Grappling with ambivalence
More about Sara
Sara Hopkins is a daughter, sister, auntie, wife, doctor, adventurer, dog and kitty mama, and friend. As a naturopathic doctor and licensed acupuncturist, she specializes in serving patients with eating disorders and other mental health challenges. She is also cofounder of The Ren Clinic, an integrative medicine clinic with an emphasis on providing trauma-informed care that helps patients reclaim their sense of wholeness and connection to the world around them.
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Sara Hopkins reached out to me at the end of the last season of Maybe Someday and said this: “To hear another woman say some of the exact things I’ve had swirling around in my head has felt so so good. I have felt *relatively* certain over the last ten years that having a child is not meant to be part of my path. I’ve traversed the landscape of wanting a child, to feeling fully ambivalent about whether I actually wanted a child, to feeling fairly certain that I don’t want children. Now, on the cusp of 40 years old, I’m having very strong feelings of grief and loss that are hard to fully articulate when I think remaining child free is still the right choice for me. These feelings are particularly compressed around me as I’m in another go around of the baby explosion in my friend group that tends to happen to us women of a certain age. “
This message from Sara kicked off a series of emails where we got into some pretty deep stuff around friendships, ambivalence, loss, and grief. We got to know each other through writing, which doesn’t happen often these days. I invited Sara to record a conversation with me so that we could explore some of these topics in more depth.
Discussed in this episode with Sara Hopkins:
How the urge to create can be felt in our bodies
How she and her husband decided that having children was not for them
How she revisits her choice not to have children in conversations with her husband
Feeling disconnected from close friends who have children because she can’t share the experience
How ambivalence about having children can be a spiritual journey