I am pleased to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Jackie Shannon Hollis. Jackie is a writer, storyteller, speaker and the author of the memoir, This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story. The book explores Jackie’s evolving understanding of who she is in the unfolding relationships she describes between husband and wife, mother and daughter, friends, and sisters.

We will be discussing a range of topics, such as the struggle to please others and meet their expectations, the upsides and downsides of choosing to not have a child, and what it means to heal and forgive after being traumatized by rape.

Why Do We Want What We Want?

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

 

The following is a taste of my conversation with Jackie.

Q: What do you say to someone who struggles with not meeting expectations and disappointing those they love?

Jackie: Rather than striving for the goal that I’m never going to do that, it’s recognizing when it’s in play, and then evaluating when I’m finding myself pushed towards something but uncomfortable with it, and trying to tease out what is external expectation and what is my own internal expectation.

Q: How we can become more aware of and recognize our dysfunctional old habits?

Jackie: One of the things for me is just getting tired of the judgment of myself, of the frustration with myself. There’s just a moment when for me, it’s like, “Oh, I’m done with that.”

Q: How did you find healing after you were raped?

Jackie: The healing was very much about understanding that my experience of it would unfold over time, and that it was truly a healing process. And as with all healing, whether it’s a physical wound or an emotional wound, it isn’t that you’re better from one day to the next. We are all changed by the traumas that happen to us. But we have some authority over, “How am I going to be changed by this?”

Q: What has been the hardest part of childlessness for you?

Jackie: The sense of not belonging, of feeling like I wasn’t part of the mothering club, and also, I didn’t want people to see me as… I didn’t want my longing to show.

When asked if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Jackie says, “It would be to know that no matter what your struggle is, just keep turning to face it and know that you will move through, not away from it.”

About Jackie:
Jackie Shannon Hollis is a writer, storyteller and speaker and the author of the memoir, This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story (Forest Avenue Press). Her writing has been described as honest and intimate, exploring complex human issues in prose that is both direct and lyrical. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines, including The Sun, Rosebud, Inkwell, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Nailed, and Slice Magazine.

Find Jackie on Social Media:
https://www.jackieshannonhollis.com/ (Website)
https://www.facebook.com/Jackie.Shannon.Hollis (Facebook)
https://twitter.com/JShannonHollis (Twitter)
https://www.instagram.com/jackie.shannon.hollis/ (Instagram)

Jackie’s Book:
This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story

Books Mentioned in the Interview:
Living the Life Unexpected, by Jody Day
Hold Me Tight, by Dr. Sue Johnson
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.

Interviewer: I’m pleased to introduce today’s guest, Jackie Shannon Hollis. Jackie is a writer, storyteller, and speaker, and the author of the memoir, “This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story.” The book explores Jackie’s evolving understanding of who she is in the unfolding relationships she describes between husband and wife, mother and daughter, friends, and sisters. So the title of this podcast is “Becoming Who You Truly Are.” And this season, we’re talking about forgiveness and reconciliation as paths to healing and finding our true selves. Over and over and in different ways, my guests are addressing the question, “What does it really mean to forgive?” Jackie’s intimate explorations of who she is, in relationship to the most significant others in her life allow her to address this and other important questions related to forgiveness and reconciliation. Jackie, welcome to the show.

Jackie: Thank you so much for having me. I love the approach that you take with this podcast so I’m really happy to be here.

Interviewer: Thank you. To begin, I’d like for you to briefly share with our listeners how and where you grew up and what some of the expectations were for you growing up.

Jackie: I grew up in a very small town in…it’s North Central…we call it Eastern Oregon. And it was a population of about 1000, it’s less than 1000 now. And the ranch that I grew up on was homesteaded by my great grandfather in the late 1800s. And my grandfather was born and raised there, and my father and my siblings and I, there were five of us. I was born in 1958, so I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. And in the small town, there were some pretty clear…actually, I’ll say in my family, there were some pretty clear dividing lines between what girls could do and what boys could do. Now we got to do a lot of the outdoor things. We rode horses, we helped with the animals, but those were choices for us as girls where for the boys they were chores and jobs. And the girls were taught the inside things, cooking and cleaning, and homemaking.

And all through my growing up, there was an expectation. On one hand, there were options, and my mom presented to me very early on the option of college. She saw me as a good student, and she saw me as the possibility for going off to college. So that was always there, but also always in the background was having children. And that’s all of the women in town, there was only one example that I could think of of a woman who didn’t have children, maybe, and a couple of teachers who came through who didn’t children. So a very large focus was always that you would ultimately end up becoming a mother. I would ultimately end up becoming a mother. But where there was also expectations of succeeding, of getting a job very early on, I started working really early, earning money, babysitting quite young, and I always had summer jobs as well. So work was always also on the table.

Interviewer: Yeah. You struggled much of your life with feeling you were not meeting expectations, and that you were disappointing to those you loved. This is a pretty universal issue, and I’m wondering what you can say to our listeners who may be struggling with the same thing.

Jackie: Well, one is, I think, a place for me in terms of starting is knowing that that…not denying it. Just acknowledging, “Yep. That is in my, sort of, deeply rooted in me.” And rather than striving for the goal that I’m never going to have that, it’s recognizing when it’s in play, and then evaluating when I’m finding myself pushed towards something but uncomfortable with it, and trying to tease out what is external expectation and what is my own internal expectation. Where does that…you know, where does it come from? And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in one sense with wanting to have the people around me be happy and finding ways to meet their needs. But if it’s at the expense of my own needs without ever really questioning my own needs even, that’s where I think the struggle could come in. So it’s that separation.

Interviewer: Yeah. And I love that you bring up the internal expectations because, in fact, those can be tremendously challenging for us as well, not just the external ones. Jackie, you write that your sister Leanne and you were so different. You describe I think your words are “her purity” as compared to your secrets and your longings. And as I’m sure you know, family systems theory posits that each member of a family usually plays a very specific role and becomes really good at following certain rules. So from that perspective, would you say that you and Leanne were each playing roles which then became your almost expected identities within the family?

Jackie: That’s really interesting. Yes, I would say in one sense, although from the outside, I don’t know necessarily that people would have seen how troubled I was. I was a student, Honor Society president, dance team leader. I did all of these sort of externally successful appearing things, but I had this secret life that had to do with my own sexuality, and just a sense of hiding. I think, for sure, and, you know, I’ve watched this in so many families just that there is a role that’s taken. I think that Leanne’s role, my sister Leanne’s role was definitely where she just had more clarity. And I tried to think about in terms of the family system because when I got my masters in social work I did multi-generational family history and looked at the roles in the family that would pass down. And the one thing I did discover were there were certain roles in my grandfather’s generation, you know, the single uncle, the childless aunt, that then carried through two generations later in my generation.

Interviewer: Interesting.

Jackie: Yeah. So in that sense, I definitely saw the roles and other aspects of that as well. And I see now my sister playing a role that my grandmother very much had with her grandchildren.

Interviewer: So continuing the family systems theme, in some ways, I think your relationship with your mother is one of the most complex and significant relationships you write about in your book. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about your relationship with your mom?

Jackie: Yeah. I adored and admired mom so much, and in many ways wanted to be like her and I am like her in many ways. She was creative and, you know, just very smart but also complicated. She had in her own family history lots of complication, her father had committed suicide when she was 16. This is something that isn’t in the book, but just part of her own history that, I think, you know, all the stuff that went into that, she brought those complications into her adulthood and into her parenting. And the difficulty of talking openly about painful things was something she struggled with, and I learned pretty quickly to be secretive around her.

On one hand, there was this desire to be approved of by her and certainly, in the book that, sort of, big issue was around me not having children. Her expressing her disappointment about that. And her fears for me, the thing I always had a sense of with mom was that…or I understood as a teenager was that all that she was doing, for the most part, was really trying to shape me and guide me. But it was shaping me and guiding me into what she thought I should be, rather than necessarily what I thought I should be. So we struggled over clothes I wore, we struggled over, you know, I smoked as a teenager and she called me out on that.

There were just so many things that it was complicated, our relationship, and a deeply loving one. And at the end of her life, I think, you know, there had been a lot of healing. And it was still the night before she died I sat with her and she had this cup of water she wanted to drink, but she also had lots of oxygen line and so on. And it was difficult that she was in and out of consciousness. And at one point, she was trying to get that cup in her hand and I was pulling it back. She was pulling it toward her and she said, “It’s a tug of war, just like our relationship.” I felt that as love, that she could acknowledge it and [inaudible 00:10:42].

Interviewer: Yeah. Especially for someone who had a hard time acknowledging the tough parts. Yeah. You, in fact, write that your family had a very difficult time in general talking about difficult stuff. “My family didn’t admit when we were hurt,” you write, and then when you divorced, your dad said, “We don’t get divorces in this family.” This all reminds me so much of my own childhood, which I describe in my new book, “Love is Complicated.” The bad stuff was never talked about in our family and at least one of my siblings is incensed that I would, in her words, “Dredge up for public consumption,” the various failures that I described in my book. It seems to me that when you say…I think you said you grew up learning indirect ways, especially with your mom to ask for what you wanted, which is another form of not talking about the difficult stuff. But what can you tell our listeners about how you managed to begin to change this pattern within yourself?

Jackie: Well, a lot of it happened in the context of my relationship with my husband, with Bill. That was the most frustrating thing to him. In life, in general, is when people don’t say what it is they want clearly. And what was complicated for me was not only was it difficult for me to say what I wanted, it was difficult for me to know what I wanted because I was so externally focused on the small signs or reactions of the other person, in this case of him, you know, and then adjusting myself in accordance with that. And we’ve been together for 33 years now, and I would say it’s really been in the last 5 years, although it was lot of progress along the way of really being able to stop before I respond to something and check inside myself to be able to talk about, “I’m struggling with knowing what I want so I need to take some time before I give you an answer.” And a lot of it was just lots of reading, I did therapy, which was immensely helpful, particularly in the last six years that I had done some therapy that really made a difference in helping me examine what my own needs were and noticing what the cues were when I wasn’t meeting them. What happened in my body, how anxious I could be, then, you know, learning what those signs were.

Interviewer: Yeah. What are some of the physical cues that you would recognize?

Jackie: Clenched jaw, my jaw and my neck and shoulders are very, very good barometers for me of, “Something’s off-track here.” And then I also developed just an internal sort of agreement that how to check in with myself with what I wanted. A friend of mine taught me this in a class that he did many years ago, which was a…he did this quiet kind of process where he helped to develop sort of an internal physical cue in the body that’s a yes, no cue. And for mine, it’s just a sensation I get on the left side of my abdomen that just lets me know yes or no. I know it sounds a little bit strange, but it’s really powerful and it’s something I’ve really relied on that helps me get past the mind chatter to sort of what my deeper consciousness wants.

Interviewer: Yeah, and you talk about Bill being an important person along the way, helping you to become more aware of that. And we certainly are going to talk about Bill who is a central character in your life and in the book. But before we go there you describe, and I’m quoting, “A trail of boys and men in your life.” And you say that, “Initial falling in love is imagining our perfection.” This really is not unlike what Susan Clarke and Crismarie Campbell, authors of “The Beauty of Conflict for Couples,” have said on this show, that falling in love stage is really just about our fantasies. Would you say more about this?

Jackie: Oh, yes. That understanding was so powerful for me, the idea of projection. So when we first meet someone, we don’t know them at all, we’re putting on to them all of our very quick imaginations and judgments and they are also doing that with us. And when it’s a falling in love, it’s someone that we’re attracted to, we are seeing them through those sort of rose-colored glasses, a projection of who we want them to be. And they’re seeing us in that same way and it’s a really magical time because we are perfect in their eyes. We have not done anything to challenge that perception.

Interviewer: To mess it up.

Jackie: Yeah. Exactly. And so it’s a wonderful time. It’s an ecstatic time and in many ways, it’s kind of a false time because I didn’t understand that. For years and years, I did not understand that that wasn’t what love was. It was lost romance, projection, all of those things. And I read these books, “He, She, and We” back many years ago, this was in the ’80s, and that really explained and explored romantic love and sort of the mythology around that, the story around that. And it burst the bubble for me. And then early in my relationship with Bill, I understood this relationship model that’s a lot of also what Crismarie and Susan speak about, which is that that passes. It will always pass. And for me understanding that was this huge relief of, “Oh, it’s not that that person is wrong or I’m wrong. It’s that that romance was just the romance. That was just an early stage of a relationship that has to go through much more complexity in order to really develop.”

Interviewer: Jackie, you write that old habits are hard to break, especially when you don’t recognize them as habits. I think this is another one of those universal phenomena. What can you tell us about how we can become more aware of and recognize our old habits?

Jackie: Well, I think anytime we…you know, some habits are okay. Like I get up and brush my teeth every day, I make my bed, I exercise. There are certain things that I do that are habits that I just pretty much prefer to keep that in the background is without question…

Interviewer: What about the nasty old habits?

Jackie: With the nasty habits, when I find that I am doing something that I’ve told myself every day, “I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to do this,” that’s when I want to stop and pay attention. And I think that there’s this sense with habits of feeling really out of control, and I was thinking about this the other day because, I mean, this is a strange epitaph, but I have a habit I’ve had for years and years since I was a child, ongoing habit of chewing gum. And as an adult, it causes me terrible jaw pain and headaches. And so I know better than doing it and I’ll stop and I won’t chew gum for a couple of years, but it’s very much like cigarettes was. It isn’t something I can do just a little bit. So I’m aware when I start up chewing gum again that, “I’m starting in this. I think I have it under control.” And then pretty much I’m, you know, back to headaches and jaw pain.

And one of the things for me is just getting tired of the judgment of myself, of the frustration with myself. There’s just a moment where for me, always, it’s like, “Oh, I’m done with that.” But I think, you know, in Alcoholics Anonymous and addictions treatment, there’s that saying about, “You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired.” And I think that that, for most of us, we just have to reach a point where it’s more painful to deal with the consequences of it than to get better, to stop. And, you know, I’m a habit person. My dad was this way, he liked to do the same thing every day.

And my habits, you know, in terms of relationships, those were the ones of just continuing to be attracted to other men. That’s the ones that I think I’m speaking about in the book is I was very used to walking into a room, looking for the man I was attracted to, and then doing, you know, whatever it took to get his attention. That was a difficult habit to break. It really wasn’t until I was in a relationship with Bill and the stakes were so high. I wanted to be with him very much. And so I began to notice, “What is it I’m doing when that attraction is going on? What purpose is that serving?” So that’s the other piece about habits, I think, is asking, “What’s the intention behind that habit? And how else can I meet that?”

Interviewer: Would you briefly describe the heartbreaking, horrible experience of being raped? I’d like you not to go into a lot of detail out of respect for any listeners whose own trauma may be retriggered, but can you tell us briefly about that experience?

Jackie: Yes, I was a college student. I was 20 years old and I was in my apartment and a man broke into the apartment. And at first, I thought he was there for a robbery, but it turned out that he was there to rape me, and it turns out that he was a serial rapist. So at this time in Eugene, this man had been involved in multiple rapes mostly of college students. So to keep it brief, that was…

Interviewer: Yeah, you write that sometime after the rape, you realized that healing would not come from finding others who’d been violated, but that rather it would begin with you. I find that to be so powerful. Can you say more about this?

Jackie: Well, part of that was…this was, you know, the impact of sexual assault really unfolds over time. And after this happened to me, you know, a year later, or two years later, or even five years later, I kept thinking, “Well, I should be over that.” I think people do this with grief, too, like, “I should be past that,” or, “Why do I still feel the need to talk about this?” And one thing for sexual assault survivors that often happens is that there’s a compulsion to talk about it, and then a shame about the desire to talk about it, and then managing other people’s discomfort when we talk about it because other people feel uncomfortable, and it brings up our own discomfort. So there are all these complications that it took me many years to really understand, particularly as someone who was always reading the field out there for responses, to understand my own feelings about what had happened.

And so, in part of my journey, 20 years down the road, I began writing and I began writing about having been raped. And I decided to do this, I’ll call it a research project, where I was going to find the other women, I was going to interview the police detectives who had been involved and my family. I did interview my mom, had a beautiful conversation with her. And I was also going to contact, this is not in the book because it was sort of too complicated to go into a lot of the details, but I was going to, of course, write to the rapist, which I did, he was in prison. And we exchanged a couple letters back and forth. And in all of that what I thought was, “I don’t really…” You know, when I think back on it now, like, what was I thinking that I would get? You know, an apology?

And it turned out, of course, it was completely unsatisfying because he still claimed his innocence and was continuing… It was just not…I mean, it was a very difficult response. But for me, it was empowering, it was just like, “Oh, there’s nothing out there in a sense that’s going to make this better.” And it wasn’t even about forgiving him or not, I never really felt anger toward him. In a way it was more, “This terrible thing has happened, and how do I carry it? How do I speak about it? And what is healing from that?” Because the truth is, this goes into you and it’s with you. And for me, a lot of it was just recognizing, “These are the ways that I responded to it. I want to be able to talk about it.” And, you know, at that time people really did not talk about rape. I mean, I’m so glad the conversation is more open now. Or sexual assault. It just…

Interviewer: Yeah.

Jackie: So for me, the healing was very much about understanding that this would unfold my understanding, my experience of it would unfold over time, and that it was truly a healing process. And with all healing, whether it’s a physical wound or an emotional wound, it isn’t you’re better from one day to the next. We are all changed by the traumas that happen to us, and having some authority over, “How am I going to be changed by this?” And knowing that some of it may be for a while out of my control, but finding all of the resources I can, doing all of the things I can to manage that is good. But knowing that I’ll understand something different 5 years, 10 years, 15 years after what happened.

Interviewer: Yeah. And that the process really doesn’t ever end of continuing to try to understand. Yeah.

Jackie: Which doesn’t mean that we’re… You know, I mean, I think that doesn’t mean you’re in pain or terrible turmoil. It just means that there’s new understanding each step along the way.

Interviewer: That’s right. You’re continuing to grow. Yeah. The recurrent theme throughout the book is that having a baby is what was expected of you. It’s what you wanted, and it’s what you didn’t get. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Bill and the decision the two of you made to not have a child?

Jackie: Yes. Sure. When I was younger, as I mentioned before, I thought that I would have children. It just was this automatic thing. And then in my mid-20s, after marriage, we tried to get pregnant, and then the marriage ended before we went very far with that trying, I began to really question, “Why do I want to have children?” And recognizing that that was just an automatic response to how I’d been raised. And it occurred to me that my life could be okay without children. Maybe I won’t have children. But I hadn’t really closed that door entirely. And then I met Bill, and he was very clear he did not want to have children. And we married with that agreement. And about a month after we were married, was when I went back to the family ranch, and was holding one of my newest nieces and my mom expressed her disappointment about me not having children. And I understood that my father was disappointed and that my sisters were, you know, missing that opportunity to share that experience with me.

And I just felt, you know, the weight of this expectation and of their disappointment. And so I talked with Bill about, you know, “I do want to have a baby,” and he remained steadfast in his position about not wanting to have a child. And so a lot of the next many years was an exploration both of my own longing for this and of his great lack of interest in having children. Why is that? Why did he not? It just made no sense to me that it wasn’t even something he even really wanted to consider or have a conversation about. And so, you know, for me, I knew, you know, I’d gone into this marriage with this agreement and I did not want to have resentment of him. And I also knew it was possible to have a good life without children, that my desire to have a child, and this was the ongoing process for me was, and this goes back to the romance, was very much about my romance about motherhood.

And that when I saw the reality of motherhood, maybe that, you know, I looked at the life that I was living, traveling, working, this really deep, deep connection with Bill. I just…you know, I would question it, but my body longed for it. I had dreams I would hold a baby and feel this really, really powerful desire to have a child, and then bring it up to him again, and he would say, “I’m really clear about this. I don’t want to have a child.” It was hard. I admire…you know, I think a lot of people could be angry or frustrated with him when they hear this. Like, “Why wouldn’t he let her have a child?” For me, I felt admiration about his clarity about what he wanted and didn’t want, about his comfort in telling me that and holding me capable to manage my own feelings on this.

He continued to love me, he offered me comfort. And for me, there was this ongoing understanding of, I didn’t want to have a child with someone who didn’t have the same fierce desire as I did. And that helped me a lot because what I knew was he was the one I wanted to be with. And if I was making a choice between having a child and being with him, he was what I chose because I knew with him, that’s where the growth of my own sense of self, by being in relation, not because of him, but by being in relationship with him. That was exciting to me for the possibility that it offered.

Interviewer: Yeah, I want to touch…I’m going to go back to that in a moment, that issue of what relationships do to help us grow and understand ourselves. But just to stay with the childlessness issue for a bit longer. You write that you couldn’t ask Bill to have a baby because, and I quote, “Some wounds are too old, some paths too harshly cut.” Would you say more about that?

Jackie: Well, in my in my exploration of, you know, my desire was also the exploration of, you know, his not wanting a child and I wanted to know what it was in him that kept him from seeing the possibility of a child. And I began to look at his own family history. His father had left the family when Bill was a year old. He had a sister who’s a year older than him, and his mother was pregnant with his brother. And his father left and they saw him two weeks every year. He was in the military. And they never had a model of a father, of a loving father, of a father taking joy. In fact, what he had was a father who, when Bill asked him, you know, “Even though you got divorced from mom, it was worth it because you got us,” and his father said no.

And so that wound right there I think went very deep. And in talking about my book, going around and doing book events, I’ve talked with mostly women, but people who’ve made decisions not to have children, and there are a number of them who have said, “My own childhood was so shattered that regardless of whether I want to have a child, I know I would not be a good parent, and that whatever healing I have to do is going to take too long for me to try to have a child and bring them into my own history that I’m carrying.”

Interviewer: That’s a lot of deep awareness.

Jackie: Yeah. Yes, it is.

Interviewer: Jackie, most of us probably imagine that the hardest part of childlessness when you really wanted to have a baby is not having that baby. But you’ve said this isn’t necessarily so in your case. What was the hardest part for you?

Jackie: Well, one of the hardest parts was the sense of not belonging, of feeling like I wasn’t part of the mothering club, of being in places where all of the conversation was about the children. And it wasn’t that I didn’t find that interesting. I know a lot about being with babies and children and I’ve got so many nieces and nephews, I’ve watched children grow so I knew a lot about that. And I found the conversation interesting but that that we are increasingly, but even then, in a pronatalist society where the celebration of motherhood is really great, and the romanticization of that is quite high.

And so there was that sense of not belonging. And also for me, and this goes back to that sort of secretive self and self-image was I didn’t want people to see me as… I didn’t want my longing to show. I didn’t want people to know that there was something that I had wanted that I didn’t get. And so, you know, unfortunately for me that habit of hiding a part of myself, but also didn’t want people to try to talk me out of it because it was clearly and always a decision that I was making. It wasn’t a decision that Bill was making for me. I was making the decision. I mean, there are a number of possibilities that I could have done.

So yeah, I think that those two things, the sense of not belonging, and then the struggle with my own self-image, of not wanting to be seen as, you know, the things that in a similar way, as someone who had survived sexual assault, there are labels we put on people, things we look for in people who are survivors, you know, of, “Oh, that’s because she was raped,” or, “That’s because she…” you know, this or that. Those labels we put on them in the same way we put labels on women who don’t have children and are very black and white in our view of that, that they’re odd or selfish, when in fact most women who haven’t had children have considered it much more deeply than the women who have had children. It’s a difficult choice.

Interviewer: I think that that is definitely true. Yeah. Jackie, I’d like to… Go ahead.

Jackie: Can I just say one other thing? There’s a woman, Jody Day who has written a book called “Living the Life Unexpected” and done a lot of work with people who are childless. And she has a thing where she says, and I can’t remember exactly, but, “In the room of childlessness there are many more doors than the one smart didn’t have or couldn’t have.” And so childlessness is very complex. And I think people miss that.

Interviewer: Yeah. I’d like to talk a bit about forgiveness. Your book describes so many opportunities to forgive. Your parents, your rapist, your husband, yourself. What does forgiveness mean to you today?

Jackie: I think it means acknowledging where I’ve been hurt or disappointed, where the needs that I may have had weren’t met but not holding that, not using it to justify my behavior against another person. And so the key thing for me is about resentment, and that if I find myself experiencing resentment, it’s always asking, “How much opportunity did I give that other person to respond to my needs? Did I express them clearly?” Now, you know, I think with parents and children, no matter how perfect a parent is, there’s always going to be disappointment, complication, and areas where a child has to forgive even if it’s one moment of a parent yelling at them, if they have to move on from that. So for me, I think forgiveness is measuring resentment in myself, and then taking responsibility for that resentment. And it’s just not worth it to hold on to things for me. The cost to the person who holds stuff is so much higher than it is for the people who is unforgiven.

Interviewer: Yes, it’s about your own personal freedom. Yeah. Jackie, even though the explicit theme of your book is about childlessness, underneath that, your ongoing struggle really is with a more general question that’s relevant to all of us. And that is, “Why do we want what we want?” How do you go about figuring out why you want what you want?

Jackie: I’m really, really glad that you said that about the book because I think it’s easy to just say this is a book about childlessness when, for me, it is this deeper story.

Interviewer: Yes, it most definitely is.

Jackie: So it’s, you know, understanding the self, I think, for me, it is identifying my want, where does this come from? Is it because I was told to want this? You know, our longing, our wants are shaped in so many ways, and we’re influenced so much by media, by family, by all of these things outside ourselves. So it’s been…it is an ongoing process. It’s not like I’ve figured it out and this is what I’m going to want forever. But knowing that this is an ongoing path, and what I want I can identify it right now maybe by stopping and taking quiet…you know, a lot of it for me is about making sure I have adequate quiet time, adequate time to reflect on myself, but also to have time with other people, trusted friends, trusted people to help sort out my own longings.

And then the other part is just knowing that longing I think is a natural part of us. And making meaning is a natural part of us. And I think that our wants often are tied to that desire of looking for meaning, “Why am I here?” and then choosing, for me, the why I’m here question is, or the answer to that is, there’s probably no answer, really, I am going to make the meaning around that. I’m going to choose what kind of quality of life I want, and how I spend the time in it. So mostly I would say it’s an ongoing process of exploring wants and knowing that they change.

Interviewer: Yes. And you talk about the importance of having a trusted other to explore those issues. And so that gets us back to something you touched on earlier, and that is that in relationship, in the relationship you have with Bill, you say that it’s with the other that we learn about ourselves. Would you say more about that?

Jackie: Well, I think that, and this on some level goes back to that idea around starting off with a romance, but then realizing that what our imperfections are are going to be reflected in the eyes of that other person. And that isn’t just with your primary person. It’s with, you know, deep friendships, parents and children, jobs, all of that. But with the primary person, it’s an ongoing moment to moment navigation of how do we be together? Susan Clarke and Crismarie talk about this as the me and we in a relationship, but how do I maintain my own sense of myself while also nurturing this relationship? And it isn’t either-or, it’s both-and. How do we have both of these things?

And it’s an ongoing process of communicating, of knowing, again, here’s what I want and that may be different within what this other person wants. How do we talk about it? The mirror is always being held up by that other person, if we’re willing to look into it. We can turn away, we can go into apathy and boredom, we can go off and have affairs, all of those things. But for me, the key thing with Bill was really staying in and looking at that mirror. And I’m telling you, he held it up to me. And not in an in way, but just, you know, one of the things that we went through was I actually had a very difficult time letting his love in and he loved me deeply, loves me deeply, and was sort of way more in on me in many ways than I was on him just in terms of fully with abandonment expressing his love and joy in me.

And I felt overwhelmed by that and I felt overwhelmed because I was afraid I was going to lose myself. That it would just be, you know, somehow I would, you know, suffocate from it, or die, or disappear. And that wasn’t what he was asking of me. You know, love is my, you know, everything that I’ve pursued on my own and we have very different things that we go off and do separate from each other. But it was about maintaining the connection. We have many conflicts over the years. A lot of it was being willing to stay in, stay in through the fight.

Interviewer: I love what…we keep referring to Susan and Crismarie. And just for the sake of our listeners, these are the authors, again, of “The Beauty of Conflict for Couples” and they’re also my guests on this podcast. But I love what they say about conflict. It’s a wonderful thing. It keeps the vibrancy in the relationship. And also the way they talk about navigating the me and the we, which is what you are just now talking about. How do you sense when that dance between me and we is out of balance?

Jackie: I feel a restlessness inside myself when I feel like it’s slipped over to the we. I notice that I will start making sideways rather than direct comments about what I want. I’ll be afraid that I’m going to disappoint Bill by saying I want to go off and do this thing by myself. And so I’ll feel inside myself again that, you know, the jaw, the neck, and the tension and a lot of mind chatter. And when it’s the me…

Interviewer: Yeah, I was going to ask you about the other side of it.

Jackie: Yeah, when it’s the me, I feel lonely for him. I miss him. And I know, “Oh, I’m further afield than I want to be here,” and I feel disconnected and I want to feel connected to him. And the way I know that we connect the best is by, you know, the more time together, the more connected we are. And there’s another book called “Hold Me Tight” that also talks about this. You know, I was just talking with someone the other day and she was referring to this idea that…she had told me about this book because she was referring to the idea that in these days, we sort of have this idea of, “Well, it should be about the me and no man is going to tell me what I can do or not do.” And I think our independence is really important, but I think the deep connection with another person is also really important.

Interviewer: Yes. When Ed and I, my husband and I, went through a rough patch, we read “Hold Me Tight.” It’s an amazing book. So Jackie, toward the end of the book, you ask, “What is worse…?” And listeners, if you would listen carefully, this is an amazing question, I think. “What is worse, to want something and decide not to have it, or to wake up to the might have been that you didn’t even know about?” But Jackie, I don’t believe you ever provided an answer to that question. What is worse and why?

Jackie: Well, in that moment, I think I was thinking there was a possibility that the worse was to never have known, you know, to wake up to the might have been at a certain point in your life and to experience regret. My thought was that I had experienced this longing and I had worked through it so that I was living my life without regret, because I’d made a really clear choice based on full information. I think that for some people, and in this case I was speaking about Bill, was when he began to understand my desire to have a child long after that was a possibility, it was because he experienced his own desire for them. Not deep, not overwhelming, but just, “Oh, I get it now. I understand this.”

Interviewer: Yeah. It’s a very poignant moment.

Jackie: Yeah. Yeah. And it was, you know, I don’t really think there are…I mean, he had gone through all of his life without that longing. So some might say, “Well, lucky him. He didn’t have that struggle all those years.” And so maybe I still don’t think there’s a definite answer, but in that moment for me, I felt a really deep sense of…I felt good that I had gone through the struggle because where I was felt really complete.

Interviewer: So how would Bill answer that question?

Jackie: That’s a good question. I wish he was here right now. I think he’s a bit more…I don’t know if this is the right word, but fatalistic. He would just be…you know, there’s really nothing that can be done about that. And while he, in that moment, was experiencing some regret, our awareness of [inaudible 00:50:41]. I think what he would say is he’s really glad he had that feeling, in part to understand me, that he knew me better in that moment.

Interviewer: Yeah. Jackie, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?

Jackie: It would be to know that no matter what your struggle is, just keep turning to face it and know that you will move through, not away from it. It won’t…you know, you’re not going to get through it and it’s all going to be, you know, better and magical, but that your own deepening of your understanding of yourself is what I would hope a person’s goal would be. That’s my projection onto other people is to know yourself.

Interviewer: Yeah. And your book describes that journey so well. This has been great and we’re out of time. Jackie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

Jackie: And thank you. I just…I love your questions and your thoughtfulness about this. It’s really, yeah, very impressive to hear your take on all of this, and thank you.

Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you. I’ve been speaking with Jackie Shannon Hollis, author of “This Particular Happiness.” You will find details on the show notes about how to purchase her book, as well as my new book, “Nothing Bad Between Us.” I’ll also post a link to my website. And thank you, our listeners, for joining us today. If you know anyone who’d be interested in this podcast, please do share it with them. And if you liked it, take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcasting network. Instructions on the show notes make rating and reviewing easy. And remember, we are together on this journey.