Dear Mariella

Link: The full letter & response on TheGuardian.com

Dear Mariella

Why won’t you let your childless reader grieve? 

I’m 53, Mariella, and would say I’m pretty unshockable. But your column on Sunday – dismissing a grieving woman’s agony as a midlife crisis – drove me close to the Sertraline edge. 

‘It sounds like a midlife crisis, so visit your GP and focus on what you’ve achieved — not what you haven’t’… And pick up some Diazepam whilst you’re there — for the childless not by choice women and men who are reading this and can’t quite believe the level of #AsAMother those words have hit.

Seriously? You’re seriously so entitled – what, the parents’ monopoly on exhaustion isn’t enough? – you can’t even recognise or acknowledge or allow a childless person’s grief?

This line: ‘Instead of rueing your misfortune, write a list of all the amazing things you can do now you’re mature and solvent’… Do you know how this line reads to me? Do you want to feel how I feel when I read it? Well, Mariella, imagine one of your beloved children had died. And I wrote you this: ‘Instead of rueing your misfortune, write a list of all the amazing things you can do now X has gone. How you could spend the money you would’ve spent on his university fees, perhaps. Or what you can do with his now-empty bedroom. And, Mari, look, no more annoying teen “Harry Enfield character” moments. Lol!’

Yours,

Sick Of Saying This of Hove