More about Karen:

Karen C.L. Anderson is the author of Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide For Separation, Liberation & Inspiration and is a champion of healthy boundaries for mothers and daughters with minimal drama. She offers classes and workshops for women who wish to reclaim time, energy, and freedom by setting healthy, effective boundaries without guilt and anxiety. Her next book, The Difficult Mother/Daughter Relationship Journal: A Guided Journey, will be out later this year. Karen writes honestly and candidly about her own life, as well. OprahMag.com recently published her personal essay about a profound and unexpected experience she had with her husband’s ex-wife just prior to her death.

Learn more about Karen by visiting her website: www.kclanderson.com

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Karen Anderson doesn’t remember a time that she ever wanted to have children. She just assumed she'd have them anyway. She thought she’d go to college, meet a guy, get married, and have kids. Cause that’s what you do, right? When she had an unwanted pregnancy in her senior year of college, she decided to have an abortion.

Karen is now 56 and has been married for 21 years to a man who has three (now adult) children. When she met her now-husband and fell in love with him, it was such a relief for her to learn that he didn’t want more kids.

Karen reached out to me by telling me than in the years since her abortion she has explored, deeply and on many levels, the hows and whys of who she is and why she didn't want to have children. Part of that exploration led her to healing her relationship with her "difficult" mother (and writing a book about it, for other women who have difficult relationships with their mothers). And it led her to explore and to write about the truth of her relationship with her husband's ex-wife (and the mother of his children) who died nearly five years ago (her essay was published in oprahmag.com in January).

I wanted to talk to Karen about deciding not to have biological children, about being a stepmother, and about her work on difficult mother-daughter relationships (and other difficult relationships).