The number of women without children, we are told by the ONS, is steadily increasing. One in five women of my generation is hitting 45 without any signs of babies in the nursery.
The culture, from books, to films, to the tabloid media, loves this issue because - even more than the working/non-working mummy palaver, it allows them to whip up entirely artificial divisions among women. And if women who reproduce are under constant scrutiny (for having children out of wedlock, too many children, only one child, children with different fathers, children they cannot support, children they leave in the care of others in order to earn a living), childless women offer a whole new avenue for vivisection and chastisement.
They are blamed for being career obsessed, for leaving it ‘too late’, for being too picky in their choice of mate, for having youthful abortions that they’re made to tearfully renege on. They are pushy, selfish, self-obsessed. The only type of child free woman given any slack is the tearful, infertile one, particularly if she’s had the decency to ruin her heath, marriage and bank account by going through several rounds of painful IVF. This doesn’t mean she’s a proper woman. But she is tolerated and pitied. There is a script for her.
I belong to a difficult-to-quantify subspecies of female who is unabashedly child-free by choice. I’m certainly not alone - but there is still no script for us.
I first became aware of my predicament when, having kissed every available frog in both Italy and Britain, I finally met my wonderful husband at the age of 36 and realised that had no desire to reproduce at all. Or rather, if it had been a matter of handing over some genetic material and tell my partner to get on with it, I probably would have done it. I would have been a dad, at a pinch . But being a mother was an unpalatable proposition, once the possibility existed in practice.
I don’t know how to explain it, other than to say that I felt none of the hormonal pull towards it, whilst at the same time experiencing these realisations:
- I wanted my life to continue to be about me. The new fathers I knew seemed to have been able to add ‘children’ to their life’s CV, whilst their partners had gone from being women to being mothers. Motherhood described them and circumscribed their lives completely.
- My mother and most of the mothers of friends my age all seemed, in different ways, to have felt cheated by motherhood, the very thing they were so desperate to sell us. Most seemed bitter and hypercritical. Many were depressed. These are older women I’m talking about, for whom the trials and tribulations of raising a family were firmly in the past. It struck me that they’d spent their lives expecting some special reward for all the selflessness they’d had to endure, and none was forthcoming. This, I thought to myself, is what happens when you live your life for someone else.
- There was no structure 'there' to make motherhood happen like any other rite of passage, any other phase of life, other than my willingness and desire to put everything else on hold and go for it. From pregnancy to decisions about work, then childcare, then the juggling of the two, the running of the house and so on I knew with absolute certainly that, wonderful husband notwithstanding, having a life that could accommodate children in it (not even at the centre of it) would have been my problem to solve.
When strangers ask me about children I’ve adopted a shorthand response – we met too late but we have many nephews and nieces. My face and demeanour says: I know, I’m pitiful yet somehow I will manage to be strong. Inside I’m dancing the Samba , giddy at the thought that I’m allowed to get away with living my life for myself.
These are the things I love: I love my husband, working, writing, sleep, travel and time to read. I love living in London’s zone 2, in a minuscule house with a relatively tiny mortgage, I love the cultural events I can attend because I live there and disposable income I can spend on them. And I love lots of children, from my sister’s little Mouse to several friends’ offspring, many of whom I have somehow become a godmother to.
I love them because I love their mothers. They are under no obligation to love me back or make me proud or happy or give me things to look forward to. They are little people I hope to know for the rest of my life (they are bound to become interesting any day now) but whose possible failure, unhappiness and neurosis won’t be pinnable on me.
Had the conditions for motherhood have been different would I have gone for it? Ah, now that is a question, and one our leaders might want to start asking themselves. You see, I’m sure a sizeable proportion of those 20pc of childless women have chosen not to go for it, at some level.
It seems to me if we want to stop women (at least those lacking the natural urge to reproduce) from opting out of parenthood we need to make motherhood more attractive: less of an often lonely, and always (it seems to me from the outside) superhuman, struggle to keep all the balls in the air, all the trains running on time, everybody else happy and safe. It should be an easier, lighter load, more equally shared in the personal and political sphere.
