Did you know that 1 in 5 women in the UK is ‘childless’ – I prefer the term ‘Child Free’ – and 20% of women born in 1965 reached the age of 45 without having children?
The closet door is open. It used to be just a crack, but now there seems to be a whole generation of us pushing out. For those of you who have children, remember what your labour was like? Well, it’s a bit like that for us. It’s been a long time coming, but some of us are giving birth to a whole new concept that’s challenging the landscape of traditional female roles forever.
I know you’re probably not scared you might get trampled in the rush but I sense that there is a real fear that, because of people like me who chose not to have children, women will start to realise that having kids isn’t, actually, all it’s cracked up to be and maybe some of us could achieve a lot more if we proactively procrastinate against procreation.
Why do we need an army? What are we fighting against? We’ve spent years feeling guilty – no, that’s not true, being made to feel guilty for choosing not to have children.
For all of you people out there who actively choose to have children I would question sometimes what fact and logic you are basing your choice on. For example, do you sit and work out the cost and the long term gains? Do you create a forecast for the future and analyse the risks? Do you have a strategy in place to deal with the outcome? Or is that not emotional enough… for a woman?
Do some of you have children because it’s ‘expected’? Is it the next big step on the conveyor belt of life? Or is it really just down to hormones and that wonderful emotion that I’ve always found to be most elusive in my genetics… the maternal instinct? Someone told me my hormones weren’t working properly. Really? I cry, feel, bleed like any other woman. That’s not the point. Why people choose to have families and children is neither here nor there – just as why people choose not to have them is irrelevant. What annoys me is the judgements that are made when you choose to deviate from the norm.
Let me put it in perspective for you. Let’s say a 42 year old woman with a successful career decides, suddenly, that she wants to have a baby. Everyone congratulates her and, probably, those closest to her heave a sigh of relief that she is, in fact, normal, after all. But what if you questioned that choice closely? The way people, and often complete strangers, question you when you decide you don’t want to have children and, heavens above, you reveal it when you are out in polite society.
Can you imagine if, every time a woman decided to have a baby somebody said: Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? What about your career? Will you give it up, and if you give it up, how will you afford to live, and if you continue to work, do you know how much childcare costs are? And how will you cope in the holidays? And you usually work until six, and you have to be at the school gates at three? And didn’t you want to see South America?
But people don’t ask those questions, do they? They nod reassuringly at each other. Another baby in an already overpopulated world. Fantastic news. Just as an aside – there are 2.2 billion children in the world and over half of them are living in poverty. Oh yes, I can see the argument in favour of breeding just for the sake of it, just because that’s what is expected of us, to keep the population going.
Okay, so that’s fine. You’ve decided, for whatever reason, to have a baby. I just nod and listen and congratulate along with the rest of the crowd but suddenly, the friendship changes. I’ve been through it all before. Suddenly, friends who have known me for years, friends who I’ve shared fantastic times with, happy moments, world travel, memorable occasions, forget who I am, or try to redefine ME as they redefine their own world.
When a friend of mine chose to have a baby in her 40s, I was accused, and yes, it was an accusation, of not taking any interest in the pregnancy. Quite frankly, I wasn’t interested in the pregnancy! In fact, I was quite amazed at the total drama that started to happen as soon as the foetus was the size of an orange.
I was told that as soon as I held the baby, I would want one for myself. When the baby came, it was thrust towards me in the hope that my inner bitch would melt. She didn’t. In fact, I was really terrified by the monotonous routine of it all. No wonder I grew apart from all my friends who had children. I’m not the slightest bit interested in the intricacies of domestic family life and most certainly not in the contents or smell of a nappy – can you imagine if, every time you finished in the toilet, you brought your soiled loo roll out for everyone to examine?
I’m not sure a smile and a burp would recompense me for the loss of my freedom and my individuality. I’m not sure that re-directing all of my efforts onto another individual, at the risk of alienating everyone and everything else in life, would be a good choice for me. And the other problem I have is that you have no idea of the return in your investment. I’ve known families who have given up everything to bring their children up ‘right’ and give them everything they never had… only for the children to disappear into the world without a thank you. No, that’s not all true, sometimes they have come back to ask their parents to pay their debts off for them or to make sure their inheritance has been protected.
Your kids aren’t a blue print of yourself, you can’t live your own life through them or expect them to achieve your aspirations by proxy, and neither can you expect your offspring to display a tick list of wonderful attributes. All you are doing is creating another life – another human being that might have a similar nose to your own, but who has its own mind and its own thoughts and its own way of feeling. There’s nothing – as a parent – that you can do to change the genetic make-up of that. All you can do is teach them the values we live by and arm them with the basics. But even then, there’s no guarantee they will live by them.
Which brings us back to that question of why you have kids in the first place? I get the usual arguments. You don’t want to be lonely in your old age, you need to keep your ancestry going, it’s what life is all about… is it really?
Someone once said to me that the rewards of having a child were phenomenal. I haven’t had a chance to ask her what they are yet as she’s too busy complaining about smelling of sick, and picking up after everybody, and not having time to have a bath or read a book… and her husband just left her…because, quite frankly, she hasn’t had a bath for what seems like weeks, she hasn’t been to the hairdressers in months and she never lost that infamous ‘baby fat.
I don’t know what the other benefits are – it’s got something to do with this overwhelming feeling of love you have for another human being, an emotion within you that stops you wanting to feed your own needs and wants. Apparently this feeling wanes a bit when your child reaches its teenage years. Or maybe you’re just so not used to feeling anything for yourself by then, or you’re so brainwashed by the monotony of the routine of daily life that you just continue on, giving your children the benefit of the doubt, giving them everything you never had, placing them on pedestals so high that inevitably they fall off every now and again because they can’t stay children forever… at some stage, they turn into regular human beings… and believe it or not, they are going to err at some point in life…as human beings are want to do.
We wrap children up in so much cotton wool now that it’s amazing they ever get to breathe. I know some women, despite working in really high positions with long hours, performing jobs with enormous responsibility, who are rushing home to cook the tea even though her son and daughter are 21 and 18 respectively. I even know a woman who still makes her daughter’s sandwiches, and her daughter is 26!
Would it be harsh to say ‘Get a Grip’? No – it’s totally unacceptable to say these things out loud. Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties? Or, at least, I don’t get asked back. That’s probably because when people ask me why I never had children, I tell them I like holidays too much. Cue the embarrassed silence and the other women around the table scrutinising me to see if I’ve got tentacles and another head. I then try to justify my reasoning. Well, who wouldn’t really rather be in Hawaii than getting up in the middle of the night to wind and wipe the arse of a bundle of flesh and bones that can’t even say thank you? Then the dinner party goes tits up. It’s a recipe for disaster. Not so much cold feet as cold shoulder.
Think about it. The average cost of bringing up a child these days is over £100,000 and statistics say that they don’t, or can’t economically speaking, leave home until they are about 27. And it doesn’t stop there. Statistics also show that two thirds of people with grandchildren under 16 in England and Wales provide some regular childcare. So, when your own kids leave home and have kids of their own, you will get to bring them up some of the time. And so it goes on, history repeating itself.
I went through all the discrimination when I was a young woman in my fertile years. Having children was never on my radar and was never something I thought about when I was growing up, I’ve never been maternal and I’ve never particularly liked babies. I had a Teeny Tiny Tears when I was six and I broke the leg off changing the nappy. For me, that was an omen. I tossed it to the back of the cupboard in favour of a toy panda and I would spend hours wondering what it would be like to be a Chinese animal with infrequent mating rituals.
Instead I wanted to be educated, have a great job that I enjoy, have enough money to live comfortably and be happy. There was no big game plan. But I knew what kind of lifestyle I wanted and I planned for that lifestyle, taking into account what a mortgage might cost, what the bills might cost, what kind of job would afford me some freedom but would allow me to utilise my skills and passion for writing. Do people plan their breeding programmes in the same way? I don’t think so and maybe it’s because all you have to do is put your hand out.
As soon as you get knocked up, and, let’s face it, this isn’t really a miracle, it’s a couple of seconds of frantic spurting in the grand scheme of things, the Government falls over itself to hand you things like a Sure Start Maternity Grant, money to help with costs of having a new baby, Child Trust Funds that allow you save tax free, Childcare and Tax Credits, Child Benefit. Then maybe later you might benefit from free school meals, Care to Learn… Maternity Leave and full pay for up to a year… the option to then return to work part time, four days a week and only during Term Time…
Then it’s more than likely you’ll have a caring employer (but only because by law they have to be) who will let you leave work early, come in late, stay at home because the school has closed due to adverse weather, or your child has developed a cough or is showing signs of a fever. And in addition to that, some holiday companies will let your child stay for free, or let your child eat for free, or give you little books that they can draw and colour in while you attempt to eat your evening meal in a restaurant environment simply not suited to baby high chairs or toddler tantrums. I think they call it ‘trying to live a normal life’ or sometimes it’s the naïve mentality – ‘I’m not going to let it change me or my lifestyle!”
No, it’s actually the other way round. We all change, on the outside, to accommodate you and your family. Which is why I can’t park close to the entrance of Sainsbury’s anymore – even though I drive a sports car which needs a lot of door space when I open it! While you’re desperately trying to ‘carry on as normal’ I have to listen to your child screaming while I’m out having my dinner and trying to have a conversation in a restaurant, I have to sit quietly on my flight while your child kicks the back of my seat relentlessly… because, apparently, as someone pointed out to me, I should learn to be more tolerant.
And that’s why we’re coming out of the closet. The time is right for us now. Why are bragging rights only reserved for parents with genius kids? I want some bragging rights, too. I went on five holidays last year, I drink nothing but champagne, I lie in at the weekend and have breakfast in bed, I watch what I want on TV, I drive a nice car that doesn’t accommodate a child seat, I buy clothes when I want and spend what I want, I exercise when I want… and I work hard to pay for everything I have. I don’t expect the state to give me a leg up because I decided not to have children and not burden society with another mouth to feed, clothe and educate. I don’t use health services excessively, I only ever put one bag of rubbish out for collection and I’m always the one at work to stay late when other women have to leave early to fulfil some random maternal function involving bodily fluids or arguments at school.
And I don’t get offered any free perks for all of that. Could I get some credit instead of instant vilification?
I’m child free. And I’m proud of it. Everywhere you look there are groups of us springing up all over the place, choosing places to have lunch, reading books in the park, enjoying languid dinners over glasses of wine, getting up late, booking holidays and just generally being spontaneous. We are emerging – the Child Free Nation – why not join us and let the battle commence?
Mags Winthrop Blog 