I decided to look back over the reasons I originally had for not wanting children when I started this project and ask myself: are these still relevant?
10) I’d become less sexually attractive.
Yes. This was really one of my major concerns when I started this project. Wrapped up in this was my fear that I would not be a much-celebrated ‘yummy mummy’ (even though the term makes me want to vomit; not because I don’t think mums should be celebrated as being tasty, but because why is there a need for the term in the first place? Why is it so assumed a mummy cannot be yummy that it’s something special if you are: something worth pointing out?) and would become a baggy-clothes wearing, exhausted, grumpy excuse of a female that in no way exudes glamour and fabulousness. As a result, my boyfriend would grow to hate me and become increasingly attracted to everyone we passed in the street until eventually one day he would leave go of my hand so that he could hold someone else’s as we passed Waterstones. Alternatively, we’d be at a party with lots of non-mums who don’t have vomit down their top and a baby at their drooping breasts and I’d be relegated to the corner where I’d forever remain as a shadow of my former self. I now feel this is a reflection of my own confidence issues, and of sub-consciously soaking up too many advertisements. I’m working on this.
9) My vagina would be damaged.
Yes. Indeed. My friend told me childbirth had left a car-wreck down there and she’s now unable to enjoy sex. Do you know how easy it is to wet yourself once you’ve had a child? My other friend ripped herself as she climbed into a taxi. Everyone knows that no-one loves a bucket. It’s enough to want to cross your legs forever more. Because having a tight vagina really is the ultimate prize in life, isn’t it? It’s the best compliment you can receive really, something to tell everyone over dinner: I’ve got a tight vagina. Why have a child when you can get that printed on a t-shirt?
8) Sex would become less of a priority.
So many writers made me feel this was a major issue. While your children are young, mums have kindle porn and dads go online. Foreplay is your partner taking out the bin bag. Your man’s at work in his suit and you’re at home in vomit and poo. You’re very dry and it hurts. You have no sex drive for the first few months. You have to hope your partner doesn’t run off with his secretary. Really. That’s been immortalised in a book. Sex will never be irrelevant, but it isn’t the only joy in the world. This phrase is only temporary and perhaps it will help build better bonds based on something more…spiritual than sex. Given that there’s only 12 months between my sister and I, it can’t be all that bad. As Shakespeare sort of said: nothing is either good nor bad: it is our attitude that makes it so. Losing out on sex for a few months v bringing a life into the world…as a stand-alone reason, it’s struggling.
7) I wouldn’t be able to go to Starbucks.
See my video on this. How terrible it would be not to be able to just go for a coffee and chat away with people without having to entertain a little one? And it’s not just Starbucks. So much of the city isn’t built for children. It’s built for consumers. However, now I am doing my best to rebel against capitalism’s buying game, I already feel excluded from most urbanscapes anyway. So I may as well retire to the child-friendly-countryside. Goodbye 4 H&Ms. Hello trees.
6) The terrors of giving birth.
This one is still sticking around in my mind as a worthy contender. But on sadistic days I think: yeah bring it on! I can tackle this mind over matter stuff. And it is possible. There are plenty of women who orgasm during childbirth. I’m not kidding. I’ve even spoken to one. There’s also plenty of women who turn blue and rip everywhere. So it’s swings and roundabouts. This was one area of my research that really infuriated me after I realised how much money plays a part in the myths (what our free NHS says is safe is completely at odds with America’s Health System, who benefit directly from consumer profits), and how much expertise was lost centuries ago once male physicians took over the delivery reins from midwives. If only we could recover their secrets! I realised during my research that actually there is no typical birth. There are plenty of options and drugs, there’s even the body’s natural drugs (hence the orgasms) and actually you can take control of your birth. It doesn’t have to be legs in stirrups while you screw up your face and a vampire crawls out of you.
5) It would destroy the environment.
A child’s carbon footprint is pretty big. It’s an entire lifetime of a person roaming the earth and taking up resources. If you don’t successfully teach them to recycle and be fruitful in their shopping habits, it’s going to be even worse. There are plenty of children sitting on shelves who would love to be taken home: why buy a shiny new product when we’ve already got a surplus? There’s a clear environmental argument to not have children. But when I realised that my Environment Hero Naomi Klein had successfully argued the case for having a child, I personally found it difficult to prioritise this. Why, she argued, should she lose out on experiencing that personal joy because corporations around the world are so unethical on a massive scale? Which brings me on to my next reason:
4) Altruism
Raising a child takes so much time. Imagine what women could have been doing for the past few centuries if we hadn’t been so busy raising our children. Now is the time to find out. Is it more beneficial to dedicate our time to overpowering environmentally-challenged corporations? Or perusing an interest? Or building up relationships with adults? Can we spend more time on community projects? Support groups? Connect with people online? Travel? Use our knowledge to benefit others. The choices are endless. During my research I found a strong counter-argument to this: ‘Half the Sky’. It was written by a couple, Nick Kristoff Sheryl Wu Dunn, who have raised awareness of millions if not billions of women suffering all around the world: the women who hold up half the sky. The altruistic value of this work is off the scale. You can check out their foundation here. And they’re parents. This is still a strong contender. The problem is, and maybe it’s just me, I feel there’s a lot of pressure to make it up to myself – well, you’re not having kids so you can DO something. So what are you going to DO? Is that important enough? What if you fail? Etc. etc.
3) I would have to give up my career.
There are few ways around it: if you don’t want to run yourself into the ground, it’s pretty difficult in a lot of fields to balance motherhood and career. This is still a strong contender and, despite some early signs of growing popularity in paternity leave, there is still a strong reliance on mothers to be primary caregivers. However, whether that changes or not is irrelevant to me. If I’m going to become a mother, I’m going to do it properly. I would want to be there for my children. Which means making sacrifices at work. In a career I’ve been building towards since I learnt to read and write. See my video on this here.
2) It’s boring.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 once I caught a fish alive, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 blow my brains out once again. Eat sleep repeat. Babies cannot hold a conversation. They can’t watch a film with you and dissect the character development, or complain about an overly-long exposition. They can’t give you their opinion on a Tweet, or tell you anything about the world that you don’t already know. When you wake up on a Saturday and you have to go to stand on the side of a football pitch in the pouring rain, or when you’re sat the side of a swimming pool after eight hours in work, you may find yourself staring at the ceiling and wishing for a different life. Or maybe you’ll be enraptured with that thing you brought into the world and you won’t notice. Maybe you’ll be sat with your partner engaged in some quality conversation, or laughing with some new friends you made. Maybe when you’re up at 3 in the morning and the rest of the world is asleep, you can blog about it and make friends with someone across the world. Maybe when your child is a bit older he’ll turn to you in the car and say something so deeply profound you’ll see the world completely differently. Who knows?
1) It isn’t cool.
When did that happen? When I was in high school (I left 2001), becoming a mother was sort of expected. There was no question about. Perhaps this was a generational thing, perhaps it was a working class thing: perhaps it was a naïve thing. Before the internet exploded, the world was much much smaller. If something wasn’t shown on the TV or in mainstream novels, the chances are I wouldn’t have access to it. At sixteen I had no idea that French women were chic, or there were people in the world who really did have millions of pounds for doing very little. I had no idea that there were people in the world who didn’t grow up and get a job and get married. If I wasn’t married with children by the time I was 25, my life was going to be a disaster. I even made a pact with someone that if we weren’t married by 27 we’d marry each other.
At some point, motherhood stopped being a norm and started being an option. And at another point it started being a very unfavourable option. Hence the need for terms like Yummy Mummy. The war between the mums and the childfree folk should never have happened. The chance to choose should have been a celebration but instead some mums took it personally; some childfreers didn’t hold back on their idea that motherhood was the lesser vocation. Suddenly you were either a career girl or a mum and the career girls were the glam ones; the ones with the potential, the ones who were making the most of their time period and the wonderful things on offer. They were the ones who weren’t selling out.
And so here we are. Being a mum isn’t really considered to be that cool. But I suppose right now I don’t really care about what’s cool.
Do these reasons seem familiar? Or insane?! Let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading!
The Motherhood Choice 