Happy Mother's Day

xx

It’s Mother’s Day in London. I’m sitting at my desk by the window looking down at the market street I live on, where the flower stall has already set up for the day. It’s raining. A little boy with blonde blonde hair, a bright blue waterproof onesie and yellow Wellington boots is jumping up and down in a puddle, looking at the ripples he is creating like he has discovered America, while his dad looks on patiently holding a bunch of flowers, presumably, for a mum who is waiting at home.

Now a teenage boy is walking down the street with his dad. Both in glasses, curly hair and stooped postures. The boy is holding a bunch of multicoloured flowers.

It makes me smile to think of all the mum’s getting flowers today… and there is not one bit of me that yearns to be one of them.

I am forty six and I’ve never had children. I never particularly wanted them but I imagined that want would turn up one day, probably when it was too late, and I would regret every choice I’d made that meant I was a woman who did not have kids. A woman who put her career first. A woman who never made it work with a man. A woman who was immature and selfish and who only saw her folly when it was too late.

These are all the warnings we are given both subtly and obviously about not having kids. You’ll regret it. Don’t leave it too late. Who will look after you when you are old? I’ve had all that stuff said to me directly - often by uber drivers who seem to look at my face and be overcome by an urge to tell me how to live my life.

In my thirties an older friend told me that I’d wake up at forty and it would be like a bomb had gone off: I would suddenly want children. I waited for the bomb. It didn’t happen. It still hasn’t happened.

For what it’s worth, to anyone who might be a few years younger than me and dealing with this stuff, I’m here to say that I do not have a single regret about not having children. If anything I feel more grateful every day that I was in the position to choose the life I have, a life in which I am not a mother.

I love kids. I have felt the absolutely rightness of a baby on my hip. I have marvelled at their skin and gazed into their crystal eyes and thought wow, wow, wow, this is a miracle. This little being is a miracle. I’ve looked at the beauty of my best friend’s little boy asleep, his brown limbs flung out of the white duvet, his blonde hair stuck in sweaty clumps on his forehead, and I’ve wanted to climb into his head and watch his dreams. And still I do not want to be a mother.

This is not to say my life is perfect or one big bottomless brunch or shopping trip (the other message we get about child-free women is that we are superficial Peter Pans who don’t want the party to stop). Anyone who reads my writing or knows me, knows this is not true. I get pretty down, I get ill a lot. I watch more murder shows on Netflix than anyone should watch. And yet - weirdly perhaps! - I would not change anything.

Despite my ups and downs, struggles and overdrafts, I often have moments of feeling, quietly, this is it: this is the life you wanted. The life you chose. I look out the window at the chip shop, giggle at a message that Gary sends, or delight at my neighbours’ latest stories over coffee in our pyjamas, and think wow, this is it: a beautiful interesting life. And you get to live it. Lucky you.

Which is not to say that having children isn’t beautiful and interesting. Of course it is. It is also one of the hardest, most important and least appreciated jobs in the world. I am in awe of the mothers I know. Genuinely. I do not know how they do it and they do it so well. They deserve all the days, all the cards, all the flowers and so, so, so much more.

But I suppose I’m writing this for anyone who might not have children and who are feeling the pain of that today. The pain of wanting kids and for whatever reason not having them. The pain of paying thousands for fertility treatment that may or may not work. The pain of knowing you might not meet the person you want to have children with. The pain of feeling that your life does not run along the same course as the people around you. The pain of wondering what that says about you. The pain that comes with the limbo of not knowing what your life will look like if you don’t have kids.

I’m here to say on the other side of the limbo years that I truly believe there are so many ways to have a beautiful life.

Motherhood and children offer one kind of good life (a well publicised kind) but I’ve come to realise that all lives have their own kind of beauty. Sometimes we can be so blinded by the messages society gives us about what a good life looks like, that we don’t see the goodness in what we have.

I have a friend who spent tens of thousands on fertility treatment only to have their so wanted baby, and wonder if she’d made a huge mistake. ‘I had a great life and I threw a bomb in it,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me what this was like?’

She grew to love motherhood but she says that it’s not any better than her child-free life. It’s just different.

I have friends who desperately wanted children and for various reasons it didn’t happen. I have seen them show up to other friends’ children’s birthday parties with presents and a bright smile that’s unable to conceal their broken heart. I have seen them hold nieces and nephews and wonder why they couldn’t have their own. I have listened to them rage at the unfairness of it all. And it isn’t fair.

And still I see them build beautiful lives.

They don’t have their own children but they mother in many ways. They mother their friends, younger colleagues, pets, pieces of work. They do the painful work of mothering themselves after not receiving that love as children.

They should be celebrated too.

As a single woman with no children there are not many celebrations for your life.

The friend who had the baby after years of fertility treatment was upset by the reaction she got on social media when she shared a picture of her baby. All the years of work wins and buying her first home on her own and being a good friend and a good human, no post got as many comments as the one she shared about her baby.

We are conditioned more than we realise, I think, to celebrate these heteronormative landmarks - marriage, kids - and to devalue other things (and therefore ourselves if we don’t do these things). Even today getting married and having children can seem like a woman’s greatest achievement. But it’s not true.

Life is far more full of possibilities than that.

So this is a message to all mothers and non-mothers: Happy Mother’s Day.

Whatever your situation, I hope that you get flowers today, whether someone buys them for you or you buy them for yourself or you visit some in the park. We all deserve flowers and to see the beauty of our imperfect perfect lives. Whether they contain children or not.

Love xx

xxx

Ruby Warrington’s Women Without Kids is one of the most important books I’ve read about the growing numbers of women not having children (through choice or not) - and I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it yet.

xxx