Perceptions of motherhood
Juxtapositions and contradictions
Of all the great dividing lines across our societies, the one dividing mothers from women who do not have children seems to be amongst the largest and most fraught. Yet on each side of this great chasm, there are further dividing lines that are even more sensitive: the divide between the “childfree” and the “childless”, between mothers who say they breezed through pregnancy and others who were bedbound throughout, between mothers who are deeply fulfilled with their family life and those who find themselves struggling with motherhood or living in deep guilt and shame with a regret that they dare not voice. The one thing that seems to unite these states of being is how strongly emotions and raw human drives, fears and needs are felt by each person along these divides, often to the extent that those across the chasm feel completely incomprehensible.
Despair and joy
I have sat with friends as they have sobbed in pure dismay and panic after a positive pregnancy test, fearful that the life they knew seemed to be over in a flash, and others who have sobbed in as much dismay after a second, third, fourth round of IVF, desperate for that flicker of life. I have also sat with friends as they confessed they felt lifeless and suicidal after having their second child, and with others who have risked everything, including their own lives, to fulfil their deepest desire to have their own child. I have known women who have whispered their relief that a pregnancy ended in miscarriage and watched the panic and guilt set over them immediately as the words came out, and others who have carried the pain of a miscarriage deep within them for decades after.
Contraception has allowed many more women than ever before to try their hardest to not get pregnant, whereas the cancer that ate its way through my friend’s body much too young meant she had to try incredibly hard to retain the ability to get pregnant - including delaying chemotherapy to undergo fertility treatment, all the while knowing that the hormones were causing her tumour to grow. As some women are desperate to not get pregnant, others see that desire as selfish, incomprehensible, as they spend everything they can for the chance of a positive pregnancy test.
Most devastatingly, I have seen parents attempt to comprehend the birth of a stillborn child, and the cruelty of a tiny, child-sized coffin being lowered into the ground as her mother’s body shakes with grief. “But how could I give birth to death?” is a question that will not stop ringing in my ears, as it is impossible to answer. The poem "For sale: baby shoes, never worn” is amongst the most haunting ones I have ever read. And yet, I have seen mothers so distraught at the circumstances of their pregnancy that they seek to do everything they can do end the pregnancy - including attempt to harm their own lives. And historically, life, birth and death have been heavily intertwined in infant mortality rates and maternal death rates that stun us today.
Unconditional love
Perhaps the most enduring archetypal mother is the one who loves her child unconditionally and will sacrifice herself, and her own relationship with the child, to spare the child. The Judgment of Solomon, (1 Kings 3:16–28) tells the famous story of two mothers living in the same house, each with an infant son. Tragically, one baby had been smothered and each mother claimed the remaining child as her own. King Solomon called for his sword and declared that he would cut the baby in two, with each woman to receive one half of the boy. One woman accepted the ruling, and the other begged Solomon to give the baby to the other, as long as he did not kill or harm the baby. Of course, King Solomon declared that the second mother, who had not accepted his ruling, was the true mother, as a mother would even give up her baby if that was necessary to save its life.
Whenever I read or think of this story now, I cannot help but think of those gut wrenching scenes of desperate mothers in Afghanistan attempting to throw their babies over barbed wire at Kabul Airport to Western soldiers following the takeover of the Taliban.
And yet. And yet. This is a deep, primal instinct but it is not the only one we have: as enduring as the tale of the sacrificial mother is, so too was the practice of infanticide and child abandonment in almost every culture in human history - until relatively recently.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the archetype of the devouring mother loves her child too much, smothering the child and crippling them. At the extreme, though thankfully rarely, mothers (and it is almost exclusively mothers for this syndrome) will engage in Munchausen's by proxy and purposefully fake their child’s illness - often even harming the child to keep up the pretence -in order to bask in the praise and admiration we give to a mother who is desperately fighting for her child’s life.
In other cases, a mother can experience deep loneliness if she is not able to bond with her child after birth, or may even develop psychosis immediately after birth although this is thankfully rare. Not every mother feels the expected sweep of overwhelming, sacrificial love - not at first, and sometimes, not at all.
Regret
If you are, like me, a woman without children, you may find yourself occupying a bizarre, contradictory space in the narrative of regret: there will be many women - and men - who tell you they regret not having children, and urge you to have them straight away, and other parents who whisper their darkest confession to you: that they regret having their children.
There will be many parents who are in awe over the purpose and meaning and joy that their children have brought into their life, and will not be able to fathom how you could give this up without regret. In Birthgap, Stephen J Shaw sets out to find out why birth rates across the world are plummeting, and calls this “The epidemic that dare not speak its name.” He finds that a large majority of people who never have children did want children, and that many who had children would have wanted more.
The common assumption amongst parents seems to be that this fate of regret is only waiting to meet you if you do not have children. And yet, and yet: there is another phenomenon that dare not speak its name to other parents, and that is of parents who regret having their children. I have sometimes found that my admission that I do not want or have children is taken as an invitation for a desperate mother to suddenly blurt out something that she can never say to anyone else: That is, that she regrets her children. Fathers too.
I came across an article by Farrah Storr recently, in which she movingly wrote about how many women have confessed the guilt they feel over regret they have about their children. Most of the women she spoke to would not dare go on the record to publicly declare their regret. However, one woman with a severely autistic child did go on the record with her story, and Farrah writes the story beautifully in her article. The juxtaposition of regret and enrichment coinciding together is summarised wonderfully by the mother in question in the following lines:
“Without question my son has ruined my life, but, and this is the important bit, he has also enriched it beyond compare.”
“If I didn’t know James would I choose to have a child on this agenda? I don’t think I would. But I do know James and so one of the best things in my life has been my relationship with him, despite everything we have been through. James laughing uncontrollably, which he does a lot, is for me like someone else winning the lottery. I’m a business coach. I’m a logical person, and yet so there’s no logic to any of that.
Asking to be a mother is asking and accepting any and all of the consequences of it. That’s why I think it’s okay to live with the dichotomy of feelings. The love and the hate. The resentment and the joy. Motherhood has taught me that light and dark can live alongside one other. However dark the dark got, my love for James never diminished. It just stood strong alongside the resentment, the disappointment and all the fear.”
I have come across many others who are deeply fulfilled by their children and cannot fathom a life without them; they look at me with pity sometimes, and ask the ever-famous question “Who will look after you when you’re old?” (as if care and nursing homes are not full of parents whose children never did look after them or could not look after them, as if having a child must be a guarantee of future care).
But I also come across many mothers who confess to me that they can’t imagine their life without their child now, and of course they love their child, but they are just so deeply lonely, so tired, and feel a total loss of their identity. Some have never come to terms with how their body changed during pregnancy. Others are traumatised for years later by the birth, and cannot tell anybody. Amongst the saddest stories are those who say that having children ruined their marriage in some way, with a common feature of these stories being a partner or husband who felt second to the baby or just not sexually satisfied, and found intimacy elsewhere.
The regret of having children, for some women, is sharp and unspoken. The regret of never being able to have children, for others, haunts them as they age through life feeling the loss with each year.
Choosing to forgo motherhood
Then there are those who live a deeply fulfilled life without children - I know many of them at various ages and stages of life and almost none of them have a life that resembles the caricature of a selfish, immature woman who neve grew up and is partying and drinking until 4am in her 40s that circulates over social media regularly.
The women I know who deliberately don’t have children tend to fall into the following categories:
(1) Have raised multiple siblings since they were themselves very young and have no desire to do it all over again, especially as they are still looking after those siblings and guiding them through young adulthood.
(2) Are the “default” caretaker of elderly parents in their families, while their siblings tend to their own children.
(3) Have a genetic predisposition to a condition that they do not want to pass on.
(4) Simply never had a desire to have children - these women tend to be either very introverted or have a deep interest or hobby that is very solitary.
All have various degrees of involvement with family commitments, and so are not all over social media posting about how “responsibility-free” and fun their lives are. This is an angle that is often missed in the narratives over how selfish it is not to have a child as the birth rate collapses.
Selfish and selfless choices
In the climate change narratives, the narratives go the other way: How can anyone have children in a dying world? Is that not the most selfish of all choices, to bring a life into the world that is surely condemned to suffer?
This narrative misses the various ways that humans who already exist today suffer or are likely to suffer if birth rates continue to fall off a cliff edge, and that as populations get richer, they tend to fend off the impact of climate change better.
We already see how the impact of falling birth dates may play out for us if we look over to how countries further along on this road than us, such as Japan and China, are attempting to cope with rapidly declining birth birth rates and an ageing population. The battle lines between the generations and the anxieties this prompts is explored in the dystopian movie “Plan 75”, in which Japan implements a programme encouraging its elderly citizens to undergo assisted euthanasia to make way for the younger population - complete with stipends, support services, and salespeople. The eerie part about the plot is that it feels all too familiar and plausible, particularly if we look at out euthanasia services play out in their most liberal implementation in Canada.
The inconvenient truth is that it may well be the case that not having children is the correct and understandable choice for some on an individual level, but a disaster at the population level. The population level dilemmas that low birth rates cause are unlikely to be solved in the long term by more immigration - after all, immigrant families become citizens and age too, and each next generation tends to shrink drastically in size, further compounding the existing issues with a welfare model that relies on an ever-growing, expanding tax base. Populations are also shrinking globally, and the number of countries that will need overseas labour to shore up an ageing population will increase, meaning we can't simply rely on an ever expanding pool of migrants who will be willing to come and care for our elderly. That is not to mention the additional considerations and tradeoffs that reliance on large scale migration has on local populations, resources, civil society and social cohesion (another topic for another post).
Those who do have children are indeed producing and raising the citizens who (in the best case) will inherit and contribute to our civilisations, and are vital for its endurance. Yet very rarely does anyone have a child in order to benefit the rest of humanity in this way - when you speak to most parents, they will talk excitedly about wanting to create a child with the person they love, and delight in who the child will look like; they will look forward to life's milestones, watching their child take a step, smile, grow teeth, crawl, walk, dance, marry, and have their own children. Or they feel a deep, primal longing for a child. Or they want to carry on a legacy, to live on in their children and grandchildren when they themselves die. The process of carrying and then caring for a child may require admirable selflessness and bravery - the female hero’s journey - but very rarely is the desire to have children selfless.
There are self interested reasons to both have children (see Bryan Caplan’s “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids), and to not have children. There are some parents who will raise children who will contribute greatly to society, and others who will cost society a great deal in terms of resources and potentially harm if for whatever reason (nature, nurture or both), their child goes on to negatively impact their fellow citizens through crime or neglect, etc. Selflessness and selfishness therefore is an odd metric by which to impose a blanket judgement or injunction on either side of the scale.
Stephen Shaw’s assertion that the majority of people who never had children did want them suggests that there are perhaps other ways we can support people who already want children to have the children they want to have, rather than start to force a load of women who don’t want children to have them. It has, however, proven incredibly difficult to encourage increase in birth rates in most Western countries - but this is a topic for another post, one which I intend to write after reading Louise Perry’s forthcoming book The Case for Having Kids in conjunction with David Benatar’s “Better Never to Have Been.”
I suspect though, that for the vast majority of women who have had children, the reasons to have them were either rooted in a deep human drive, or simply the circumstances of life meaning that sex and reproduction were tied before reliable contraception came along. Interestingly, it seems birth rates started to fall before the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, suggesting that it is the interaction with the modern economy which has started the trend, but no doubt the availability of reliable contraception has greatly exacerbated it.
I also suspect that for women who never want children, the reason for this is similarly rooted in something instinctual that cannot always be reasoned with, and each instinct on either side of this great divide is turned into a philosophy to impose onto others for the most dogmatic.
For others, the desire for a child will only kick in later in life or once they meet a partner with whom they want to raise a child. You can try to tell them to have a child on rational terms, berate them with judgements of how selfish they are, or scare them with stories of ageing - or you can introduce them to a suitable partner, steer them towards a career that doesn’t require them to be in education forever or move to London, and see what happens. Maybe they will be amongst the stable minority of women who, across history, have never had children - or maybe they will discover a maternal urge.
Matrescence
All of this is made more complicated by the process of matrescence - the changes that a mother’s body, brain and being goes through during the process of pregnancy, and then childbirth. I have never experienced it myself, but every instinct I have and the experience of watching women become mothers tells me that it has got to be one of the most powerful transformations we know - after all, babies are totally helpless and dependant on it happening for them to stay alive. We mark and note the rhythms of puberty and adolescence in which we mature from children to young adults, but the total transformation of a woman into a mother seems to me to be a much more important, monumental transformation. As Mary Harrington so eloquently remarks often, “pregnancy doesn’t just create a baby, it creates a mother.”
This does mean that it is impossible to experience the process of becoming a mother until you have yourself gone through it. You may rationally understand it, but it is impossible to know how you will feel until you have gone through the transformation. Once a woman has crossed this great transitional stage, she also cannot go back and may not be able to fathom those of us who choose to stay on the other side of this transformation. However, those of us who remain in the pre-transitional stage cannot experience crossing the Rubicon without actually doing it, meaning if we feel regret then, it might be too late. But if we were going to feel joy and love that we have never known before on the other side, we would not be able to comprehend its depths beforehand.
Given how monumental this transformation is or can be, it is remarkable that we don’t mark this stage of life as one for us all to think about from when we are young - after all, whether or not you want children or not will be amongst the most impactful decisions you will ever make, and we should perhaps be equipping young women with the tools, stories and experience to try to imagine whether they want a glimpse of the other side of the Rubicon or not.
Motherhood and status
I was always told “Heaven lies at the feet of your mother” as this was the most important role a woman could play in the culture I was raised in. But when I hear other women in the West describe becoming a mother, they talk about a sharp drop in status: the look in someone’s eyes glazing over with boredom as they discover you are “just a stay at home mum”, the look of horror and annoyance when your child cries too much, the total invisibility of pushing along your pram along and never being acknowledged. This seems to be more pronounced in England and perhaps the rest of the UK too as far as I can tell, even compared to other Western countries. It’s unclear if there is a general disdain for mothers, or for children - the idea of children being “seen and not heard”, packed off to boarding school or shoved up chimneys feels as English as a rainy summer. But I have also seen children abandoned due to poverty or children disowned, children subject to genital mutilation etc, in other cultures, so perhaps this, too, is universal.
Either way, it’s going to be hard to persuade a nation to go forth and multiply if motherhood is seen as either a drag on GDP and a stupid financial decision, or the only proper role for a woman (and all on your own too, without family nearby to help). On the question of support with childcare, the grandparents seem to be speaking too, and they increasingly seem to be saying no.
The future of motherhood
Will the decline in birth rate be solved by artificial wombs or other reproductive technology? If so, how will the children of such technologies fare - and what will be the place of the mother then? What will that mean for human relationships?
Thoughts on a postcard for a future post.
Thank you very much, that is so kind!
What a brilliant essay - thank you for your rigour.