Harpy E-Book

Caroline Magennis

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 368

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Harpy is a tonic; a tongue-in-cheek manual for dealing with Spanish Inquisition-style questioning about saying pass to procreation and building an enriching life beyond the nuclear family' VOGUE 'Harpy made me nod in recognition, and shake my head with sorrow, and then it made me laugh out loud' EMILIE PINE, author of NOTES TO SELF and RUTH & PEN 'Defiant, funny and inspiring' SEÁN HEWITT, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE Each generation has more childfree women than the one before. For many, it is an active decision made for a wide range of reasons. Despite this growing trend, we continue to live in a society where women are often judged for deciding to remain childfree - for not conforming to narrow expectations. For being a Harpy. In this timely and thoughtful book, Caroline Magennis looks beyond the often-divisive conversation around women who choose to be childfree and offers an alternative message of hope and celebration. With humour and intelligence, she explores why motherhood isn't right for everybody and how any woman - whether a parent or childfree - can live a full life, while also reminding the reader that your freedoms and the right to autonomy should never be taken for granted.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773065-0

eBook: 978-183773067-4

Text copyright © 2024 Caroline Magennis

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my colleagues and students at the University of Salford for the care, community and chat over the years. I am glad to be part of a supportive, creative research and teaching culture. I am very grateful to the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology for the generously awarded sabbatical that allowed me to actually finish this book. It would quite simply not exist without Silé Edwards at Andrew Nurnberg, an agent so remarkable that I couldn’t have imagined her in my wildest dreams. She is a unique blend of kindness, savvy and tenacity. Ellen Conlon, Connor Stait, Emily Cary-Elwes, Rhiannon Morris, Elle-Jay Christodoulou and the team at Icon Books have been a delight to work with from start to finish – thank you so much for the care you’ve taken with me and this book.

Immense gratitude to the friends who gave up their time to read draft chapters – Emma Barnes, Stephanie Boland, Sophie Cooper, Deirdre Flynn, Katie Lowe, Ali Matthews, Maggie Scull, Rachel Sykes, Beth Rodgers, David Russell and Chris Vardy. I’ve also been very lucky to benefit from the strong encouragement of Éadaoin Agnew, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Hilary Copeland, Eli Davies, Alison Garden, Seán Hewitt, Ursula Hurley, Judy Kendall, Simon Kövesi, Stefanie Lehner, Claire Lynch, Mícheál McCann, Marisol Morales-Ladrón, Natalie Moran, Jade Munslow Ong, Marisol Morales-Ladrón, Laura O’Brien, Stephen O’Neill, Charlotte Riley, Jo Scott, Scott Thurston, Sarah Roddy and Mark Yates. Thanks to We are Childfree and the Women of Irish Heritage Network for offering different kinds of community. Much love to my family, Catherine and Nicholas Bell, for accepting this harpy just as she is. I am indebted to Ed Ryan for everything, all the time, but especially for being sound when I’m on a deadline.

I’d like to thank everyone who has shared their thoughts and ideas with me these last few years – the articles, reading recommendations, songs and memes have been much appreciated. Whether childfree, childless, carers or parents, there are generous minds out there and I hope to have reflected a tiny bit of your compassion and care.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction: The Makings of a Harpy

1.Harpies and Home

2.Harpies and the People Who Love Them

3.Harpies at Work

4.Bad Harpies

5.Good Harpies

6.Harpy Futures

Notes

PROLOGUE

I am sitting at a large dinner table for a work event. These events are not my comfort zone. I was raised in a small town in the North of Ireland, where a set table and multiple glasses for different kinds of wine were rarely seen outside of your posh cousin’s wedding. A few years ago, a friend who went to the kind of university where people race boats gently explained the rules of side plates to me: with the bread plate to your left, wine glass to your right, you pass the plate clockwise. It is a foreign language, but I try my best, still not at ease after all these years.

At these kinds of occasions, I always gravitate towards the end of the table that has the women with a hint of devilment, who will say things in a hushed voice that could devastate a whole room. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but …’. I have no desire to be at the end of the table where men are pompously holding court. I can imagine the ‘Well, of course’ from here. I do not want to sit and wait for that moment where they remember they really should ask this young woman about herself.

So, these women and I sit and talk and laugh. The conversation is alternately light and deep, but no one is intrusive. We take turns. Everyone reveals as much as they are comfortable with, likely more than usual, but no one pries. We talk about Irish books, because that is our work and the thing we have in common, but also film, walks, the ankle boots for daytime with the perfect heel, the political shifts in our countries, new developments in tubing mascaras.

Just as I am wiping back tears of laughter over a story about a malfunctioning halterneck bikini, an older man in a particularly hideous argyle sweater leans over, looks directly at me and says down the bridge of his nose: ‘Do you have kids at home?’ I have had this question before, and I can hear in his tone of voice that he needs to work out if I am a selfish layabout with no responsibilities or a selfish mother who has abandoned her children. I imagine him in a big hat as a Witchfinder General or as the Monty Python version of the Spanish Inquisition. I tell him that ‘I don’t, no’ and attempt to go back to my conversation as I really need to hear the end of the bikini anecdote.

‘But, do you want them, soon?’

He has obviously clocked that I have crossed the bridge from early to mid-thirties and has decided that he gets an opinion on the tick-tock of my egg factory. Bloody hell, she’s on the turn! I am briefly angry, imagining him asking this question to any of my friends undergoing fertility treatment or with painful experiences of conception, but don’t want to let him spoil my evening. ‘Ach no, it’s just not for me.’ He sits back to react to this, tilts his head and draws a deep breath as if I need his sage advice. Immediately, I pity his students if he takes this rancid, judgemental vibe into the classroom.

‘You’ll change your mind,’ he says. ‘You’ll change your mind, and then it’ll be too late.’

And there it is, folks. The bingo full house. He truly thinks he is a subversive truth-teller. An edgelord in an ugly jumper. He thinks I have never heard this before. I wonder what he hopes my reaction will be. Possibly to spring from my seat shrieking ‘Oh shit! You’re right! I do not know my own mind and must get pregnant immediately!’ before scanning around the table for the man who has the best genes to mate with.

My end of the table is silent, watching me, waiting to see what my response will be. The conversation at his end goes on, oblivious, glad to be rid of him.

I run through my mental rolodex of options to respond with. I could get personal and suggest a man who has finished off the port after hoarding all the good cheeses from the board might not be the best source of life advice. I could give him the social and environmental reasons that people choose not to have children. I could use unparliamentary language and tell him where he can put his questions. Some of this would make me feel better, but none of this would get me back to laughing and chatting. Questions like this snap you out of the flow of give and take that is a good conversation, a good evening, a good life. They ask you to make careful calculations about the kind of response that is acceptable without souring the night for others and force you to decide which bits of your life people are entitled to know about, when all you’re trying to bloody do is meet new people without getting soup on your nice top. These questions come in an exciting variety of night-ruining scenarios and for good measure, the onus is placed on you, woman, as peacemaker to smooth things over and not throw crockery at anyone.

‘What can I say? It’s really just not for me,’ I speak firmly, and lightly gesture with one palm facing upwards to signal that we are done here, and turn towards the group again with a ‘So, where were we? The coast of Sicily in full view of some trawlermen?’

***

I won’t explain or justify my life to someone who is not entitled to it. I won’t raise my voice or lose my temper and give away my peace of mind to someone who is hostile to the choices I have made. I know my own mind, but the surety of that didn’t come easily, and it didn’t happen overnight.

After dinner, a woman from the table came up to me, quietly, and said she’d never heard anyone talk like that about not having kids before. I could tell from the look in her eyes that she is like me, a childless harpy, and that this won’t be the last time we talk candidly with each other in hushed tones. Later that night, after my impeccable yet affordable skincare routine, I don’t ruminate over the man’s questions or grim warnings at all; I think about the walk by the river I might take before tomorrow’s meeting and whether I’ll listen to a podcast or that great first Anna Calvi album.

However, it hasn’t always been like this – I have been defensive at times when faced with such questions in the past. I have been bitterly angry, responded with a quick tongue and have thought about a dashed-off comment for days. But, curling into a defensive posture to make yourself smaller, lesser, diminished is, quite frankly, no way to live. The argyle sweater men do not get to win. We will explore the many ways in which ‘The Question’ manifests itself – with friends, family, media pundits, rude fellas at work events.

Even now, things still get under my skin. It’s a work in progress. My relationship to remaining stubbornly childfree might look different today to next year, to five, or even ten years’ time. What a good life will look like depends on our options, but we won’t cower from fear of judgement.

What follows is not a catalogue of complaints about how hard it is to be a childless woman; about the way we have been wronged or ignored by society. I’m sure you’ve had things said to you that would curdle milk, but we are going to turn instead to creative, generative ways of imagining our lives with the resources available to us.

What I want to show is how, through reading, watching and living, I became reconciled to my own life and hopeful about my future. I started to build a life that I was mostly happy to live. This is an offering to my fellow childless women, of what worked and didn’t work for both me and the people I interviewed. You will have your own story – but hopefully there will be something in the moments I describe that makes you feel less alone. I want this to be the book I needed ten years ago, when I was adrift, angry and uncertain about my future. I don’t want to tell you that being childless is the most amazing thing you can ever do and that no one should ever have a baby. I am not trying to persuade you to join a cult or a coven, although we can get matching motorcycle jackets if you want, complete with winged harpies on the back. I will tell you that if you feel that this is the right path for you, really feel it in your bones, and you’re prepared to put some work into it, you can build yourself a life and be in community in a way that is completely your own.

INTRODUCTION: THE MAKINGS OF A HARPY

I have lived more than 40 years of my life without children, but I didn’t really think about that fact in a clear, conscious way until recently. I just sort of bumbled along, good days and bad, brushing off some comments about my plans for my body but letting others get under my skin. We build our lives from networks of moments, chats and glances. These small, everyday moments form themselves into a narrative. The story I told myself about my own life was one of difference and separateness. That I just had to keep my head down, work hard and hope for only a smattering of awkward questions about my plans for my eggs. The answer is either unfertilised or poached, depending on who’s asking.

But, something wasn’t quite right. The feminist thinker Sara Ahmed talks about feeling when something is awry in Living a Feminist Life: ‘A sensation that begins at the back of your mind, an uneasy sense of something amiss, gradually comes forward, as things come up; then receding, as you try to get on with things; as you try to get on despite things.’1 This most clearly describes my own realisations – slowly at first then all of a sudden the truth made itself absolutely unavoidable. I had been suppressing my feelings and avoiding saying anything declarative. I brushed off comments with an ambiguous smile and hid in plain sight.

I acknowledged that something had to change in the way I moved through the world and related to the people in my life. My relationships had changed with my parent friends, with my family, and with myself. I didn’t want to be walking round like a raw nerve because I didn’t know how to fit in to our world, which is both organised around family life and dismissive of the work of parenting. I learned, slowly, to please myself and be my own advocate. I worked out what was important to me – community and connection – and have set about filling my life with as much of that as possible. I cautiously met some new people through mutual interests, made the effort with my long-standing friends and stood up for the causes that are important to me and the people I care about.

When I began to let slip that I was writing about childfree women, people came to me with their stories, their rants, nothing less than the most intimate moments of their lives. It has felt like such a gift to be trusted with these. This book is about women who either make an active choice not to have children or feel compelled not to be mothers. I will not explore different kinds of mothering, infertility or child loss. On this, I have learned a great deal from the work of writers Emilie Pine (Notes to Self) and Claire Lynch (Small). Friends and acquaintances have described to me exceptionally painful stories of coming to terms with being unable to have the children they wanted and having to find ways to live – I am very sorry for their loss and that I’ve not been able to represent their experiences here as I try to do justice to childfree by choice women. We might find kinship in hoping that no one asks us ridiculous questions at dinner, or in finding ways to navigate assumptions at work, but I will never know the depth of the grief they carry. Hopefully we can find little ways to speak to each other and build forms of community and caregiving that support us all. I hope for a future where we inform and educate about infertility, contraception, menopause and also LGBTQ+ health issues.

I want us to respect everyone – their choices, bodily autonomy and right to care and privacy – but to focus on the experiences of those who are intentionally, happily childfree. The dichotomy that we are presented with in the media feels so simplistic – that it is parents ‘against’ those who don’t have children. This blunt, simple narrative doesn’t encompass the unhappily childless, regretful parents, those who are ambivalent about their choices and those who care in other ways. While this book is aimed at the voluntarily childless, the happily childfree – call it what you will – I hope it leads to more mutual understanding of the shades of grey that make up our lives in community, together. These tired cultural tropes do not reflect the way most of us live, with friends and colleagues with all kinds of relationships and domestic situations.

Throughout this book, I want to speak to the imaginary ‘You’ – I want this to be read by everyone, of course, to help us live alongside each other. But the figure in my head is of a curious childfree woman. That’s my ‘You’. I imagine us in the corner of a pub with a fire, or a café with excellent hot chocolate, or on a walk down a seaside strand, raincoats pulled tight. You give me a look like you know maybe you shouldn’t say the next thing but, screw it, and tell me about that comment that you wanted to shout in a meeting or your Sunday afternoon ritual that seems self-indulgent but gives you so much happiness.

I am not, of course, the first person to talk about not having children – writers of academic books, memoir, non-fiction and fiction alike have explored the topic in a variety of different ways. Recent books include Meghan Daum’s edited collection Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (2016), Amy Blackstone’s Childfree by Choice: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence (2019) and a great edited collection: Childfree Across the Disciplines: Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children (2022). This is in addition to a growing scholarly interest in the topic. I’ve appreciated the academic work of Dr Dawn Llewellyn, who is based at the University of Chester and explores women of faith who choose not to have children. 2023 alone has seen major new books on the topic from Peggy O’Donnell Heffington and Ruby Warrington.

Although I am an academic as my day job, this is not a meticulously referenced scholarly book – I wanted to write something more personal without the pressure of citing everything in the field, to respond instinctively to the way being childfree made me feel rather than filter my life through endless theoretical texts. I am interested in what it means to be constructed as an unnatural woman, how that sense of wrongness crept into my bones and how it can be unlearned. I want us to explore how it really feels, what isn’t working, and how we can build something else. This comes hand in hand with a sense that none of us have the answers alone, but as a community we can chip away at any residual shame and stigma.

We encounter each other at the most unplanned times. In the hair salon, for example. I love nothing more than getting my hair done. Oh, the drama of it all. The chat, the scent of expensive products, the faint lingering sense of hope in the air. It is so fancy, a little glimpse at glamour in our short lives – in Ireland we might begrudge this kind of pleasure and call it ‘notions’, but since I’ve lived in England I’ve stockpiled notions. Even if I am only taking my newly done hair back to a takeaway and a film on the sofa, flouncy locks makes everything feel like an event. Why yes, I caught a glimpse of myself in that train window and I liked it. There was a perceptible swish. Perhaps I’ll give myself a pout and a wink like Jennifer Coolidge.

I love all kinds of hairdressers – I love sullen hipsters who try to talk me into a micro-fringe, I love exuberant men with an overly complex vision, I love no-nonsense Northern lasses who will bluntly tell you that the layers won’t work. Above all, I love the fantasy of a big, bouncy blow dry. Whatever else is going on, my shiny, voluminous hair will make people believe that I temporarily have my life together.

On this one occasion, I have been asked to host a literary event in Manchester and I am having a minor panic. I have read all the authors’ books and prepared a little list of questions but I’m not quite confident enough to breeze through it. So, I decide to rely heavily on the power of the blow dry. I pledge my allegiance to the round brushes.

I pick a salon that has decent reviews and is near the venue, hoping that my regular haircutter never finds out about my infidelity. On arrival, I am presented with a glass of bubbly and imagine this is what Nigella Lawson’s life is like, or a casual Tuesday for Priyanka Chopra. I am brought to a station to outline my wishes to a youngish Northern woman with the kind but sort of mischievous face you imagine telling your secrets to over a long lunch. She is maybe in her early thirties, her own hair pulled up in an artfully messy bun, and I swear she’s got that highlighter on that is meant to be a miracle worker.

As the tongs and brushes and sprays whizz around me, we begin chatting. Oh, the intimate secrets hair and beauty professionals hold. We begin to talk about our weekend plans and quickly, almost imperceptibly, the lightness of the mood shifts. ‘Oh, I used to go out with my girlies on a Saturday night, but that’s changed recently.’ I smile, and nod for her to go on. ‘Since they all have kids …’ She drifts off, not knowing how to finish this sentence, then continues. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want that life anyway, screaming brats demanding all your time and money.’ She continues, lips slightly pursed, eyes downcast, about the ways her friends have let her down. I desperately want to give her a hug, but she is holding ceramic tools which are heated to 220°C. No one wants a burnt ear.

I didn’t know how to say it then because I didn’t want to seem patronising. I didn’t want to say to her that what I heard was loneliness and sadness in her voice and it broke me into several pieces. I didn’t say that I had been through all those feelings with my own friends. I didn’t really say very much as I wasn’t ready to sit with what she was telling me, yet, because I wasn’t ready to sit with it in myself.

So instead I said: ‘Oh, I’ve never wanted kids either, and aren’t lie-ins great? And the price of flights not during school holidays?’ We shift the conversation to our favourite bits of Spain, having swerved the indignity of an actual conversation about real stuff.

I like to think that these pages contain the conversation we never had. I wish I could have said to her that I heard how rubbish she felt and that I was sorry, and that I hoped her friends would come back to her when their kids were older. I wanted her to be ok.

A few years ago, I was overly concerned with how to be the ideal childless woman in public. I was vigilant to how I appeared to others and regulated my behaviour. You must never bother or inconvenience anyone. You’re not supposed to talk about it, which I’ve screwed up a bit by writing this. You must do your job very well without complaining or asking for any help. Finally, you must cheerfully be an endless audience for other people’s lives. Their real lives as opposed to your … what is it you do with your time again? Of course, you would make more sense to people if you had children but while you’re not, you should really behave in a certain way: keep quiet and be endlessly efficient, available and cheerful. These messages are circulated across the media and the conversations we have – there is narrow path to likeability as a woman and it narrows further if you don’t have children. Then, the shift happened – realising that we can never be the perfect childfree woman. That you might always be unlikeable to lots of people for having the temerity to live a life that feels right to you. You find yourself on a tightrope until you say ‘Fuck it’ and fall, laughing. I want us to be ready to catch each other.

Having been some form of an academic for fifteen years, my habit is to constantly catch myself when I’m talking. We are trained to imagine every fresh criticism of our work. There is always a snide fella ready, willing and able to come at you with a ‘Well, actually, you should read …’ or ‘More of a comment than a question but …’. In defence, you build up a shell. In any workplace, women have learned how to manage the doubting questions that are standard for us and have built ourselves an exoskeleton to cope with being constantly under fire. Perhaps you smooth over, perhaps you fight back. It is hard not to apply these skills to your own life and to have a constant awareness of how you might be perceived and have a prickly response ready for criticisms. There can also be a sense that talking about your life, even in a measured way, is taboo and you can only seek help once you’ve reached a crisis point. Also, as a fully-fledged Irish person, I have been raised to permanently feel the spectre of those who have it worse than me as a visible, chiding presence.

I find myself trying not to second-guess my own ideas, despite having written two books and numerous articles and chapters about the cultural depictions of relationships and intimacy. I find myself apologising for my own life even though I no longer feel ashamed of the path that it has taken. There is a fear of admitting the vulnerabilities of the childless life and that it has ups and downs – of proving the columnists right. There is an associated concern of seeming like a grotesque overgrown child in a roomful of adults with ‘real’ problems. I worry that I will say the wrong thing. That I will not be sufficiently interested in a child’s minor roller-skating accident. That I will say the wrong thing to a friend’s daughter in her Disney party dress, unsure if I’m allowed to describe her as a pretty princess or if that’s the only thing I must say. If I did not like a friend’s family holiday pictures on Facebook individually, have I not performed my assigned role as spectator in their life? Can I share that benign childfree meme on my stories without the world thinking I hate their kids? And what do they think I secretly think of them?

Childfree women are repeatedly told that they don’t know their own mind. While people can and do change their minds, the constant refrain of ‘You’ll change your mind’ is limiting for so many reasons, not least because you might or you might not. It is not ‘You can change your mind and I’ll love you whatever you decide’, which is accepting and expansive. It is ‘You will change’. You must change. It is easier for us all if you change. It leaves no space for the unknowing, for the barely perceptible.

We will explore the places that tell us that our lives are somehow wrong, misguided or just plain inconvenient. We get it from all sides – from right-wing commentators treating us as malevolent witches hell-bent on destroying civilisation to both the overt hostility and the poorly concealed disappointment of friends and family. Social media is a key battleground for our relationships with others in the 21st century. We are social, we want to communicate with others, but we have traded that off for the ire of strangers and their often-dysregulated emotions. You might have decided not to have children for political or social reasons, or you might have come to the realisation more quietly than that and found yourself being an unwelcome object of political speculation. Suddenly, you are not Jean, or Siobhan, or Aisha. You are a Childless Woman. A Bogeywoman.

I’ve decided not to quote any of the various commentators who make proclamations about childfree women that range from the offhand to the stunningly cruel – I don’t feel the need to use this as some kind of evidence that there is marked hostility to our life choices and I don’t want to keep this bile alive in the pages of a book that is more interested in what’s possible in different areas of our experiences. I’m sure you know yourself the kind of thing I mean, often coming from the spittle-flecked lips of apoplectic bad actors. The sharp bite of someone else’s insecurities manifested in clickbait hatred is something I’d like to refuse for myself, and for you. I am much more interested in the moments when we are heard.

I want to explore how it feels to remain stubbornly childfree when lots of people in your life wish you weren’t. A woman that I interviewed noted that ‘culturally it feels that to suggest you just didn’t want them is an affront to the parents around you’. In Motherhood by Sheila Heti, a book I’ll come back to, the protagonist notes that:

Living one way is not a criticism of every other way of living. Is that the threat of the woman without kids? Yet the woman without kids is not saying that no woman should have kids, or that you—woman with a stroller—have made the wrong choice. Her decision about her life is no statement about yours. One person’s life is not a political or general statement about how all lives should be. Other lives should be able to exist alongside our own without any threat or judgment at all.2

Many of us are not listening to each other as we are all wound tight as a drum around these issues. There is a defence built up. I want to help us listen to each other a bit better so we can understand what makes some comments particularly hurtful. For all concerned, it is a matter of the perceived validity of their whole life. Please forgive yourself for what you did when you were defensive, or angry. No one gives us manuals on how to deal with rude questions about our lives and reproductive organs. Having said that though, I would strongly advise against getting into fights with parents on social media who are often exhausted, exploited and/or covered in someone else’s breakfast. One of the challenges but also possibilities of being childfree is finding the right people for your rants large and small.

In 2022, psychology professors Zachary Neal and Jennifer Watling Neale of Michigan State University reported on their findings:

We found that 21.6% of adults, or about 1.7 million people, in Michigan do not want children and therefore are ‘childfree’. […] People – especially women – who say they don’t want children are often told they’ll change their mind, but the study found otherwise […] People are making the decision to be childfree early in life, most often in their teens and twenties. And, it’s not just young people claiming they don’t want children. Women who decided in their teens to be childfree are now, on average, nearly 40 and still do not have children.3

This is a useful counter to the narrative that you’ll change your mind. If you don’t have a lot of older childfree women in your life, I hope a lot of their wise words in our interviews and life stories will be a relief. Similar rates of childlessness have been reported in an ONS study in 2022 of England and Wales: ‘Among women who turned 45 last year almost one in five – 18 percent – were without children, a big rise compared with the 13 percent of their mothers’ generation who did not become a parent.’4 This figure, of around a fifth, is also consistent in several European countries, Canada and Australia. So, what is clear is that more women are not having children, for a complex range of factors, and many women who profess a desire to live a childless life in their younger years maintain that intention throughout their lives.

The Observer reported Professor Paul Doran’s research that ‘unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness’.5 Dolan said that the existing narrative that marriage and children were signs of success meant that the stigma could lead some single women to feel unhappy: ‘You see a single woman of 40, who has never had children – “Bless, that’s a shame, isn’t it? Maybe one day you’ll meet the right guy and that’ll change.” No, maybe she’ll meet the wrong guy and that’ll change. Maybe she’ll meet a guy who makes her less happy and healthy, and die sooner.’

If you can live contentedly without children, then you are a threat to the established orders which demand one kind of life from women but also to the myths and fantasies around which we build motherhood. It asks the question of who gets to claim happiness, and whether they are believed. This is about us, and about more than us – it is about the choices that women can make and how we view women’s time, health and happiness. In opting out, we expose the ties that bind – both how they can be loosened and how, with some dexterity, they can be retied in so many different ways.

While researching, I developed a folder full of articles with ‘Why’ in the headline – ‘Why Generation X women aren’t having kids’ (The Times)6, ‘Why more women are deciding not to have kids’ (CNN)7, ‘Why women choose not to have kids’ (The Atlantic)8. To me, these articles deal with the least interesting part of the equation – the Why. I understand the desire to make sense of large-scale social shifts and to plan for shifting demographics. However, in the questions that I put to interviewees, I never asked Why. It seemed intrusive, and besides the point of the question of What next, which I am much more interested in. I wanted women to know that, whatever their Why, what came after was more interesting to me. But still, many volunteered a Why unprompted – familiar expressions of relishing freedom or not feeling the maternal urge. I think our desire to explain ourselves is complex and motivated by different reasons in different social settings – each of us brings something else with us that is interwoven with our family histories, our culture, our experience of being in this world. Personally, I slightly resent the implication that we must always explain our lives for the comfort of others. To take a generous view, we might be asked to explain our ‘choices’ so that someone who lives a different kind of life to us can understand better the path we’ve made, but too often we are met with bad faith. Very rarely do we think of ourselves in terms of demographics or the broad sweep of historical change – we just do the best we can to build our lives with the tools available to us.

There are not that many articles on why men are eschewing parenthood, except to articulate two narratives – that women are too picky and should just settle for a man ready to procreate or that modern men are feckless playboys, trapped in an endless adolescence. This book focuses on women and non-binary people, and I’ve noticed in childfree communities that women predominate. That women thought of this as a part of their identity that they wanted to explore – or perhaps men feel like the decision can be indefinitely deferred, inspired by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro welcoming babies at 83 and 79 respectively. I’d love to hear more stories from happily childfree men. There are even fewer ‘Why’ stories about queer, non-binary and trans people in the media.

There are regular articles proclaiming that the fall in European birthrates is due to our perceived selfishness – there are a variety of social and environmental reasons as to why people don’t want children. Many of these articles have a worryingly xenophobic aspect to them – of course, there is no population shortage worldwide, they mean, just among people who look like us. The decline in population has, of course, demographic consequences that shape the way we will live our lives in the future with people living longer and many opting not to have children. However, if population growth is something to be encouraged, the solution is not your unwilling body. It should be making it easier for people to have the kids they want, in dignity, with policies that promote parental health and childcare. This is a kind of speculation that I invite you to untether from – the solution to European society’s perceived population problems are not to be found in people who categorically do not wish to have children but in better supporting those who do but are prevented by lack of state support and childcare provision. Unwilling mothers are no foundation upon which to build a society. This is why building solidarity with and advocating for the practical support parents need is vitally important.

The endless round of ‘Why’ in the media can get to you – not the facts of population decline but rather the spurious explanations in the media around why those selfish women, some of whom presumably can have them, don’t want to. Women not wanting the things that are assigned to them has been an animating force for persecution for centuries. We can see this in the comments of Pope Francis: ‘It might be better—more comfortable—to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog. Is this true or is this not? Have you seen it? Then, in the end this marriage comes to old age in solitude, with the bitterness of loneliness.’9 Great, let’s add Catholic guilt into the melting pot. Nice to have that reawakened. I’m sure we all appreciate being lectured on procreation by someone who has taken a vow of celibacy. It’s not just your Auntie Mabel and Jonas in the office who is melting your head about changing your mind and being selfish, it’s also the Pope.

Against this pressure, women all over the world are not having children. Against the chiding press, against religious leaders, against their families. Women all over the world assert their right, within the laws they are bound by, to have or not have a family. Believing in your own future means valuing yourself now. It is a hopeful and utopian act in a world which values the next generation as hope deferred. Thinking about harpy futures beyond ourselves – for the next generation of women who refuse, who indefinitely postpone, who smile shyly at the questions. For us to just be tells other people they can just be, too. We can all just be.

People will tell you that you don’t know your own mind as if, as a woman, you haven’t thought about these things a lot. There are two kinds of intentionally childless women – the ones who have always known and the ones who have come to the realisation slowly over time. Rarely is it a ‘decision’. It’s not like deciding if a short haircut will suit you or if you should paint the bathroom teal.

For me, it wasn’t a decision at all. It’s a conviction deep in my bones. We can no more row back on that feeling that someone who wants to have children can row back on their deeply held desire for family life. Many of us just know and when we do – believe us. Realising how you feel can come from different places – you can be shy like me, or you can go around declaring your intentions to remain unfertilised to anyone who will listen. If the former, people will prod and push around your comfort zone to get you to ‘reconsider’. If the latter, people will use coercive, hurtful language to make you feel bad, cruel or immature. There is a liberation in realising that, with some people, you can’t win.

But, most of us are quite tuned into both what we think and what we feel in our minds and bodies. I never have felt and do not expect to feel the desire to be a mother. This is my life. Where do we go from here?

The most serious way that the childfree taboo affects us, in addition to the social and economic issues that we will discuss, is in our bodies. I come from a country, Ireland, where the cruelties inflicted on the female body are a grotesque litany – from the horrors of pregnant women being institutionalised to the scandal around the results of cervical cancer screening. Around the world, women bear the most horrific procedures and pains with an often-needless stoicism and are prevented from getting the care they need. One imagines, for example, that if men got IUDs fitted then pain relief would come as standard. One Sunday evening, I am having four separate conversations on my messaging apps with friends on how contraceptive options for women can be so utterly crap. Women talk, they share details of their bodies in frank confidences – we know the extra burden our friends bear who have given birth and we know the everyday inconveniences of birth control and family planning.

One of the places that allows for a particular kind of intimate chat is the beauty salon. I am getting my nails done by a therapist I adore – she is funny, warm and meticulous. She appears to relish making people happy with wild designs to match their personality or tailoring the perfect facial and massage for parched skin and hunched shoulders. Here in her salon all we do is tell each other stories and I marvel at the secrets she is keeping. People tell her everything, and over the years of coming here, I am glad she’s let me into her confidences. She tells me that she’s been refused an urgent, potentially life-saving medical treatment that she needs because her doctor won’t accept that she doesn’t want children. This is serious life or death shit that she is having to postpone because of children she never imagined having. And she’s not alone. Zoë Noble, founder of We are Childfree, told The New York Times10 about the procedure she was denied because her firmly held intentions were not believed:

The hysterectomy Ms. Noble needed to remove a fibroid was not up for discussion so far as her doctor was concerned, despite the fact that she didn’t want children. It took years of pain and an emergency room visit before she was finally granted the surgery at 37. The practice of a physician denying a patient surgery on the assumption that a woman will change her mind about wanting children is common.

In the same article, British childcare professional Lise Scott noted that:

I was recently diagnosed with endometriosis and the fibroid was huge. Doctors questioned my decision to have a hysterectomy straight away. I said: ‘I’ve known for over 10 years that I don’t want kids. I work with them, when I want to see babies I do.’ They said, ‘Think about it for a month.’ I thought, ‘I’ve got this thing growing in me and I want it out.’ Luckily, my gynecologist understood and she helped me to get the surgery.

An interviewee told me: ‘I tried getting my tubes tied at 25 and was denied on the basis that I “might change my mind” (even though I was working in a doctors’ surgery at the time so knew exactly what I was asking for)’. The expectation that all women under 40 are, essentially, pre-gestational is so harmful to our ability to advocate for our own health. The assumption that this is the path our lives and bodies will automatically follow, often to the determent of our health.

As a white, middle-class, non-disabled woman, I am listened to more than most, but I’ve often had to fight or pay for treatments I’ve needed but have been refused. I appreciate it can be difficult for medical professionals – women can and do change their minds about motherhood – but when it’s a matter of life and death, or quality of life, they should listen and act. I wish the medical establishment valued women’s quality of life over their potential to have children and stopped infantilising women who make decisions about their futures.