Standing in a circle of women waiting for an exercise class to start the other day, I found myself laughing and commiserating with them about the bugs their children kept catching at nursery, wondering when I was going to be caught out. I knew the question was coming, “Do you have children?”, followed by the usual uncomfortable silence when I said: “No.”
I have always dreamed of being a mother. I am in my late 30s – past the scary age of 35 when a woman’s fertility is meant to fall off a cliff. I’m also single. Every day I struggle to suppress the bubbling panic that I might never have children.
It has been mentally exhausting and often lonely, hovering between potential motherhood and ending up permanently childless. The experience has been made all the more fraught by what feels like a growing chasm between childless women and mothers. In recent years, it feels like both camps have developed a chronic lack of empathy for the other.
“One of the big issues of childlessness is that it can decimate your friendship group. When your friends and your family all move on to motherhood and leave you behind, it can be exquisitely painful,” Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women – a support group for women who are childless not by choice – told the Worst Girl Gang Ever podcast. This echoes my own experience. Some friends with children have seemed unable to grasp the level of pain and fear I feel, dismissing what I’m saying by telling me I have “plenty of time”, while in the same breath talking about friends going through IVF and how they “left it too late”, or patronising me about how footloose and fancy-free they think my single life must be.
In Elizabeth Day’s new book Friendaholic, she describes similar experiences with friends who just didn’t get it as she went through IVF, and recurrent miscarriages. “I wouldn’t post about my glorious babies on social media in much the same way as I wouldn’t post about my expansive mansion or my fleet of Bentleys … because it’s thoughtless to those who don’t have these things,” she wrote. Her comments triggered an outpouring of upset from mothers below an excerpt published in the Times.
I’ve noticed other examples of this seemingly uncrossable divide between mothers and childless women. On Instagram, an argument exploded over adding trigger warnings to Mother’s Day posts. Some commenters thought those who couldn’t have kids should just get over it and “stop bleating on”. One commenter even compared the experience of childlessness with not being able to afford a holiday in the Maldives. The lack of empathy and smugness towards women experiencing childlessness was astounding to me.
Social media has of course played a role in entrenching these divisions. One in five women are childless at midlife, with about 90% of those in that position not by choice. Yet our timelines consistently favour examples of straight, cis (and often white) people hitting the “correct” milestones. Just look at the number of likes and comments on any post announcing an engagement, first home, marriage, pregnancy or baby’s birth. Society has always celebrated heteronormative achievement, but social media has borderline fetishised it. Motherhood is still seen as the ultimate success – and lots of childless women feel this acutely, myself included.
At the same time, mothers often don’t feel this way. My mum friends talk about the mental load of everything they have to do. Others whisper that they have completely lost themselves in motherhood; or speak of gruelling postnatal depression, or permanent physical damage after labour. They are still the ones to bear the brunt of child-rearing. Childcare has only just made it on to the political agenda. Discrimination against mothers still happens with disturbing regularity in the workplace. Perhaps because of all of this, when women such as Day speak up, some mothers feel personally attacked.
Writing about my own experience, I’ve realised there is a well of pain surrounding the question of motherhood; among childless women who want to become mothers; childfree women who face stigma; and even mothers, too, who feel chronically misunderstood. The real culprit in all of this is, of course, the patriarchy. There is nothing the patriarchy loves more than women tearing each other down. We all experience the sheer exhaustion of being constantly judged and shamed and we all have to face the consequences of the choices we make as women – we need to be able to talk about it honestly. In the words of Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of the acclaimed (M)otherhood: “We need to normalise these conversations, outside our comfort zones. If we do not sit with our discomfort, we cannot change things.”
Nicola Slawson is a news, culture and social affairs journalist. She was a recipient of the Scott Trust bursary
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
