Childless at 30. You’ll need to hurry up.
Still no children at 40? It ‘gets harder’, you know.
Living your fifties with no family – do you regret not having had children?
Ye gods, 60 years old? Don’t you worry you’ll have no one to look after you in your old age? And, the biggie, now I’m 65 and asked with a *sad face* – did you never want them?
Every decade of my life has brought a variety of questions relating to my not having had children, and I can tell you, as I await my State Pension in November, it’s an emphatic No.
No to all of it.
There is no daydreaming about what my non-existent babies might have done. No idle musings about what my grandkids might have looked like. No worrying about their health and safety in an increasingly dangerous, depressing and precarious world. Nope. No regrets.
The pressure to have kids never came from my close friends, or even family. My mother never once asked about grandchildren, though I know she would have liked them, and I feel a little sad that my mum and dad’s direct line dies out with my brother and me, as he has no children either.
The pressure, when I was younger, came from advertising, in which a life of domesticity and children was an assumption and almost an inevitability.
Oh, what a lifetime of bliss I could live if only I served Oxo gravy to my loving family. Women who never married were labelled ‘spinsters’, which to this day carries the stigma of weirdness. Auntie Jane, Auntie Mimi, in my village – spinsters were always called ‘Auntie’ something, but we all knew it was a euphemism for lesbian.
But still I never entertained the idea of having a family of my own because I was so focused on being a writer. Growing up in the small town of Bridgend in Wales, though, it was hard to convince people I wanted to follow a different path.
The careers teacher at my secondary school in 1974 saw only one outcome for 16-year-old girls choosing their future: teaching. Because: “You can be there to look after the children at the end of the day”, “You can look after the children during the school holidays”, and “You can go back to the job when your children are a bit older.”
“But I want to be a journalist,” I insisted.
“That’s not a good job for a woman,” came the reply.
This was the same career teacher who encouraged me to learn Welsh rather than French, as “by the time you leave university, Welsh will be a worldwide accepted language.” He really should have chosen a different career.
Still, I followed his advice. I did an English degree, followed by a teaching qualification (PGCE) and taught English at secondary school level. I loved the kids but hated the educational bureaucracy.
I left after two years, did an MA in Creative Writing and set off for London with no job, no money and no friends, to pursue my dream.
It was a hellish four years on the dole, trying to get myself noticed. Gatecrashing events and filling my bag with chicken drumsticks from the buffet because I couldn’t afford to eat. Sending out article after article to editors and getting nowhere.
My big break came in 1984 when I won an award for young female journalists and managed to attract freelance work before my really big break in 1988 when I became TV critic of the London Evening Standard.
I was living my professional dream, but still the warnings carried on.
I was approaching 30 when a fellow journalist told me how much she regretted not having had children. “You’ll really regret it at 40,” she said. I started to think about it. Was she right? Was work just something I was doing before the maternal instinct kicked in? Would I have to give up what I loved for motherhood?
I became involved with a man who was living with someone, and we discussed the possibility of children. When his girlfriend found out about the affair, she asked him to stay for three months to see if they could salvage their relationship. He told me he “wanted to give her time to lose enough weight so she’ll be attractive enough to meet someone else.” My only thought was “Thank God I didn’t have kids with him.”
When I was approaching 40, I felt in the last-chance child saloon. I entered into a relationship with another totally unsuitable man, albeit a single one but one who was milking me for money. It ended when he went off with a nurse from Boston (he’d especially wanted a Green Card) – and had a child with her. I didn’t just dodge a bullet with him; I dodged an AR 15 rifle.
They were the only two times I pondered the possibility of motherhood.
I never once thought about nor had the desire to be a single mother.
Maybe, deep down, it just wasn’t something I wanted. I remember sitting in London’s private members’ club, the Groucho, tearfully bemoaning my lack of a partner and children to the comedian Rowland Rivron. “If you’d wanted it, you would have done it,” he said. I think he was right.
When I look back, the signs were pretty obvious. I never played with dolls. The decapitation of Tressy is not my finest moment, but she was one of many dolls I tortured.
I never took to Big Jane, an enormous doll with tarantula eyelashes that my parents bought for a small fortune. I loathed her, and the only time she came out of her cupboard was when the church needed her to play baby Jesus in the nativity plays.
But not having children when my friends started to become mothers was difficult. Having suffered from depression nearly all my life, loneliness was added to the mix when most of my friends started procreating. I imagined their happy, perfect lives, sometimes questioning my own decisions. When I moved to Paris in 2001 at 43, I was sitting by the Seine, reading a book, on a Sunday afternoon (Sundays have always felt the most lonely to me). I phoned my friend Victoria, who was in the middle of a lunch party with friends.
I imagined a sunny day, ham piled high on a laundered tablecloth in the garden, children dressed in gingham, running joyfully around, everyone smiling and having fun.
Then, I heard, in the background, a child screaming and a man shouting: “Look, if you don’t shut up, we’re going home now!”
“Right now, I would give anything to be by myself, reading a book by the Seine,” said Victoria.
That was a turning point for me and, in subsequent years, friends shared with me the enormous pressures and difficulties they faced in their seemingly outwardly perfect (to my deluded rose-tinted glasses) lives. Many divorced. Some fell out with their kids. Families or not, we are all broken biscuits.
And I am close to my friends’ kids, who think I am the coolest person on the planet. I often go out with them and their parents, and I love learning about their lives and experiences as they, too, make their way in the world. Untarnished by life as yet, their excitement and energy is something that inspires me.
Inevitably, I worry about the end of my life – health, financial instability – but I have a large network of friends, and I have been overwhelmed by how supportive complete strangers have been, too. I’m still convinced my bestseller is just around the corner and will keep me in my old age. And I’ve told my friends’ kids I’m relying on them, too, though I have yet to disclose I’m leaving them my credit card debt in my will.
And, let’s be honest, even people with kids can’t guarantee their offspring will be there for them in old age. There are no sureties in life.
For now, though, I have my health and am able to travel, and if I die tomorrow, I have had a better life than most people in the world. A truly blessed life, full of love and laughter. And I’ve even conquered my fantasies about everyone’s perfect family Christmas as I sit down to watch EastEnders with my chicken leg – because I know that on Boxing Day I’ll be hearing about what a miserable time everyone had.
I miss my parents, both deceased, but have come to value what I have, as opposed to what might have been. I may have taken the road ‘less travelled by’, but that, as the poet Robert Frost wrote, ‘has made all the difference.’
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