Womb with a view
Throughout her life, Marie Claire Chappet has had a band of childfree women who have shaped her more than she realised…
When I was growing up, I was perennially surrounded by a group of second mothers. These women occupied my childhood, and most have been with me throughout my life – through every success, every failure, every milestone. All of them orbiting my life and bolstering me with love and support. All of them childless. When I was younger, for me it was as simple as: some women have babies, others don’t. I marvel now at how refreshing that was. None were singled out for their lack of offspring, no one tilted their heads at them in patronising concern that they hadn’t reproduced. In fact, the women in my life with children were far outnumbered by my childless ‘mothers’. Their childlessness was something that only occurred to me in later life.
There were my mother’s work colleagues – Christina, Helen, Marie, Mum’s cousin Fran, my godmother Sue and my other unofficial godmother Dee – my mother’s oldest friend. Now I am in my late twenties, many of my single friends have started talking about their fear of not having children. Although I find it horribly premature, it’s a widespread fear among the women I know. I wonder how many actually want to have children, and how many worry they are running out of time to do something they think they have to. Too often we measure a woman’s success by her marital status and her fertility. I don’t want any of my smart, brilliant friends assessed by this yardstick. I don’t want any of them to feel incomplete.
As far as I’m aware, none of my second mothers lived empty lives. They never expressed a loneliness, or a lack of anything to me. They laughed loud, loved fiercely and inspired me to know that, if my womb doesn’t produce the goods, my life will not be poorer for it. I know I would like to be a mother one day, but I have seen the power in a maternal influence not solely from your own parent.
My godmother Sue, 63, was one of the ringleaders of my maternal harem that – as an only child with a tiny family – was so needed and appreciated. Vivacious, warm and quick to laugh, it was health issues that prevented her and her husband from having children. I remember I was very young when she finally had a hysterectomy. We brought her flowers in hospital and I never quite grasped the magnitude of the operation. When I talked to her about it recently, she shrugged it off with her typical unflappable good-naturedness, saying she was happier to be healthy. She hasn’t missed out on anything, she reassures me. Before she retired recently she was a primary school teacher and she has countless nieces and nephews as well as, of course, her goddaughter. ‘I saw children every day,’ she told me, ‘I never felt the need for my own.’
I realise that this conversation is not only the first time I’ve asked Sue why she didn’t have children, but the first time I’d thought to ask her. It’s the same conversation with Fran, 72, my mother’s funny, dry-witted Irish cousin. She was with her beloved partner Andy from her teens until he died a few years ago, but they decided to not have children. I remember the strength and love of their lifelong relationship but never their lack of kids. To me,
her life seemed full of riches, there never seemed to be anything missing. Last Christmas Day, like every year since Andy died, she was at our house. It was never discussed, just assumed, that our Christmas was now hers always.
Because that’s what you get with childless mothers: an extended family, unsplintered by the lapses of contact that often occur when each of you start your own family. Instead, these women became part of mine in a real way. I saw the power of female friendship to endure, tethering people to each other with bonds perhaps far more significant than mere genetics. My mother, who cherishes these friendships passionately, says she was proud of the strong connections I went on to form with her friends.
The strongest of these was Dee, my mother’s greatest and oldest friend. Every summer we would spend a week at her house in the country. It was my favourite time. She taught me to ride horses and gave me my obsessive love of cats, shoes and country music. As I grew older she became more than just a second mother, but what she was to my own mum: a best friend. We shared a love of the same writers, a fierce feminism and a strong liberal perspective. We would text almost every day, right up until she died two years ago after a long battle with cancer.
The gap she left in my life is one that will never be filled and I wonder, had she had her own children, if we would have fostered such a special connection. Her advice to me lingers. To not be afraid, to never waste a second: words that she bestowed in her last few weeks, to me, her daughter in all but name.
Now I would be honoured to be any child’s second mother and, if I have children, I know without question that any childless female friends of mine will have a stake in raising them. If my child has a female champion half as strong as my childless mothers, they’re very lucky indeed.