The road less travelled

Some women in Australia will never end up having children, and for many, like writer Stephanie Wood, it is purely circumstantial.

We tend tiny, empty graves hidden in our hearts. We endure the daily tortures – the careless questions and judgement, the thoughtless commentary, the barrage of propaganda. In our fundamentally conservative country, even in the third decade of the 21st century, to be a woman without children who wanted children is to be in an invidious position.

We all have different stories – infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, circumstance – but are united by our raw understanding of how it is to live in a society that glorifies the fairytale virtues of motherhood, a society in which governments prioritise ‘working families’ in both rhetoric and policy, and politicians urge the nation’s women to breed (and, if they don’t, label them as ‘deliberately barren’).

For a long time, I kept my story of childlessness to myself. I was ashamed. I had failed to achieve something I’d long thought was fundamental both to my vision of myself and to being an acceptable, authentic woman. My fairytale vision had put me at the glowing centre of a circle of love and warmth, the sun to a planetary bounty, a delicious man and multiple adoring children.

Through my 20s and 30s I worked long hours, stayed out late, lived overseas and wasted time with men of meagre character, but assumed I’d find my happy ending. I didn’t. I didn’t meet a suitable or willing prince. I didn’t have the practical, financial or emotional reserves to have a child on my own. In my 40s, I discovered there was a label for me: university researchers describe me as ‘circumstantially childless’.

I mourned silently and came to understand that my situation was of a tentacled nature: I must suffer grief, but also the sniff of disapproval. I would not escape society’s relentless motherhood narrative constantly reminding me of my deficiencies. The apparent rites of a woman’s life – positive pregnancy test, ultrasound photograph, first flutter, baby shower, birth, breastfeeding, first steps, first day at school – would not be mine. And to add to the sting, I was excluded from the club that most of my contemporaries had joined, sidelined both socially and spiritually.

In 2016 I laid my pain and shame out for all to see – I wrote an article for a national weekend magazine about my life without the child/children I had hoped for. I wondered at my sanity, sharing such a personal story, revealing my vulnerabilities. But as I have learnt, when you tell a personal story, you discover you are not alone; for every difficult personal story, countless people share it.

A torrent of grief and rage and regret poured into my inbox, a keening lament for children who had never been. One woman emailed to say she had been “actively suicidal for feeling like such a loser in my own mind”.

Many women told me about the presumptuous, insensitive questions they had fielded. One wrote of an occasion when a younger woman had asked whether she regretted “her decision”. She felt physically ill. “She didn’t know me, she didn’t know that I still cry at 46 when I think about how I want to be a mother.”

And through all the swampy feelings, women confirmed my own experience: their grief was exacerbated by external pressure. One woman said she was sad to “live in a world where as a female we are reduced to our marriage and parental status”. Another who had lost her only child 30 years earlier, a six-day-old son, and not been able to conceive again, wrote that dealing with her grief had been a lifetime journey. “Society’s insensitivity along the way has made the journey more challenging.”

One woman summed it up: “It seems to me the pain/loss comes from biological urges unsatisfied but equally from social ostracism.”

A handful of childless men wrote to me. “Becoming a dad was part of my imagined adult identity for a long time,” one said. “Adults/society at large certainly helped to seed and nurture that expectation.” But now this man is an adult in a gay relationship and for him, child rearing is unlikely. “Occasionally I feel a wistful envy toward older gay men with children or grandchildren.” Another man told me that his wife had been pregnant once but had miscarried and had not conceived again. They are now in their 50s. “Being childless devastates us both still.”

But it is undoubtedly women who experience the greatest intensity of grief and in numbers that can’t be ignored. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, in 2016, 20 per cent of women in their 40s with a degree or higher qualification had no children. (Of women without a post-school qualification, 15 per cent didn’t have children.) Some of those women will have chosen not to pursue motherhood and their paths will be more straightforward. But for the sake of the mental health of the rest, the women who want or wanted children but will not have them, we need to interrogate the messages that will bombard them. And we need to ask questions: have we been conned? Is the hallowed version of motherhood a construct?

There is no shortage of academic literature available to support this position, especially from feminist scholars. Many dispute the idea that motherhood is intrinsic to the purpose of a woman and talk of the motherhood myth. They argue that, through the ages, entire communities brought up children and the mother was not the central figure. The hallowed ideal of motherhood as we understand

it today, along with the nuclear family and the very concept of a childhood and its attendant rituals, did not emerge until the 19th century in Britain. It was a by-product of industrialisation and became a lynchpin of Empire and colonialism.

My friend Dr Alecia Simmonds, a Sydney-based writer and legal historian, outlines perspectives on motherhood that every woman who wanted children but didn’t get them should hear. “With industrialisation, many families that used to work together in the home separated. So men went out to work, leaving the women at home, and that became a sign of middle-class status. By the Victorian era, there was only one socially acceptable vocation for a woman and that was marriage and motherhood. So how do you convince women that what is an incredibly constraining role is actually good? You tell them there is a sanctified moral purpose to it, that you’re raising the Empire’s children. You throw them a lot of ideological bones.”

Flash forward and the bones are still being thrown. The economic and political imperative of constant growth demands they are. One for mum, one for dad, one for the country, the Australian Treasurer Peter Costello declared in 2002 when he introduced the baby bonus. Current Treasurer Josh Frydenberg added to the refrain in 2020: “The more children that we have across the country, together with our migration, we will build our population growth and that will be good for the economy.” We should not underestimate the power of such state-sanctioned messages to reinforce the myth of motherhood, both in the community generally and in the minds of childless women struggling with their situation.

But what is good for the economy might not be good for women. Motherhood-related grief is not confined to the childless. “So many women from the 19th century onwards felt absolutely constrained by motherhood. And more recently, more women are saying, ‘Actually, I regret having kids’,” says Dr Simmonds. Typically, the unequal division of labour in childrearing is responsible for deep unhappiness. “There just ends up being these economies of debt and resentment that develop.”

I have a conversation with ‘Lana’, who emailed me after my 2016 article to tell me of the despair that dogged her for decades because she had not had children. But she says that, over time, she came to see that the grass is rarely greener. She could see how exhausted her friends with children were and that often cracks appeared. “I didn’t always see the show reel of parenthood. I saw the cutting room floor, too. I saw the unglamorous side of parenthood where it’s just hard graft.” Sometimes she thinks she dodged a bullet. “I was in a group of women the other day and one said, ‘You’re only as happy as your saddest child’.”

My own perspectives have evolved since I first wrote about the grief I have felt as a childless woman. If I could return to a younger, more fertile model of myself carrying the wisdom of my age, I would be more ambivalent about breeding. I can see now what I have gained by not having children – experience, time, travel, work, courage.

Knowing myself now, I can see that at least some of what I have done and achieved would not have been possible if I had been a mother. I could never have done it all. But it’s more than that.

I think now that perhaps I might not even have tried to do more, that motherhood would have limited my vision, closed me down rather than forced me to search for possibilities to expand in the world.

I have come to see, too, that I may have misunderstood certain things: for a start, the contours of my longing. What I thought I wanted might not have been what I wanted at all; that circle of love and warmth I envisioned might not have been about a baby at all, but rather about finding for my outlier self love and acceptance in the world.

And I may have misunderstood the nature of my grief: now I can see that it has had as much to do with my sense of exclusion, the sense that I have fallen outside society because I do not have a child, as the actual lack of a child. The grief has been about my place in a world where conversations are so often child-focused, or contemporaries are missing in action (tied up with one of any number of child- or school-related activities), or their social lives shift towards others with children, meaning that opportunities for the childless to form new networks shrivel.

My friend Dr Simmonds directs me to the work of the American writer Rebecca Solnit, who is not a mother, and her thrilling essay, The Mother of All Questions. “I have done what I set out to do in my life … I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures. Men – romance, flings, and long-term relationships – have been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas, mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives, records and lives,” Solnit says. “Society’s recipes for fulfilment cause a great deal of unhappiness.”

Dr Simmonds takes a similar position. “If you don’t start with motherhood as a norm or you reject that as ideology, then you just live the life that you want to. And the life that I want to live is one that is deeply embroiled in community, in various forms of affection and love … for travel, for books, for writing, for music. It’s such a rich life, and for me at least I feel like it would be impoverished by having children.”

Often, there is an assumption that a woman (or man) without children must find their solace in the adoration and nurturing of nieces or nephews or the children of friends, but that is a simplistic approach and ignores other possibilities for nurturing and fulfilment.

As Solnit observes in her essay, love comes in many forms beyond a mother’s love for her child. “People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfil your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many other things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”

On a recent autumn day, I went to the March for Justice. Afterwards, I walked home with my dog through Sydney’s Hyde Park. There were two mothers walking ahead of me. One had her baby in a sling and the baby’s precious little feet dangled around her waist. The other woman was pushing a pram. I considered my emotions in that moment of observation. I saw precious little feet that would have been wonderful to hold and stroke. And I saw a woman pushing a pram and leaning into the uphill effort with all her might. There are no perfect pathways.

I CAME TO UNDERSTAND THAT MY SITUATION WAS OF A TENTACLED NATURE: I MUST SUFFER GRIEF, BUT ALSO THE SNIFF OF DISAPPROVAL