not a lot, just forever
Motherhood and dread
I think about it all the time
That I might run out of time
But I finally met my baby
And a baby might be mine'Cause maybe one day I might
If I don't run out of time
Would it give my life a new purpose?
I think about it all the time
- I think about it all the time, Charli XCX
There are still eight months left, but I am already dreading my next birthday. I will be twenty-six, which is the same age my mother was when she gave birth to me: my mother, who is an infinitely better person than I am, kinder and more generous and whose reservoirs of love are bottomless. If I wait another five years, I will be around the same age my father was when I was born, which feels more feasible. But again, he is kind and unflappable, reliable, wonderful in a way I have not inherited. I am under no illusions that the greatest privilege of my life is having parents who always have gone, and still would go, to the ends of the earth for me, and not in a spoilt or overly permissive way either: they gave me my fair share of stern words because the love they cultivated for me gave them such power of foresight that they knew it would be for the best.
Since thinking I was going to die on a plane back in January, I’ve been ruminating a lot on life and death and risk. The risks of trying to bring a new life into the world are innumerable and obvious: miscarriage; dying in labour; having a child with a severe, painful, life-limiting disease; losing your child before you die. All mammalian creatures have dealt with this for millions of years, and reluctantly accept it as part of the rich tapestry of life. There is a painting by August Friedrich Schenck, called ‘Anguish,’ in the National Gallery of Victoria which always makes me cry when I see it. It depicts a mother ewe grieving over her lamb who lies lifelessly in front of her, a murder of crows surrounding the scene like a black funeral shroud, and — the most heartbreaking part — a cloud of hot mist coming from her mouth to show her crying out in pain. It’s not particularly highbrow, but it always makes me think of how every animal on earth has the capacity for love and bereavement and how we are all made of the same matter, in the same way that the video of the orangutan with the baby on her front, wandering into a house and washing her hands with soap like a human, also makes me cry. But I think the risks that lurk under the surface disturb me more. The selfish ones, the pathetic ones, the ones we feel should always be outweighed by the inherent reward of the child you receive at the end of it. The dirty ones that no one wants to talk about. What if I get a perineal tear that splices the muscles in my bottom half in two, if the baby leaches the calcium from my teeth and they crumble in my mouth, if I shit myself during childbirth? What if I go insane (not an unlikely prospect, considering I seem to have a life-altering breakdown at the slightest disturbance in my hormones)? What if I forget to feed the baby or I take my eye off it for a second and it dies as a result? What if I have to immediately jettison everything I like about myself for this blank canvas I’ve just spawned in order to become a mum above everything else, becoming robotic and resentful at this tiny blameless bundle when what I really should despise is the pressure to have one, just because I might regret it if I don’t? What if I fucking hate being a mother?
Charli XCX released her most recent album, BRAT, a few weeks ago now. It features ‘I think about it all the time,’ an anthem for what Nell Frizzell terms ‘the panic years’ - that is, the period between the ages of around 28 and 35, which she describes as ‘a web of social and biological restrictions that make you feel trapped and insane.’ At nearly 32, Charli is just as preoccupied with the idea of ‘running out of time.’ Ever a precocious developer, this seemed to hit me early at the age of twenty-three. As a teenager, already a veteran of the trenches of a puberty that had started at eight or nine, I was hit with a second, intense wave of hormones at fourteen which drove me to obsess over having a baby as soon as possible, despite being a massive virgin who had never so much as touched another human being in a romantic way and was repulsed being seen as such. I trawled baby naming sites and Mumsnet, wrote self-insert fan fiction with my favourite inappropriately old band members where the pregnancy plot point was always The Big One, and gained a weirdly accurate understanding of the mechanisms of childbirth from all the research and due diligence I undertook to make it realistic. None of my peers felt the same way. It was isolating, and I felt weird for it. Then it died down, and I went back to feeling mostly indifferent about the idea, even rebuking it after reading a Guardian article around my 18th birthday about mothers who regretted having children. The abject horror of losing herself to motherhood made that unyieldingly ambitious teenager feel physically sick with dread that this would inevitably one day be her life: consumed by something completely dependent on me, exhausted beyond belief, losing any sense of autonomy or personality outside of an event experienced by most women since the dawn of time. I found myself fixated on, and haunted by, this passage, to the extent that I still think about it even now:
“I’d never failed at anything before,” she says. “I’d travelled to 180 countries. I’d almost died of dehydration in a jungle in Madagascar. I’d been on a sailing boat in the Indian ocean that had been attacked by pirates. I’d almost died from food poisoning in Turkmenistan.” So she felt she could handle motherhood. “What happened over the next few years I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmares. I felt like I was in a plot in a crime book, where the woman is being suffocated by motherhood.”
Fischer says she found herself forced to have endless baby conversations with other mothers. She watched friends drop their previous interests and careers for “baking bread or setting up mummy blogs or making jam”. When Emma was four months old, she was offered a freelance job that involved a lot of foreign travel. The reaction from friends was discouraging. “Is any job really more important than being a mother? Don’t you have a husband?” people asked. “A mother suffers when she is away from her children, and it’s a crucial time for a child, developmentally. You ought to be there.” (“How, then, do fathers cope with missing these crucial stages?” Fischer grumbles. “Besides, I’m broke.”) “Well, it’s your own fault,” her husband told her. “It was your decision.”
In my disgust, and the second-hand guilt I felt for these children who would have to live the reality of having a parent who wished they didn’t exist, I shoved it to the back of my internal filing cabinet of things to worry about later, until the ’sweating, panicky compulsion’ Frizzell describes started to gradually creep in around my 23rd birthday. It has only worsened exponentially since the plane incident. I regularly find myself feverish and sleepless at night, swallowing the fact that my Belle Époque, my Long 19th Century of an adolescence really is all behind me, that this is adulthood and this is me for the rest of my life. The natural conclusion is that I should probably get a shift on if I want to have a baby, while not knowing if I do, and coming up against a whole host of limiting factors - money, precarity, my own preparedness - as the clock stops for no one.
Will the baby be alright?
Will I have one of mine?
Can I handle it even if I do?
You said that my mind
Is not fit or so they said
To carry a child
I guess I'll be fine
— Fingertips, Lana Del Rey
I like children. I care deeply about children and their welfare. I am brilliant with children. Specifically, I am brilliant with children between the ages of nine and seventeen, in a sort of summer camp counsellor, court jester way that means they see me as the funniest person on earth, but with the permanent caveat hanging over my head that I lack authority in such a way that I could not be trusted to run a piss up in a brewery. I cannot perform the patronising adult voice that teachers and mothers tend to put on, or be anything other than myself. This does not instil confidence, to put it lightly. The noise of children any younger than that, their inability to regulate their own emotions, their mess, and the expectation that I have to put on a show of wonder and patience in order not to break them makes me want to avoid them altogether. Of course, they can’t help it. I don’t begrudge them at all, as it is very much my problem and mine alone. It just exhausts me. Their maladaptive, semi-formed nature reminds me of myself. On the rare occasion that someone asks if I want to hold their baby - I don’t think my age or social circle, all childless and many single, allow it to be anything other than rare - my first instinct is not one of fondness but one of dread. Oh god please don’t trust me with your most precious creation I’m going to drop it I’m going to break it I’m going to fuck it up irreparably. I don’t get baby fever. There is no natural maternal instinct there. I don’t believe I possess any sort of inherent instinct in general, be it maternal, survival, common sense. I often think I don’t know how to be a person.
However, I know I’ve met the person I want to be with, and we do talk about children. I don’t know if he knows the extent to which I think about it all the time. As I write this, I’m sitting in the park, and a father walks past me with a chubby-cheeked baby peering over his shoulder, wearing a jewel-green beanie. I smile at the baby. Her head perks up and she inspects me carefully. Her dad sits down and lifts her into the air, hands underneath her armpits. I realise again that if it were me, I wouldn’t know how. When people hand me their babies or their small animals like that, I have this enduring obsessive worry that I am going to grip too hard and crush their ribcage and they’ll crumple in on themselves like an empty can of Coke. I wouldn’t know how to carry the baby, I wouldn’t know what to do with the baby, I wouldn’t know how to talk to the baby. Sam tells me we can’t do baby speak because his parents always spoke to him in full sentences and it made him a smart kid. I go one further and say I want to bring the baby up bilingual because language is a gift and you have to start them young. He says that in that case, he’s launching Project Mbappé until they’re four and then if they show no sporting promise they can be an organic chemist like Dad. We’re half-joking, of course. But I always feel a twinge of guilt, because I don’t think this is the right way to be thinking about it.
I don’t know if the simple fact of wanting a child, feeling a selfish urge to create something from nothing, to play Echo and Narcissus and fall in love with yourself as it is reflected back at you, or to indulge a fantasy of nurturing and protecting something because it makes you feel fulfilled, is enough for me. I have a perhaps equally selfish but superseding urge to take something that needs care and to help fix it. I am drawn to the unruly children, the quiet children, the beaten dogs, the birds with mangled left claws and a limp, the matted stuffed toys with sad eyes. Forgive my saviour complex, but intervening on an existing someone or something in need has more appeal than creating something new of my own that I can so easily ruin, as I am unreliable and fickle and easily dissatisfied. I have so much love to give: I just don’t know if I am a good enough person to make something with it.
Either way, it seems as if there can never be any reasoning for having a baby — be it mine, or Charli’s, or anyone else’s — that prioritises the needs of the baby itself, or makes a convincing argument that doesn’t simply appeal to religion as to why it is better off being born than remaining an unfertilised sperm and egg. Is there ever a way to have a child purely out of altruism? Is it so wrong to be selfish in this instance?
Coventry icon Philip Larkin’s infamous poem, ‘This Be the Verse’ (They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do, etc etc) gets to the root of this selfishness in a similar but far more concise way than a lot of people in militant child-free communities on the internet. ‘Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.’ Clearly, plenty of bad people, people worse than me, people who act in harmful ways through no fault of their own, have had children, and it would have weird and borderline eugenicist implications to encourage that they don’t. This is my decision, though, and I struggle to convince myself that a baby would be better off stuck with me or forced to live an existence it might not enjoy very much than it would be if it had never existed. I’m not usually knocked off-kilter by the question of whether I am a morally upstanding person, and I think navel-gazing on the prospect of being uniquely terrible gets in the way of you actually doing good. The one thing that sets this spiral in motion, where I become so caught up in my own rumination and immobilised by the weight of the many variables involved, like Chidi in The Good Place, is when I think about childrearing. And I think about it a lot. I never finished the series, so I tend to forget that Chidi still ended up in The Bad Place because of — not despite — his wavering.
I suppose self-preservation and the ostensibly in-built urge to continue the human species isn’t inherently selfish. I find it ironic, though, in a horrifying kind of way, that the people who seem most concerned about birth rates and women’s fertility and ‘child grooming’ are the very people I dread to imagine actually reproducing. Having a child solely in service of a political or religious goal, instilling in them that you predominantly, or only, love them because they’re a pawn in your ideological mission, or that there is a laundry list of conditions and stipulations to your love for them, fills me with disgust in a way that I struggle to articulate. I have seen the effects of this first-hand on some of the teenagers I taught. It is devastating. In this way, I feel like a lot of intentionally child free people - at least, the ones who aren’t militant or insane about it - often spare more of a thought for children’s rights than those who make making more of them for the sake of the white race humanity the core of their political agenda.
I can’t help thinking about making Sam happy, though. About making my parents and his parents happy. How wonderful that I can do that - that we can create something that brings so much joy to so many people. Is that enough? Is it enough reason, when I don’t know what I want or what makes me happy, to fall back on wanting others to be? Without getting too Girardian, am I simply turning to them to know what I desire? On the other side of the coin, when I see girls I went to school with post their Instagram pregnancy announcements and baby shower photos (a hideous American import that I reject wholeheartedly) one by one, I am not so much influenced as I am repulsed. It is terrible and cruel of me to admit, but I get this involuntary reflex that feels the opposite of survivor’s guilt - survivor’s smugness, maybe - a horrid, subconscious, judgemental sort of ‘oh what a shame, what a waste, glad that’s not me,’ and so on and so forth. Each one feels like another fallen soldier. Then I remember that they are not cautionary examples of teen pregnancy: we are all adults in our mid-twenties, and they’re probably happier than I am.
When I look back at my own family photos from when I was small, it strikes me that the love in each frame is palpable. How did my parents feel, having their first child and then another within three years, not knowing what to do but trying their very best? It takes a village to raise a child, of course, and I imagine I wouldn’t be alone in it. I just don’t know what it is to make a commitment that lasts a lifetime. I don’t know how I can promise forever to something so precious when I can barely promise to myself that all of this is even worth it. I will likely end up being selfish, whatever that means. I just wish I had more time to figure it out.
And your dearest fantasy
Is to grow a baby in me
I could be a good mother
And I wanna be your wife
So I hold you to my knife
And I steal your letter
- not a lot, just forever - Adrianne Lenker
i felt a ball of hair in my throat reading this and i loved every bit of it. just like how camp counselors psych you up to jump off a ledge or something, i think the real answer is: there will never be a definitive time to be ready. the closest you can be ready is knowing that there is a safe ledge you can jump off from into a whole new world. i’m doing my rotations in obgyn and everyone keeps hammering down the fact that women who are older than thirty five are classified as ‘advanced maternal age’. “complications”. “risks”. to me, there will always be a risk regardless of how much you pad your fall. it might not be my place to say, but i believe ‘maternal instincts’ are more nurture than nature — it takes practice — so there is no need to chastise oneself in perceiving you lack it. yes, motherhood isn’t a job you clock into or an item on the political agenda. it’s another shape love can take. everyone is born a child , no one is born a mother, you become one. regardless of whether you take the leap or not, nothing is indicative of your identity, semi-formed or not.
i forget who said it: a child lives once, a mother lives twice.
my recent piece considers the flip-side of this (and i would love it if you had time to check it out, it might comfort you or let you in on something different).
Florence & the Machine’s King too: ‘We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children / About the world ending and the scale of my ambition / And how much is art really worth?’