So Many of the Women I Cherish Don't Have Children. Does it Matter?

I’m currently on holiday with a group of girlfriends, celebrating a 40th in exquisite style. They are women I have loved for a decade; we’ve travelled the world together, weathered storms and dispatched quite literally too many glasses of rosé to remember. From both a statistical perspective and in comparison with my regular life, we make an unusual group, because out of the five of us, I’m the only one with kids. By 45, 82% of women in the U.K. will have one child—they’re all American but you get the gist. In any given random sample of women, the proportion of childfree women in a group would usually be flipped. None of us are 45, but aside from one whippersnapper, we’re all in or entering our fourth decade.  

In recent years, I’ve read and listened to lots about childfree (both by choice and not) womanhood. The maternal drive has been such a huge force in my life, shaping every single big decision I’ve ever made. Even as my biological clock judders towards its final tock, broodiness still part of my everyday spectrum of emotion. Of course, for most of my life I’ve been propagandised to believe my drives are the natural state of being. I appreciate the wake-up call from childfree female writers and podcasters—what tosh that all is. There have always been women who weren’t fussed about offspring; their lives and desires have just been designated as divergent by societies obsessed in varying degrees with procreation (the Nat Con conference reminding us that we’re still seen as portable wombs in some quarters). 

However, there is no point beating about the bush, my lifestyle and priorities are now very different. Keeping our bonds solid has been an investment and for at least a few years yet, our lives won’t jigsaw together in the way they once did.  I can’t just drop everything like I used to and jump on a flight. Financially I’m constrained and my heart has strings moored to two little bodies. Perhaps more profoundly, because of the geographical distance between us, the increasing expense of travel and the Covid gap, many of my friends haven’t watched me mother over these years. They haven’t done my school run, watched the toddler lob a handmade (with love) bowl of sweet potato soup at a wall. They don’t know that my eldest calls everyone ‘mate’, nor have they been tired out by his repertoire of jokes. They also haven’t watched my slow shift over these days. Right now, I am snake-tattooed, red headed and full of fire. It could be hard to understand any of that outside the context of my experience of motherhood.

I’ve spoken a lot about my isolation as a mum with young kids and some of that is down to the fact that so many of my closest friends, living both in the U.K. and abroad have remained childfree whether by fate or choice. I knew I was going to be the first to walk through the door, but I suppose I’d guessed it was only a matter of time before someone else followed me. I obviously have no regrets, it’s just a reality of what can happen when the universe sends you on a different path to your pals and that would be true whether it was having kids or moving to the countryside, or really anything which has a marked shift in your lifestyle.

I guess as ever the key is keeping the door open to frank communication and remembering that the labels of ‘mother’ and ‘childfree’ are so flattening for the depth and breadth of experience that each encompass. It’s also appreciating that the things that are important to my friends are just as important as my children. Culturally again, there’s a hierarchy in what women prioritise—just think of the derision a ‘cat lady’ endures. Some of my friends haven’t met both my children and neither are babies anymore. But in the same breath, I’ve missed poignant and palpable moments in their lives too. I never visited the home that one friend renovated through blood, sweat and tears. She’s since sold it and its changed both her career and life. I didn’t share that experience with her, an experience that was totally and utterly consuming, creating pressures on finances, relationships, the physical and mental self–all things which you can compare to raising a newborn if you remove the cultural pecking order. My friends have been through scary health issues and surgeries, lost parents, animals and braced gut-wrenching professional ruptures. All without me there. The things that are the most important to them are as important as the things that are most important to me, however different they might be.

We live in a new era where the end point to entry into motherhood is so much less distinct, so there is always a chance that babies will again cause a shift in our group dynamic. But when it comes to celebrating our 50^th, making sure that we’re all still in each other’s lives isn’t always going to be straightforward. If that’s what I want, I will need to hold sacred the time and space I spend with my childfree friends. I will need to choose to spend money and my childcare windows on time with them instead of my fiancé or family. I can very easily see how people drift apart from each other at this moment. It is easy to exclusively lean into communities whose days look so very familiar to our own. But easy is rarely the right choice. It would be such a blow to me to lose the long-distance sisterhood of the past decade and our shared history, simply because the pace of my days has been transformed by raising bairns. If friendships are for a reason, a season or a lifetime, we have to be honest and say that if they are going to last, they take work, just like with any marriage or romantic partnership.

I’d whipped up the idea that the conversations on this trip would feel diametrically opposed to my usual diet of chat. For sure, we haven’t zoned in on potty training or the Bank of England base rate. But we have spoken about aging and beauty standards and schooling and gender politics and career balance as a business owner and the cost of living, property ownership and generational wealth. Plus ça change. Often the differences are imagined. Ultimately, though we can’t pretend that everything is the same as it ever was. It isn’t, because life doesn’t stand still and we are all evolving. Sometimes my feelings have been hurt along the way, I’m sure some of theirs have too as we navigate these sea shifts. We are no longer bearing witness to every element of each other’s lives, whether physically or digitally and that can feel sad. But really, it’s just part of growing up. As a sorority of the heart, we can boomerang from deep to ditsy and back again in the space of time it takes to drink a spritz, children or no. That is something which I’m old enough to know is both extremely rare, extremely valuable and certainly worth fighting for.