After my parent's divorce was final, Mum moved us to London so that we could be closer to Dad. She wanted to make it easier for us to see him, she explained. It was 1985. In London, all the buildings were big, and the streets were filled with people you never saw more than once.
Swapping sleepy country lanes for the sophistication of the city felt like one step closer to being a grownup – and at age nine, I could not wait to be a full-grown woman. This was also the year that the Madonna classic Desperately Seeking Susan came out – a move and a movie that would make for an intoxicating cocktail of influence when it came to my ideas about what this even meant.
Given that I was too young to see the movie in a theatre, and taking into account that it would have taken a year or so for it to be released on VHS back then, let’s assume that I was ten years old when I sunk into Dad’s battered corduroy sofa with the cat- scratched arms, squished between my brother and Dad’s new girlfriend, to watch the film. I snuck a sideways glance at her. She was ten years younger than my father and as tall as him. She had a loud, confident laugh, and she wore her hair in a sleek, shiny bob. I got the feeling she was also part of the reason we’d moved to the city.
Madonna’s character in the film, the Susan of the title, was a gum-chewing, loose-limbed rock chick who lived out of a battered drum case lined with pink satin and adorned with graffiti skulls. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Watching the scene where she arrived in New York City at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, headed to the restroom, blasted her underarms with the hand drier, and opened up the case to change into a black lace tank, it was as if I had been picked up from my spot on the sofa and transported into my future.
But nowhere in my future as a woman did I see myself as a mum.
Having grown up around pregnant and nursing women, it was clear to me that women and babies went together like hot milk and honey. As for my mum, she worked because she had to; her primary and most precious identity was that of “mother.” But as I matured and the potential paths my life might take began to reveal themselves, the womanly experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing did not even cross my mind as possibilities to be rejected. Which just wasn’t normal. Was it? Girl children are indoctrinated with the message that womanhood is synonymous with motherhood from the word go. Aren’t we?
“In some ways, forgoing motherhood in favour of doing literally anything else with your life is the final frontier in women’s fight for equality.”
Until relatively recently, the answer to the above has been an unequivocal yes. Being female has meant being socialised to aspire to the role of mother.
But the pervasive ambivalence about motherhood among my generation and younger, and the numbers in which we are either putting it off or opting out full stop, suggests that this is no longer the case – that we are the ones who are destined to rewrite this script for good. After all, the past four decades have also brought forth untold alternative role models for what a woman can be – and more emerge with each new generation. She is an artist, a director, a CEO. A traveller, an activist, a whistleblower, a W.I.T.C.H. (Woman in Total Control of Herself ). She is the vice president of the United States. She is trans; she can even be a he or a they.
The question What is woman if not mother? used to draw a blank at best. But I say she is whoever the fuck she wants to be. In some ways, forgoing motherhood in favour of doing literally anything else with your life is the final frontier in women’s fight for equality. The ultimate expression of my body, my choice. So why is it, then, that outside of a few progressive circles, non-motherhood remains such a stigmatized, deviant path? Why, no matter what other roles she might perform and what other roads she may travel down in her life, is a woman still not seen as complete until she becomes a mom?
When I began working on my new book, I was coming to the subject matter from the position of “outsider.” As established, as somebody who never wanted kids, I had always felt different. Othered. I wanted to write a book that would speak to others in my position, as well as to any woman who has ever questioned whether motherhood was for her or who has tried and “failed” to become a mom. My primary intention here is to help my readers feel less like the freaks of nature that we are often painted as. As also noted, I have come to believe that the majority of women coming of age at the turn of the new millennium are destined to experience some degree of ambivalence about being a mom. To fall somewhere short of the Affirmative Yes end of the Motherhood Spectrum.
But while I had grown up feeling like “the only one,” by the time I reached my early forties, something interesting began to happen: I was meeting more and more women my age and younger who were either actively pursuing an alternative legacy or for whom motherhood just hadn’t happened. This had something to do with me having followed in Madonna’s Susan character’s footsteps and moved to New York City, a town that tends to attract women with bigger-than-average ambitions for our lives.
But as other women without kids began to emerge in my life like rocks in the sand at low tide, I found myself asking: had they been there all along?
Extracted from Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington, Orion Books.
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