A couple of weeks after I wrote the column about umbilical cords I had lunch with the journalist Rosie Millard. I emailed her to ask for some advice and she generously invited me to her house. Rosie had a big job at the BBC, but left it when they told her she couldn’t also do a column for the Sunday Times. Now she seemed to be writing for practically every newspaper I picked up. She seemed, in fact, to be making a big success of freelance life. I hoped she would share the secret, or perhaps just breathe on me so that I’d be infected by her success.
Rosie lives in a big house in Islington. She has written before about her property ‘portfolio’ – her two London houses, two London flats and flat in Paris – which she has said she and her husband managed to maintain by juggling credit cards. She once created a stir by writing an article about being ‘broke’, which meant that she sometimes had trouble in a restaurant getting her credit card to clear. I’m jealous. Of course I’m jealous. But someone who has managed to build up a mini property empire on the back of credit cards is clearly an awful lot better at managing their money than me.
Her house in Islington is beautiful. Her kitchen is gigantic. My kitchen is the size of a cupboard. If you swung a cat in it, it would hit its head. The one time I did have a cat in my flat, by the way, it didn’t go anywhere near the kitchen. I had borrowed it from neighbours who were on holiday, after weeks of trying to tackle a new influx of mice. The mice, unfortunately, were fans of Nietzsche: what didn’t kill them made them stronger. The cat was not a fan of Nietzsche. It spent the week cowering behind the sofa. I was terrified of it, it was terrified of me, and the mice seemed to find it all a big aphrodisiac, had a wild orgy and bred.
Sitting in Rosie’s beautiful kitchen, surrounded by photos of her four children, and no signs of any mouse traps, I couldn’t decide if I felt more like Jane Eyre or Adrian Mole. Every day in her household, she said, started with the children playing the piano or violin. I didn’t want to tell her that every day in my household started with silence and ended with silence and the only voice to break that silence was John Humphrys telling off a politician or someone who sounded a bit like a robot warning me about storms off German Bight. We had a lovely lunch and then, over coffee, she said that when she lost her column at the Sunday Times, it was her husband and children who saw her through.
Some people choose not to have children and are happy with the choice they have made. For many of us, not having children doesn’t feel much like a choice. About a fifth of women now don’t have children. Among women with higher degrees, that figure is more like a third. According to one study, by Satoshi Kanazawa at the LSE, an increase of fifteen IQ points cuts a woman’s likelihood of becoming a mother by a quarter. Statistically, it’s harder for a highly educated woman to find a partner, and potential father, for her child than for one who isn’t. It isn’t quite true, as a character said in Sleepless in Seattle, that you’re ‘more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married’ if you’re a woman over forty, but it isn’t all that far off.
If you don’t have children by your late thirties you can start to feel like a freak. Society is arranged around families. Politicians don’t even want your vote. If you’re not a member of a ‘hardworking family’, the message seems to be, you must be a wastrel or a weirdo. If you’re a woman, you’re probably a ball-breaker. Tabloid newspapers will call you a ‘career woman’ as if it’s worryingly masculine for a woman in the twenty-first century to hold down a job. Or you’ll be seen as some kind of Anita Brookner heroine, living a pinched life in dowdy clothes in a gloomy basement flat. You must, in other words, live at the margins because you are not a proper woman.
If you are single and childless, you are expected to fit your life and needs around the people who aren’t. You will be squeezed into the gaps of your friends’ lives. At work, the demands of people with families will come first. ‘It’s just taken as read,’ said a woman I met on a course, ‘that if you have children your hours are negotiable in a way that they aren’t if you don’t. It’s almost like a hierarchy of the important things in one’s life. I don’t know anything else that’s considered to be as important as having children.’
Jessica runs a marketing agency. She finds herself constantly having to give way to other people’s holiday requests even though she’s their boss. ‘The whole holiday thing is now a given,’ she told me. ‘Men do it as much, possibly even more. Women didn’t use their children so much because it would have been a disadvantage in the workplace, and now men share more of the parental duties, they’re also claiming the holiday entitlement first. Half-term and school holidays are almost built into the calendar. Those without children aren’t thought to have any rights.’
Jessica has had her own family pressures. She has a brother with MS and a father with dementia, but this doesn’t seem to be the kind of family that counts. ‘I could really have done with some flexibility,’ she told me. ‘I think when you get to a certain age, you realize that the demands of elderly parents or other relatives are as big a deal for you as perhaps a small child. But that isn’t recognized. What could you say that could possibly rival children?’
And what, I asked, if you didn’t have children, but just wanted to be reminded from time to time that you also had some claim on a life outside work? ‘Imagine,’ said Jessica, ‘if you said, “Well, actually I’ve bought a canoe and I’ve decided I want to go canoeing every weekend, so I need to leave early on a Friday, so I’ll come in early and leave at four.”’ Count me in, I said. That should be just fine, though count me out of the canoe. ‘It ought to be fine,’ she said, ‘but I think you’d have to be extremely steely to carry that off. A lot of this stuff is unspoken. And you want to be decent to your colleagues, so it’s really hard to say, “Oh, your little Johnny is stuck in the playground; well, that doesn’t cut any ice with me.”’
I have covered several maternity leaves. For two of these I was paid about an extra tenner a month to do my own job as well as the job of my much better-paid boss. At the end of the maternity leave, nobody said: well, thank you so much for taking on a killing extra workload, why don’t you go off travelling for six months and we’ll keep you on full pay? In fact, nobody even said thank you. It can make you feel a bit as if you’re skulking in the sculleries of someone else’s life.
Ask anyone what’s most important to them and they will usually say their family. Almost everyone I’ve interviewed has said it’s what has made their life complete. I once heard a film star say that he hadn’t been able to look at pictures of starving children since he had children of his own. It does make you wonder what he thinks the rest of us are doing. Giggling at the way their ribs stick out? Do you really need to become a parent to understand that those figures on the TV news aren’t just pixels on a screen?
Most of the public figures I have interviewed are artists of one kind or another. Most are men. Artists don’t usually get to be world class by doing their fair share of the household chores. Actually, very few men do their fair share of the household chores. According to the Office for National Statistics, women still do 40 per cent more housework, and childcare, than men. The people, in other words, who speak loudest about the importance of family are often not the ones who are doing the work.
*
I have forced myself to smile at a lot of weddings. I have forced myself to smile when friends have told me they are pregnant and when they thrust a little scrap of wriggling flesh in my arms. I love babies. Who doesn’t love babies? That soft, soft skin that’s like a peach, that luscious flesh, those big, round eyes. They smell so delicious you almost want to eat them. Who wouldn’t want one of those to cuddle and kiss and feed and squeeze? Who wouldn’t want to see if your little egg or sperm might be the seed that turns into a towering oak of a Shakespeare or a Mandela? Or even just into a vine that makes some very nice wine?
Well, my friend Dreda Say Mitchell, for a start. I met Dreda after writing a column in The Independent about her award-winning thriller Running
Hot. It was set partly in Ridley Road market in Dalston, down the road from where I live. Its central character, who’s in trouble with the police but wants to be a chef, reminded me of my friend Winston. Dreda sent me an email thanking me for my column and we met up for a drink and have been friends ever since. A few months after I lost my job, she agreed to talk to me for a piece I was writing about women who don’t have children. The piece was for the Sunday Times magazine. It came out of an email I sent to the editor of the paper, one of the many emails I had sent begging for work. It was the first email that struck something like gold.
‘My parents were migrants,’ she told me in the cosy sitting room of her house in Walthamstow. ‘The whole big thing with migrants is you plant roots. One thing the next generation do is have kids, so the next set of roots keep going.’ As the daughter of a Grenadian father who was a factory worker, and a Grenadian mother who worked as a hospital cleaner, Dreda grew up surrounded by big families on an estate in the East End. ‘Ours was one of the smaller ones,’ she said. ‘There were only four of us kids. A lot of them had seven, eight, nine. Having children was just seen as a natural part of life.’
Dreda always thought she’d have several children, but she was the first member of her family to go into further education and when she went to university she had her eyes opened to a whole new world. She ‘got the travel bug’, trained as a teacher and used her holidays to go travelling. When she met her partner, Tony, they both expected to have children, but one day she saw an ad for ‘this fabulous tour to Ethiopia’ and realized she didn’t want to give up her freedom to travel, or do anything else. ‘I had the sense,’ she said, ‘that being a teacher, and travelling, were not the only things I wanted to do. I always suspected I might want to write. I thought: I can’t see some poor kid having the space as well.’
Dreda is one of the most positive people I know. She lives her life as if it’s a delicious meal to be gulped down, before handing back her plate and asking for more. So did she, I asked, really have no regrets? Dreda shook her head. ‘No, but I do look at my sister, and I see her kids and grandkids, and I see she’s got this really personal family that are connected to her. I do look at myself sometimes and think: “Who will be looking after me?”’
Well, quite. My mother broke her ankle two weeks before I lost my job. My brother and I made sure that one of us went to visit her in hospital every day. I can’t say I’m looking forward to lying in soiled sheets in a state-run care home with no one to care about my day except a member of staff on minimum wage.
There are countries, of course, where they don’t shove you into a care home. In those countries you have children because it’s your duty to your parents and because those children will have a duty to look after you. Through Mimi I met Shanta Acharya, a poet who went into investment banking to support her creative writing, publishing several books of wry, witty, sometimes searing poems along the way. Shanta was born in Cuttack, by the Bay of Bengal. As a young university lecturer in India, she wasn’t allowed to go out on her own except when she was going to work. ‘You always had an escort,’ she told me, over tea and cake in her maisonette in Highgate. ‘It was, in some ways, a very Jane Austen world.’
As a member of a Brahmin family, who were also academics, she was encouraged to have a career in academia, but she was still expected to have an arranged marriage and children. ‘I didn’t want to upset my parents too much,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t really fancy that.’
She thought she might meet someone when she came to Britain, to do a DPhil at Oxford, and later at Harvard as a Visiting Scholar. When she left Harvard, and failed to get the academic post she wanted, she joined an American investment bank in London, where she trained as an analyst and portfolio manager. At her next job, at a Swiss bank, her performance proved she was the best fund manager in her peer group. When she left banking to focus on her writing, she continued to win accolades for her work. Her personal life was less successful. ‘I kept thinking it would happen,’ she said, ‘I would meet my life partner, but I didn’t.’ It has taken a long time for her parents to accept her status as a single, childless woman. ‘My mother keeps saying it’s OK,’ she said, ‘and I’m thinking, “Well, I’m calling you. Who’s going to call me?”’
When the article about women without children was published, I got an angry email. ‘What’, said the man who sent it, ‘about all us men who have never had children? Do you think we don’t feel the same?’ I might, he said, find the ‘attached spreadsheet’ of Census data interesting, showing percentages of people in each age group who were ‘not living in a couple, single, never married’ and another one about those living ‘without dependent children’. When I looked at the spreadsheets, I gasped. He had given them the heading ‘The Walking Wounded’.
I didn’t need a spreadsheet to know that many men don’t have children. My brother doesn’t have children. Two of my male cousins don’t have children. Nearly all my gay male friends don’t have children. Men without children don’t get called ‘childless’. People don’t seem to think they have failed in their primary purpose in the way they sometimes do about childless women. But that doesn’t mean that not having children doesn’t cause them any pain.
Benjamin Zephaniah was one of nine children, a twin in a family with two sets. ‘When I was a kid,’ he told me, when I went to interview him for a follow-up piece about men without children, ‘I used to say “I’m going to get a woman, right, and I want nine kids, so I’m going to have triplets and then triplets and then triplets”.’ When his mother ‘ran out of the door’, fleeing her violent husband, Benjamin followed her. He was eight. He lived alone with her in bedsits until he was sent away to ‘an approved school’ for being ‘a criminal kid’. When he left, at sixteen, his friends were all having babies. ‘We didn’t even think of condoms,’ he said. ‘And I just noticed that they were having kids and I wasn’t.’
It took him a while to realize that he was the problem. In the end, he had a test, which showed that he produced no sperm at all. During his thirteen-year marriage, to a theatre administrator called Amina, he got tested again. This time it was the mid-1990s, on a TV programme about male infertility with Robert Winston. At the end of the show, he said, Winston promised to do some research, but when he and the producer followed up, he didn’t reply. ‘It gave us some hope,’ he said. ‘Then I kind of gave up.’
So was it, I asked, a source of grief? For a moment, Benjamin looked away. ‘A little bit,’ he said. ‘There was a period when I did that thing men do. They look at other men playing with kids in the park and think “I can’t do that”.’ Benjamin is a glass-halffull kind of guy. ‘I’ve got such a good relationship with kids all over the world,’ he said. ‘People are always saying to me: “if you had your own kid, it would probably take away from your relationship with all these other kids”, so I just kind of resigned myself to that.’ What he couldn’t take, he told me, was the people who kept offering him cures. At a Mind Body Spirit festival, someone even told him that he’d been castrated, in a past life as a slave.
My friend Stefano Nappo has, thank goodness, never been told that he has been castrated. I first met him fifteen years ago, just after I moved into my flat. He and his then boyfriend, Nick, had also just moved in, to an enormous loft apartment on the top floor. One night, they knocked on my door and invited me to join them for a Thai takeaway over Ally McBeal. It made me feel as if I was living in an episode of Friends.
Stefano is a very successful corporate lawyer. He travels. He goes to the opera. He collects art. It would be easy to think he has a charmed life, and in many ways he does. But Stefano is the son of Italian immigrants. When he was growing up, in Loughborough, ‘family was everything’. There would, he told me during one of our Saturday-morning catch-ups in his vast sitting room, be regular dances, christenings and weddings. ‘There were always loads of children there,’ he said. ‘I always assumed that one day I’d have a family. My mother would say, “When are you going
to get married and give me grandchildren?”’
Stefano always knew that he ‘felt different’, but it was only when he was eighteen that he finally acknowledged that he was gay. ‘I was lying in my bed, awake at night,’ he told me, ‘and had a conversation with myself about my options. I said, “Well, you can either kill yourself, because you don’t want to be gay, or you can get on with it.”’
When he was younger, gay couples rarely had families. During ten years with his last partner, they never even mentioned the possibility of having children. ‘I have thought about it over the years,’ he said. ‘Neither my brother nor sister has children, so if I don’t, our little line comes to a grinding halt. I remember feeling wistful about that, but only to a certain level. With my current partner, he’s completely anti, so I definitely can’t have a child while I’m with him. But if I was with somebody who said, “You know what, I’d really like to talk about having a child,” I think I would be very happy to. I’d love to have that sort of opportunity.’
Stefano and I both live in Stoke Newington, which has one of the highest birth rates in the country. Sometimes, when I’m walking on the pavement, I’m forced into the road by a convoy of buggies that seem to think they are tanks. The cafés are full of mothers promising their children that they will get a blueberry smoothie if they finish their organic bok choy. This is motherhood as a Grand Design, one where you, the mother, are Michelangelo and your child is the masterpiece waiting to be cut free from the stone.
When my parents were young, you had a child because everyone had a child. You hoped you would have healthy, well-behaved children, but you didn’t expect them to fill an existential void. I thought of this when I read an interview with the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg. He talked about the moment he held his first child for the first time. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘so that’s what it’s all about.’ The horrible feeling in my stomach made me think he was probably right.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 6
