The answer, it turns out on the thread, is yes, quite a few people do. There’s a Facebook group called ‘I Regret Having Children’. A French psychoanalyst wrote a book called No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not To Be a Mother, which became a bestseller. In 2016, the BBC included its author, Connie Maier, in a list of the 100 most inspirational and influential women in the world. An Israeli sociologist, Orna Donath, wrote a book called Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis, which became another bestseller. ‘People were saying,’ said the German blogger Jessika Rose, ‘“How can you admit to this?” “How can you be so ungrateful for a choice you yourself made?”’ It was, Rose told the Guardian journalist Stefanie Marsh, she who pressurized her husband into having a child almost as soon as they got married. ‘I had a very romantic notion of being a mother,’ she said, ‘that I’d love going to the playground, that I would always be loving and understanding. I hate playgrounds. I find it extremely boring to stand there and watch the child on a swing and the helicopter mothers making sure their kids don’t fall off.’ She had ‘never thought’ about the noise, the boredom, the stress. Older generations had, she thought, repressed all their bad parenting experiences ‘just to survive’.
Well, maybe. Or maybe they just didn’t expect everything in life to be fulfilling. Maybe they just had babies because that’s what humans generally do, and maybe they were just grateful that they didn’t have to squeeze a child out of a prolapsed womb every year of their adult life until they died. Which is, after all, if we’re going to take the organic lavender oil approach to things, Mother Nature’s way.
It’s quite a novelty, this thing called choice. It’s quite hard to know what to do with it. For my parents’ generation, it was more straightforward. You got married, because everyone did, you had children, because everyone did, you stayed together, because nearly everyone did. You loved your children. You did not expect, as a suicide bomber might, that you would then be catapulted to Paradise.
Now we’re all like citizens of a former outpost of the Soviet Union who are used to spending hours queuing up for a loaf and are suddenly hurled into a supermarket the size of a city. There are thousands of different types of bread on offer. Some are delicious. Some aren’t. The catch is that you don’t have all that long to choose your brand and you will have to stick to that one for the rest of your life. Some of us trip over, hobble around in a panic, grab the nearest thing and only find out after we have paid for it that the packet is empty. There are still lots of other things we can buy and eat and do, but that particular option has now gone.
If you don’t have children, some people will think you are selfish. They think that the urge to replicate your genes, and boast about your offspring’s achievements, is a noble thing, in a way that trying to be a good friend or daughter, or do a job well, is not. Perhaps some of them protest a bit much. Everyone, as those brutally honest mothers have said, expects parenthood to make you happy, but the truth is, it often doesn’t. Children, clearly, bring great joy. I have no doubt that gazing at your baby’s beautiful eyes will give you a burst of joy that I’ll never know. But is it actually true that children make you happy?
Professor Ruut Veenhoven is the world’s only Professor of Social Conditions for Human Happiness. He has produced a World Database of Happiness, with 8000 findings from 120 countries, and the conclusions are clear. Marriage, he says, makes people happy, but when children arrive, their happiness drops. ‘The presence of children’, he says, ‘detracts from the quality of marriage, at least to the quality of the modern, romantic, equal marriage. The situation becomes even more unhappy in modern marriages where the mother is working and looking after children.’ When I think about the couples I know, I’d have to agree that some of the happiest are the ones who don’t have children. They still go on adventures. They still have fun. At eighty-five, says Veenhoven, adults with children are happier than those without. But that’s quite a long time to wait.
It was Julia who interviewed Veenhoven, for a feature for The Independent. She had just met the man she would marry and was still hoping to have a family. So how, I asked her, does she cope with the fact that she hasn’t? Julia smiled. ‘I deal with it,’ she told me over that coffee in that London hotel, ‘by accepting it. I don’t believe you have everything in your life that you want. It’s ridiculous to think you would. When I look back, I’ve had a very happy and successful life. I’m very grateful for everything I’ve had. I’ve had lots of wonderful experiences I never imagined.’
You can say that again. As a journalist, Julia won an Amnesty International press award. As a novelist, she has been a New York Times bestseller, and had one of her novels selected for the Obamas’ holiday reading list. ‘I’ve got good friends and a loving family,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been able to have children, but I’ve had a hell of a lot of other things I didn’t expect.’
Simon Ricketts takes the same view. ‘I don’t feel like there’s a hole in my life where my child should be,’ he said. ‘I just think it would have been lovely to have them, but my personal situation didn’t work out. There’s no such thing as deserving children. Nature lets you sometimes have them, and sometimes it doesn’t. It sounds cheesy, but they’re a gift. I think being a parent and wanting to be a parent is about doing something for a child, not just as some accessory. Many kind people say “you’d make a great dad”, and I’m sure I would have done, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about would I be able to raise a good child? Would I be able to bring another human being into this world and set them off for this life? It is,’ he said carefully, ‘a very difficult thing.’
I agree with Simon. I agree with Julia. It would have been lovely. It could have been lovely. It could also have been awful, but that’s irrelevant because we’ll never know. Having children isn’t meant to be about what they can do for you. It’s meant to be about what you can do for them.
It’s a long time since I’ve cried about not having children. The worst time is when it’s still uncertain. When it’s no longer a possibility, you adjust to the new landscape of your life. Like Julia, I feel I’ve had opportunities I could never have dreamt of. And like both Julia and Simon, I don’t believe you get everything you want in a life. I still get the odd pang, but nowadays it really is just the odd pang. I don’t need little Lizzie on my iPad to remind me that it’s a wonderful world.
A life worth living
‘But it’s not,’ said the young man sitting opposite me, ‘too late for you to have a baby!’ I had just told him that I didn’t have children and this was his response. He was nineteen. He had a pierced chin and was wearing a baseball cap. I liked him the moment I spotted him across the room. I thought it probably wasn’t worth explaining that the odds, for me at fifty, were about the same as my becoming prime minister. We weren’t there to talk about the miracles of modern science. I had been asked to do a piece on teenage pregnancy and the dapper young man drinking a can of Coke, in the bar at the Southbank Centre where I had bought so many drinks for so many poets, was there to tell me what it’s like to become a parent at fifteen.
Even I had to admit that work seemed to be going quite well. I was doing lots of interesting stuff for the Sunday Times. I was doing quite a few columns for The Guardian. I was still doing the press review on Sky News twice a month. I wasn’t earning anything like as much as I had before, but I certainly couldn’t say that the work I was doing was boring. And I was getting to meet people like lovely Leroy.
Leroy lost his virginity when he was twelve. He and his girlfriend were both fifteen when she got pregnant. ‘My mum cried,’ he said, ‘because her baby was having a baby, do you know what I mean?’ I nodded, as if I had had that very conversation with my own teenage children, but his huge smile just made me want to smile and nod along. His baby was born at the end of January. Leroy went into a young offenders’ institute three weeks later. He saw him every day before he went in, and then didn’t see him for a year. I was already worrying that his ba
by might not have recognized him when he came out, but Leroy set my mind at rest. ‘Babies,’ he explained, ‘know you by scent.’
While he was in his young offenders’ institute, Leroy decided that he wanted to be a midwife. He is now working hard to get the qualifications he needs to make his dream come true. Yvonne, who got pregnant when she was seventeen, is trying to build a career as a life coach. Lucy, who also got pregnant at seventeen, has done a business diploma and wants to study forensic psychology. ‘It was quite isolating being pregnant at seventeen,’ she told me. ‘I lost all my friends. I would walk around in a big coat.’
I thought someone should give these young people medals because they had lost their childhood and they didn’t complain. They got up every morning and did what they needed to do to make sure their children got washed and clothed and fed. None of them actively chose to be teenage parents. None of them actively chose to be single parents. With better guidance, things might have turned out differently, but they were coping with the cards they had been dealt.
The statistics on teenage parents aren’t good. Their children are much more likely to grow up in poverty, end up on benefits or be placed in care than the children of older parents. Statistics on single parents aren’t great either, even though nearly half of all children are now born out of marriage. Children of parents who break up are much more likely to have struggles with school, drugs and mental health than children of parents who stay together.
On the teenage parenting front, things are getting better. In recent years, the number of teenage pregnancies has dropped. On the single parenting front, they aren’t. After the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, many people seem to think that they have a right to weave in and out of relationships as they want. Their children just need to travel light and come along for the ride.
It was the psychoanalyst W. D. Winnicott who came up with the concept of the ‘good enough parent’. He didn’t talk about the ‘good enough child’. What is a good enough child? A child who’s healthy? A child who’s clever? Or a child who’s kind?
Katherine was pretty sure that a child who screamed and raged and kicked and hit was not the kind of child she wanted. ‘My love for him,’ she told me, in such a matter-of-fact voice that I had to compose my face, ‘was just negative, right from the beginning. It took a long time for me to love him properly. But,’ she added, ‘I never didn’t have that feeling of this terrible stretch when he was away from me. I had this need to protect him and this terrible worry about what kind of life he was going to have.’
Since her son Dan was born, life, she said, has been a series of battles. There’s the battle to get him up and washed and dressed. There’s the battle to stop him hurting other people and himself. There was the battle to get a diagnosis of autism, which took eighteen months, and the battle to get a statement of special needs, which took another eighteen months. And there was the two-and-a-half-year legal battle to get him into a special school. ‘We couldn’t afford a lot of the help we needed,’ she said, ‘so I did a lot of the legal work myself.’
On top of all of this, when she was seven and a half months pregnant with her second child, her husband was made redundant. They had agonized about whether to have another child, but decided to do it since they both had siblings they adored. ‘I was earning seventeen thousand pounds,’ said Katherine. ‘My husband was earning sixty thousand. I thought we were going to lose the house. We realized that he would have to be at home to look after the children because we thought Dan might harm Tom. So I had to go all out.’
Katherine did go ‘all out’. She worked ‘all the hours God sent’ and ‘got promoted up and up and up’. She is now a successful civil servant in charge of a complex policy portfolio. ‘So that,’ she said, ‘got me through. I had this driving thing that I needed to earn more money because I thought Dan’s never going to be able to support himself. That thing about keeping going because you have no choice.’
And what, I asked, about the bloke? He sounds, I said, trying to keep the envy out of my voice, pretty amazing. Retraining as an electrician and fitting his work around childcare. Offering to give up full-time work to take the hits and the kicks. Oh, and still being around. Lots of fathers of children with disabilities don’t actually stick around. Katherine’s smile was like the smile in the Madonna of the Rocks. ‘We are,’ she said, ‘like two halves of the same thing, really. Whatever happened, I had him, and I never had to worry about him leaving me. It’s above all that. Having that one thing that was good.’
Thank God they both had that. There are other good things, too. Their other son, Tom, is healthy and happy. ‘He is,’ said Katherine, ‘a joy.’ And Katherine and her husband won their legal battle to get Dan into a special school. It has changed all their lives. ‘From the minute he wakes up,’ she said, ‘everything they do is tailored to helping him cope in the world. They’re teaching him how to be a social human.’
Since Dan has been at this new school, Katherine and her husband have been able to devote more time to Tom. They go on trips. They go on long walks. Katherine has been so starved of time to do anything but work and try to deal with her son that she now leaps at every opportunity. ‘I’ve found myself doing quite mad things,’ she confessed, ‘like rock climbing, things I’ve always been scared of. I say yes to everything. I’ve learnt to squeeze everything out of half an hour.’ She has built up a network of friends on Twitter. She walks seven miles a day. ‘I’m fitter than I’ve ever been,’ she said. ‘When you can’t make your mind any better, you can try and work on your body.’
Now, when Dan comes home at weekends, or for holidays, Katherine has some of the feelings she never thought she would have. ‘I came in the sitting room,’ she said, ‘and he was on the sofa, doing something on his iPad, and I just felt this rush of warmth. I wanted to go and hug him, but I know he doesn’t like that, so I didn’t. Just this simple feeling of loving him, that’s so new.’
I smiled, in relief. She smiled back. ‘I used to have these dreams all the time,’ she said. ‘In the dream, he would not be as bad as he is, and I was able to talk to him. We’d have proper conversations. I’d wake up and for a few minutes I would think it was true. When he comes home now,’ she said, so calmly that I felt my heart skip a beat, ‘he’s almost that boy.’
There has never been any doubt about how much Mimi loves her son. When I’m round at hers, I often hear her on the phone to Tom and the love in both their voices is so clear I sometimes wish I could bottle it and give it to everyone on Twitter.
Mimi does not have the support of a loving partner. Her home is full of beautiful furniture and paintings, but she doesn’t seem to have quite such good taste in men. She doesn’t walk seven miles a day either. She’s seventy now and has a bit of arthritis, so that would be quite a challenge to her knees. A good relationship and exercise are both things the experts say help you to deal with challenging situations, but you can’t just go on Amazon and order up a lovely partner – or new knees.
But, like Katherine, Mimi works very hard. She’s seventy and she still works very hard. She runs workshops, mentors people, and does poetry readings, sometimes on the other side of the world. Work, she told me, is one of the things that has kept her going. And poetry, like policy, is hard. ‘For a great many years,’ she told me, ‘it was difficult, because I always had the sense I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing. You’re just sort of in the dark. You’re aware all the time of everything you don’t know. You have to work with that, and despite that.’
It sounded, I said, a bit like finding out that your son has a mental illness psychiatrists say is incurable. My mother would certainly say that that’s what it was like. You’re floundering around in the dark, trying this thing and that thing and just hoping that one of those things will help.
Mimi told me before about the sense of ‘misplaced optimism’ she had when her daughter Tara was diagnosed with a degenerative disease and then again when Tom was diagnosed with sc
hizophrenia. Optimism, I told her, is like a snake. It can seduce, but it can bite. Optimists make promises they can’t keep. Optimists let other people down. But optimism, according to the scientific evidence, can be a useful coping strategy. People who think they will get better from an illness are more likely to get better than people who don’t. People with religious beliefs are likely to live longer than people without them, even if their beliefs are based on delusion or literal interpretations of ancient texts. Optimistic surgeons, on the other hand, are more likely than their pessimistic peers to do harm.
So where, I asked Mimi, did her optimism come from? Mimi took a drag of her cigarette. ‘It’s not something I’ve really thought about too much,’ she said. ‘I tend to be pessimistic about the smaller things. Like, if I’m commissioned to write a poem, I instinctively think “oh God, this is going to be dreadful and I’ll humiliate myself”. And I agree with you about optimism being annoying. I’d much rather people said “yes, there is that risk”, rather than “it will be wonderful, everything will be fine”.’
She paused. ‘I think probably that optimism comes from the same source as the voices that say “oh, this is terrible, this is the end of the world”. Because you get so frightened you can’t bear to look at it, so then you just think it will be fine.’ So it’s optimism as a form of denial? Denial can, according to some studies, ‘improve your psychological functioning’ if you have something like cancer. ‘It comes,’ said Mimi, ‘from my childhood, where I find myself in a strange country, with a strange language, in a strange school, without any family or anyone. I think I remember that feeling that it will be all right. As in, Mummy will come and get you, even though I knew she wouldn’t.’
Mimi was born in Iran, but sent to a boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six. She didn’t speak a word of English. She saw her mother about every four years. ‘I had to believe everything would be OK,’ she said, ‘through all my years of growing up. You can collapse, you can get totally distraught, you can have a little breakdown or whatever, but if there’s nobody there, if there’s no audience, there’s no one who’s going to comfort you, you don’t do it.’
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 19
