Childless By Choice by Helen Taylor (Whitefox £14.99, 256pp)
If you’ve ever met a perfect parent who swore, hand on heart, that having children has been a totally unalloyed delight, then the likelihood is that they are lying. That’s not cynicism, it’s the voice of experience. As a mother of two and grandmother of four, I can testify that children can offer the dizziest highs and blackest lows. Whether those two poles balance each other out seems a matter of luck. So why breed at all?
Sadly, many women become mothers because that’s what their own mothers and grandmothers did, then find themselves exhausted, disappointed and wondering where their individuality went.
Birth rates are at their lowest since records began
Helen Taylor understands this process because she’s witnessed it in many women she knows. But she’s also observed the happy camaraderie of family life – and felt wistful. Therein lies the dichotomy unravelled in this honest, thoughtful and touching book.
An engaging blend of cultural history and deeply personal memoir, the book neatly offers a clever subtitle to interrogate the word ‘childless’ in the title. In exploring ‘The Meaning and Legacy of a Childfree Life’ Taylor poses a fascinating question. ‘Childless’ sounds so negative – something missing, loss, regret, potential loneliness. On the other hand, ‘childfree’ is a positive – a delighted dance of free selfhood, and no smelly nappies in sight.
Yet neither ‘side’ tells the full story, as her book makes clear. Taylor’s distinguished career has been within the university sector. Having taught English and American literature at three universities, she is now (in her 70s) an Emeritus Professor and the author of many books. Yet she holds back from suggesting that such a career would have been impossibly hampered by having a family – even though those of us who chose (or slipped into) motherhood years ago know how mind-numbingly frustrating, tiring and guilt-inducing the juggle of work versus children can be.
In this age of often over-lyrical confessionals, Taylor’s tone is refreshingly matter-of-fact.
‘My tale is not tragic – although it contains bewilderment, regret and sorrows, as well as happiness and fulfilment. I had an illegal abortion that was performed safely by a Harley Street doctor, and to my relief no more pregnancies (helped by sterilisation in my early 40s). I have had two relationships involving step-children whom I found challenging but not monstrous. Most significantly, my long-term partner has expressed no desire to father a child with me. That said, there are doubts and ambivalences I have never really confronted…’
‘My tale is not tragic…’
Childless By Choice, she says, is an attempt to analyse such feelings, since many younger women (as well as her contemporaries) share them.
There is a kind of puzzled generosity in Taylor’s honest working through of her own complex emotions – with the help of other women she’s talked to and the literary examples cited in a useful chapter at the end.
This book comes at a time when Western governments are becoming more and more anxious about falling birth rates and looking at ways to make parenthood more appealing to a generation that has – arguably – grown used to doing its own thing, as well as angsting about the planet. Britain – in common with just about everywhere else – is facing a demographic crisis. Our birth rate fell to 1.44 children per woman in 2023, the lowest since records began in 1938. The 2024 numbers show a tiny increase, mainly caused by an increase in babies born to fathers aged over 60, and to first-generation immigrants.
But that’s certainly not enough to keep the wheels of a sophisticated nation turning – which is why Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson recently stated that she wants ‘more young people to have children’.
However, the rather feeble liberal qualifier she added – ‘if they so choose’ – rendered the political wish pretty pointless.
And it takes us straight to the dilemma posed in Helen Taylor’s quietly powerful book.
As a little girl, Taylor adored her dolls, but those feelings did not evolve into that cliche of longing for babies.
She reveals a complicated, though loving, relationship with a mother who expressed no wish for her only daughter to follow her down the path of wearisome and consuming motherhood. A friend’s home festooned with drying nappies gave the author such a feeling of ‘fastidious distaste’ that ‘I was so glad to return to my orderly childfree flat’.
She lists all the tasks mothers (and fathers – but not so many) must tackle as their children grow and schooling becomes more worrisome. You read it thinking guiltily how terrific it might have been to avoid all that stress.
Childless by Choice is available now
The ease of a childfree existence is easy to imagine as she describes a life of friendships, of cultural and political involvement with the world around, of the luck of having an equal life-partner (they did marry in the end) who not only shares her interests but is a brilliant cook.
All this is true and convincing – and might even make younger female readers profoundly glad of the contraception that liberated my generation (which is Taylor’s) from our mothers’ burdens.
But this writer is too honest to leave it there, and a careful reader may be left hearing a plangent note of sadness, rather than triumph. Taylor admits that in her 50s she ‘had twinges of regret for having chosen a childless route’ and has looked wistfully at families enjoying time together.
Movingly, she remembers that after her own mother’s death she felt ‘a deep sadness at having no daughter or son beside me’. Unsurprisingly, she worries about the future and ‘I ask myself who I am living for’. She has experienced real depression in trying to come to terms with the residual sadness that stems from her own free choice.
Taylor acknowledges that ‘we need to keep our precious human race alive and kicking’ but her final cry for ‘more political, financial, emotional and practical support for mothers’ sounds a false note, at odds with the down-to-earth truth of her book.
Because let’s face it, that is just not going to happen. As ever, women will just get on with it, nappies and all.
