For the fencesitters

If you are a fence sitter and still debating your options, here is an article for you. It is not coming from a child-free person, but should be an OK guideline:


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The joys of childlessness
The decision not to have children is hardly confined to the career-driven, middle-class professional
Laura Marcus
Thursday August 22 2002
The Guardian


I always expected to regret not having children. Like many young women today, I was dreadfully ambivalent about it during my 30s, the biological clock banging and nagging away at me. Inner voices insisted: "For goodness sake have a kid, or time will run out and you'll pay a heavy price." So it comes as something of a surprise to discover that now, in my 40s, I do not regret that I never gave birth.

The anguish I expected? Not there. The regret I was told I'd feel? Didn't happen. I enjoy my friends' kids; I love being an indulgent aunty. But I'm so very glad now that it didn't happen for me. I find, much to my delight, that I actually adore being childless. And I mean childless. "Childfree" smacks of rationalisation and I don't feel that need.

While researching her book, Will You Be Mother?, author Jane Bartlett told me that women who don't want children have always known it from a very early age. Successful career women such as Lindsey Hilsum, who wrote in this paper last week, and writer Joan Smith, knew all along that being a mother wasn't for them.

These women are rare, though. Most women either want children, or fear they'll regret it if they don't. Yet how can you possibly project a decade forward and find out if having kids or not is the way to go, as suggested in Baby Hunger by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who proposes that women start planning their families in their early 20s. It seems you really can't start too early with the worry, the fears, the anguish.

Everybody thinks they have a right to input into women's decisions. Friends, family and work colleagues are all forever ask when you are going to have kids, and if not why not. There is a constant drip, drip, drip of pressure, a need to justify yourself in a way parents never have to.

Suzi Leather, the new chair of the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority, said this week that women should not be panicked into pregnancy like this just because they are scared they'll regret it later.

As the mother of three children, that's very easy for her to say, but she is right. There really is more to life than having children, and perhaps it takes a parent to have the guts to say this. In fact it is usually harangued and hassled parents who congratulate me the most on my childless choice; though in my case it was not so much a choice, more a case of time running out and me happily letting it run.

When you can't make decisions about even the simplest things, it's actually quite nice when nature does it for you; and, no, I never considered IVF because, unlike the professional, driven career woman my choice is supposed to represent, I simply could not afford it.

Which is where I part company with the whole to-have-or-not-to-have-kids debate. Like so many social issues today, it has been hijacked by the middle classes. You can be an earth mother, working mother (professional woman, of course) or childless career woman. Always there's the assumption that a woman who doesn't have kids is a high-flier and high-earner. But why?

I know poorly paid factory workers who have been sterilised because they didn't want kids. It doesn't follow that the childless among us are forging ahead in our careers, earning buckets of money and dressing head-to-toe in designer gear. And nor does it follow that the childless are necessarily single. I've been in a relationship for more than a decade and not having kids has, if anything, strengthened our love. As any counsellor will tell you, it's the birth of the first child that threatens a couple the most. Childless couples are frequently the happiest, since they don't face a constant tussle for their attention, their affection and their purses.

Parents frequently speak, and write, of the overwhelming joy and happiness having children brings. The endless surprises, the daft things their kids say, the unexpected acts of kindness, the sense of immortality, of sending your genes forward into the next century. I don't doubt any of this. But not having kids can be equally as surprising and enjoyable. The freedom, the ability to act spontaneously. The possibility of taking risks; running up debts knowing it isn't so terribly irresponsible since there's no one else's future to worry about. The chance to live for the moment, be a true hedonist and, all right, totally self-indulgent.

So it's selfish and self-absorbing, but who does it harm? And isn't having children, wanting a little version of you, equally as self-indulgent? Besides, it's frequently the non-parents among us who have more time for charity work, or volunteer to cover Christmas and August at work so parents can be with their kids during the school holidays.

There will be those who say I protest too much, that I want a child really, and it's true, I did. Once. So when it didn't happen, I expected to mind. Everyone told me I would. Instead, I feel more liberated than I could ever have imagined. There will be women who regret not having children but that's not a good enough reason to have one. Don't the children we do bring into this world deserve better?

· Laura Marcus is an agony aunt

laura_marcus@yahoo.co.uk

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