For some reason, the world really wants to know when women are having children. It likes them to have planned this shit early. It wants them to be very clear and upfront about it – ‘Oh, I’d like a glass of Merlot, the clams, the steak – and a baby when I’m 32, please.’
It is oddly panicked by women who are being a bit relaxed and ‘whevs’ about it all: ‘But your body clock!’ it is apt to shout. ‘You need to be planning at least five years ahead! If you want a baby at 34, you need to be engaged by 29, minimum. Chop chop! Find a husband! Look on Ocado! Or you’ll end up like poor barren lonely Jennifer Aniston.’
And if a woman should say she doesn’t want to have children at all, the world is apt to go decidedly peculiar:
‘Ooooh, don’t speak too soon,’ it will say – as if knowing whether or not you’re the kind of person who desires to make a whole other human being in your guts, out of sex and food, then base the rest of your life around its welfare, is a breezy, ‘Hey – whevs’ decision. Like electing to have a picnic on an unexpectedly sunny day; or changing the background picture on your desktop.
‘When you meet the right man, you’ll change your mind, dear,’ the world will say, with an odd, aggressive smugness.
My sister Caz – who has been resolute in her desire not to have children since the age of nine – went through a spell of replying to this statement with, ‘When Myra Hindley met her right man, it was Ian Brady.’
But she’s stopped now.
Women, it is presumed, will always end up having babies. They might go through silly, adolescent phases of pretending that it’s something that they have no interest in – but, when push comes to shove, womanhood is a cul-de-sac that ends in Mothercare, and that’s the end of that. All women love babies – just like all women love Manolo Blahnik shoes, and George Clooney. Even the ones who wear nothing but trainers, or are lesbians, and really hate shoes, and George Clooney.
So, really, you’re kind of helping them when you ask them when they’re going to finally get on with it, and have a baby. You’re just reminding them to keep their eyes open – in case they see any sperm, when they’re out and about. They might need it, later.
When I was 18, I presented, for one year, a late-night music show on Channel 4, called Naked City. If asked to summarise it in one sentence, I would describe it as ‘Like The Word but without the mentals’.
Whilst this meant we didn’t have viewers coming on the show eating a cup of vomit, or getting off with an old lady, it also meant we didn’t get the viewing figures, either, and it was cancelled after two series.
None the less, when it first launched, it had a bit of publicity around it, and I got to spend a couple of weeks being interviewed by Her Majesty’s press, and having my picture taken during which I would, unfailingly, do my ‘open-mouthed Muppet face’, to the consequent and immense dispiritment of everyone involved.
Whilst all the various sections of the press had their trademark angles on the interviews – the Sun asked me about my ‘boobs’, the Mirror tried to get me involved in a ‘feud’ with Dani Behr, the Mail wanted to know just how far back the Moran family had emigrated into the country, and, therefore, how foreign I was – there was one common question, across the board:
‘And so – do you want to have kids?’
The first time I was asked this, I laughed hysterically for three minutes.
The interview was being conducted in my shambolic Camden house – electricity still cut off, Saffron the stupid dog moulting everywhere so badly that I’d had to put a sheet of newspaper down on the sofa, for the interviewer to sit on lest he leave wearing a pair of dog-hair chaps. I was in pyjamas at 4pm, chain-smoking, and serving out tots of Southern Comfort in a wine glass. They had come to interview someone whose job was presenting a late-night rock show on the ‘naughty’ channel, where I interviewed Mark E. Smith from The Fall when he was so pissed out of his head, he spent half the interview staring at his own hands on the table. I was 18. I was a child. But, still:
‘And so – do you want to have kids?’
‘Have kids?’ I hooted. ‘Have kids? Dude, the mice in my kitchen have starved to death because I never have anything in. I can’t even care for vermin. Have kids. HAHAHAHA.’
So that was the first time – but not the last.
Of course, I understood why these journalists were asking me this question: because, when I was being a journalist, I was asking this question too.
I wasn’t at first. When I interviewed, say, Björk, or Kylie Minogue, the last thing on my mind was asking them if they wanted children. After all, I never asked Oasis, or Clive Anderson, if they did. But if you work for a glossy women’s magazine – which I did, sporadically – when you filed your interview, more often than not, the editor would read it, and then ring you, to have this conversation:
EDITOR: It’s amazing. Reeeeeally lovely. Fabulous. Gorgeous. We love it. LOOOOOVE IIIIIIT. [PAUSE] Just two things, though. First of all – what was she wearing?
ME: I dunno. A top?
EDITOR: Whose top?
ME, confused: Her top?
EDITOR: No – whose top? Was it Nicole Farhi? Joseph? Armani?
ME, trying: It was grey …
EDITOR, briskly: Just ring her PR and ask, could you? And put it in the first paragraph. You know. ‘Kylie sits on the couch with her bare feet tucked under her, dressed down but elegant in a cashmere top by Joseph, trousers by McQueen, kicked-off Chloé shoes on the floor beside her.’ That kind of thing.
ME, bemused but willing: OK.
EDITOR: And second thing – does she want kids?
ME: I dunno!
EDITOR: Is she going out with someone now?
ME: I dunno! I didn’t ask. We were talking about the album, and this party she went to, and how she cried when Michael Hutchence died …
EDITOR: Could you just do a quick phoner and ask her? Ask her when she wants to become a mother. I think the piece needs it …
Only with the women, though. I’ve never once been asked to do it with a male interviewee. You never get asked to ask Marilyn Manson if he’s been hanging around in JoJo Maman Bébé, touching tiny booties and crying.
The reason they don’t ask men when they’re having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on as normal once they’ve had a baby. That’s how the world’s still wired. Millions of admirable men choose not to, obviously – they go, hand in hand, with their partners, and cut the sleeplessness and the fear and the exhaustion and the remorselessness of the birdlike squawking 50/50. As a result, I fancy them.
But when women are asked when they’re going to have children, there is, in actuality, another, darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it. If you listen very, very carefully – turn off all extraneous sound-sources, and press your finger to your lips, to silence passers-by – you can hear it.
It’s this: ‘When are you going to fuck it all up by having kids?’
When are you going to blow a four-year chunk, minimum, out of your career – at an age when most people’s attractiveness, creativity and ambition is peaking – by having a baby? When are you going to – as is the decent, right and beautiful thing – put all your creativity and power on hold, in order to tend to the helpless, minute-by-minute needs of your newly born? When are you going to stop making films/albums/books/ deals? When do the holes start appearing in your CV? When do you get left behind, and forgotten? CAN WE GET POPCORN AND WATCH?
When people ask working women, ‘When are you going to have a baby?’ what they’re really asking is, ‘When are you going to leave?’
And the question is always ‘When are you going to have kids?’ Rather than ‘Do you want to have kids?’
Women are so frequently scared about their biological clocks – ‘YOU’VE ONLY GOT TWO YEARS LEFT TO HAVE A BABY!’ – that they never get the chance to consider if they actually care or not if the damn thing grinds to a halt. With female fertility being presented as something limited, and due
to vanish quite soon, there’s a risk of women panicking and having a baby, ‘just in case’ – in much the same way they panic, and buy a half-price cashmere cardigan, two sizes too small, in the sales.
On the one hand, they didn’t really want it but on the other they might not have the chance to get one again, so better safe than sorry.
It’s not unknown for mothers to say at 2am, and gin-truthful, ‘It’s not that I wish I hadn’t had Chloe and Jack. It’s just, if I could do it all again, I don’t know whether I’d have kids at all.’
But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, ‘I choose not to,’ or, ‘It all sounds a bit vile, tbh.’ We call these women ‘selfish’. The inference of the word ‘childless’ is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of non-mothers as rangy lone wolves – rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys, or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirties if they don’t ‘finish things’ properly, and have children.
Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow, women are incomplete without children. Not the simple biological ‘fact’ that all living things are supposed to reproduce, and that your legacy on earth is the continuation of your DNA – but something more personal, insidious and demeaning. As if a woman somehow remains a child herself until she has her own children – that she can only achieve ‘elder’ status by dint of having produced someone younger. That there are lessons that motherhood can teach you that simply can’t be replicated elsewhere – and every other attempt at this wisdom and self-realisation is a poor and shoddy second. Like mothers can get a first in PPE from Oxford, whilst the best the childless can manage is a 2:1 from Leicester de Montford University.
Although I’m generally pro any rare anomaly in societal attitude that values women’s work highly – in this case, the belief that motherhood is some necessary, transformative event, without any parallel or equivalent – it is, ultimately, a right pain in the arse for women.
Part of this feeling that women can only become powerful elders in society when they have kids – the rise of the ‘yummy mummy’ in the UK, or Sarah Palin’s ‘mama grizzly’ in the US – is, I suspect, linked to the fact that women aren’t valued when they actually do get old: essentially, the peak of your respectability and wisdom is seen to come in the years you’re still fertile, holding down a family and, increasingly, a job at the same time. By the time you hit 55 you’re being fired from the BBC and getting sniped at for being wrinkly. You don’t have a glorious, eminent old age – where you’re a bit like Blake Carrington, but a lady – to look forward to. Your big moment in society is during the breeding years. The inherent sexism – and stupidity – in this takes my breath away.
Because this injunction for all women to have children isn’t in any way logical. If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet really doesn’t need all of us to produce more babies.
Particularly First World babies, with their ferocious consumption of oil and forest and water, and endless burping-out of carbon emissions and landfill. First World babies are eating this planet like termites. If we had any real perspective on fertile, Western women, we’d be jumping on them in the streets screaming, ‘JESUS! CORK UP YOUR NETHERS! IMMUNISE YOURSELF AGAINST SPERM!’
If we could remember this for more than ten seconds at a time, women would never be needled with ‘So – when are you going to pop one out?’ again.
Because it’s not simply that a baby puts a whole person-ful of problems into the world. It takes a useful person out of the world, as well. Minimum. Often two. When you have young children, you are useless to the forces of revolution and righteousness for years. Before I had my kids I may have mooched about a lot but I was politically informed, signing petitions, and recycling everything down to watch batteries. It was compost heap here, dinner from scratch there, public transport everywhere. No Barclays Bank, no Kenyan beans – I paid my dues to the union, and to charity. I rang my mother, regularly. I was smugly, bustlingly, low-level good.
Six weeks into being poleaxed by a newborn colicky baby, however, and I would have happily shot the world’s last panda in the face if it made the baby cry for 60 seconds less. The towelling nappies – ‘If we don’t use towelling nappies, who will?’ – were dumped for disposables; we lived on ready meals. Nothing got recycled; the kitchen was a mess. Union dues and widow’s mites were cancelled – we needed the money for the disposables, and the ready meals. My mother could have died and I would neither have known nor cared.
I had no idea what was going on outside the house – I didn’t read a newspaper, or watch a news report, for over a year. The rest of the world disappeared. This world, anyway – with China, and floodplains, and malaria, and insurgency. My world map now was soft – made of brightly coloured felt, and appliqué: Balamory to the north, Fireman Sam’s Pontypandy to the west, and the rest of the planet covered in the undulating turf of Tele-tubbyland, and scattered with rabbits.
Every day, I gave thanks that both my husband and I were just essentially useless arts critics – in no way engaged in the general betterment of the world.
‘Imagine if you and I had been hot-shot geneticists, working on a cure for cancer,’ I used to say, gloomily, after another panicked day of shoddy, half-finished work, filed with the despairing cries of, ‘Dear God, let the editor have pity on us!’
‘And we were so exhausted that we had to simply give up the project – downgrade to something easier, and less vital,’ I continued, eating dry coffee granules, for energy. ‘Lizzie’s colic would be responsible for the deaths of billions. Billions.’
Let’s face it, most women will continue to have babies, the planet isn’t going to run out of new people, so it’s of no real use to the world for you to have a child. Quite the opposite, in fact. That shouldn’t stop you having one if you want one, of course – a cheery cry of ‘Yes – but my baby might grow up to be JESUS. Or EINSTEIN! Or JESUS EINSTEIN!’ is all the justification you need, if you actually want one.
But it’s also worth remembering it’s not of vital use to you as a woman, either. Yes, you could learn thousands of interesting things about love, strength, faith, fear, human relationships, genetic loyalty and the effect of apricots on an immature digestive system.
But I don’t think there’s a single lesson that motherhood has to offer that couldn’t be learned elsewhere. If you want to know what’s in motherhood for you, as a woman, then – in truth – it’s nothing you couldn’t get from, say, reading the 100 greatest books in human history; learning a foreign language well enough to argue in it; climbing hills; loving recklessly; sitting quietly, alone, in the dawn; drinking whisky with revolutionaries; learning to do close-hand magic; swimming in a river in winter; growing foxgloves, peas and roses; calling your mum; singing while you walk; being polite; and always, always helping strangers. No one has ever claimed for a moment that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer, and crippled by it. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Newton, Faraday, Plato, Aquinas, Beethoven, Handel, Kant, Hume. Jesus. They all seem to have managed quite well.
Every woman who chooses – joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire – not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women – presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on, and on …
Whilst motherhood is an incredible vocation, it has no more inherent worth than a childless woman simply being who she is, to the utmost of her capabilities. To think otherwise betrays a belief that being a thinking, creative, productive and fulfilled woman is, somehow, not e
nough. That no action will ever be the equal of giving birth.
Let me tell you, however momentous being a mother has been for me, I’ve walked around exhibitions of Coco Chanel’s life-work, and it looked a lot more impressive, to be honest. I think it’s important to confess this. If you’re insanely talented and not at all broody, why not just go and have more fun? As I’m sure we’re all aware by now, there really are no prizes for drudgery. Jesus is not keeping a note of every tiny arse you’ve wiped in Jesus’s Big Jotter of Martyrdom.
And if you’re a nerdy girl, you’ve read enough books and seen enough films to know that being on a mission, saving the world, trying to get the band back together, or just putting on a play, right here, in a barn, really is a life well lived. Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it.
Feminism needs Zero Tolerance over baby angst. In the 21st century, it can’t be about who we might make, and what they might do, any more. It has to be about who we are, and what we’re going to do.
Plus – having decided to remain footloose, unimpregnated and at the height of her creative potential – Caz is always available for baby-sitting for me. I’m going to get her an IUD for Christmas.
CHAPTER 14
Role Models And What We Do With Them
If there is one single thing that gives me hope for the future of female liberation, it has been, over the last few years, watching the fall, and rise, of various female icons. In many ways, it is within the pages of the glossy gossip magazines that the next chapter of feminism has slowly, and incongruously, been taking shape.