A Child-Free Life Can Be Full of Adventure. It’s Also Complicated.
This article originally appeared on Outside
In an era of escalating climate crises, crippling student debt, and an ongoing political war over women's reproductive rights, it's no wonder living child-free has become a movement, complete with its own set of influencers. A 2021 Pew Research study found that 44 percent of American non-parents aged 18 to 49 don't think they will have children, up from 37 percent in 2018.
Being child-free hasn't always been so openly accepted--in 2000, the year I turned 30, only 28 percent of American women between the ages of 30 and 34 were childless. I felt no direct pressure from family or friends to have a baby, but I was also surrounded by subtle social cues that parenthood was the nobler path, even though having children wasn't a choice I felt I had.
I grew up in the seventies and eighties when overpopulation was the looming existential threat. My parents had wanted a lot of kids, but out of concern for the planet they had three biological children and adopted two, a complex and sometimes painful dynamic.
By the time I was 30, I had separated from my husband of four years, I was still paying off graduate school debt, and I was struggling to make ends meet. Plus, I wanted to see the world. Having a kid in my situation seemed irresponsible, if not impossible.
Deciding whether or not to become a parent is deeply personal, which is why I've never felt compelled to write about my own experience. But I was excited to read Maria Coffey's new book, Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life, in hopes that she would articulate emotions I've been carrying around for decades.
Coffey, who splits her time between British Columbia and Spain, is 71 years old and a hard-core traveler in the vein of her contemporaries Tim Cahill or Paul Theroux. She's paddled a kayak around the world; started the adventure travel company, Hidden Places, with her partner Dag Goering; and co-founded the non-profit Elephant Earth Initiative.
She's also an award-winning author of 12 books. In 2000, after Joe Tasker, the love of her young life, disappeared while trying to summit Mount Everest, Coffey wrote Fragile Edge: A Personal Portrait of Loss on Everest. She followed it up with Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, exploring what happens to the people left behind by tragedy through interviews with the world's top climbers and the families of climbers who had died. It won a 2004 National Outdoor Book Award.
Coffey's books are honest, full of inquiry, and beautifully written. But what intrigued me about Instead is the hard-earned wisdom: It's one thing to proclaim the joys of a child-free life as a twenty- or thirty-something influencer. It's another thing to examine that life as a septuagenarian facing old age without any biological offspring. Perspectives change as we age--was Coffey still happy with her decision?
"Yes I am," Coffey told me in an email. But there are caveats. "It was only around my mid- sixties, when I realized others were seeing me as elderly, that I began to think about the reality of being old and child-free, and fear started creeping in. What happens to old child-free nomads when they get really old?"
With Instead, Coffey sets out to answer that question. In the process she offers readers a generous glimpse into her lifetime of wanderings, which makes her book feel like the best kind of old-school adventure travel yarn.
It begins with a Covid-era anecdote that would chill any traveler: While they're living in Catalonia, Spain, Coffey's husband Goering fails to return home after a routine e-bike ride. He's crashed, destroyed a leg, and dragged himself more than a mile to the nearest country road, where he flags down a passing vehicle. Maria is on her own to navigate the complications of care and recovery in a foreign country during a pandemic.
The book then skips back in time to Coffey's own precarious brush with death, a near drowning at age 21 off the coast of Morocco. She survives, barely: "I had been returned to life--but differently," she writes. "The invincibility of youth had been stripped away. Underneath was a raw understanding of the fragility of existence. It was a knowledge that would impel me to chase my dreams and inform the biggest choices I was to make in the years ahead."
The trouble, however, is that Coffey grew up in England and her Irish Catholic parents, who lived through World War II and only want peace and stability for their children, resist most of her choices. That sets her at odds with her mother, a woman she describes, in part, as "a fierce and controlling matriarch who branded guilt like a weapon."
Coffey backpacks through Europe, staying in youth hostels, hitchhiking, and experimenting with drugs. Upon graduating from university, she tries to appease her parents, accepting a teaching position at a Liverpool high school, but longs for something "bigger and exciting" and soon quits that job to follow her boyfriend to Peru. That relationship blows up and Coffey returns to Manchester, which leads her to a new circle of friends and to Tasker, who disappears on Mount Everest 30 months into their relationship. His death sets off three years of despair, inspires Coffey's first book, and fuels her exodus to Canada.
In Canada, Coffey falls in love with Goering, a veterinarian five years her junior who wants five children. His wish forces her to face her fears around motherhood that "are rooted in loss," she writes. After Tasker's death, she writes: "I understood there was no way to defend oneself against such pain, except not to love so deeply....No matter how I tried to rationalize it, the thought of having a child, of opening myself up to the possibility of the worst kind of bereavement, terrified me."
The couple delay their decision to have kids and instead set off around the world on a tandem kayaking journey. The years tick off as they survive many near-misses while paddling, Goering's cerebral malaria in the Solomon Islands, and a riot in Kenya. They start an adventure travel company to feed their wanderlust. In lieu of having her own kids, Maria forms bonds with children along the way, like Agnes, a Samburu girl from Kenya who she helps support through university and who calls her "mother."
Coffey's life is full. She has friends and family across the globe who have replaced the need for a nuclear family. But as she ages, doubts creep in: "All those warnings during my reproductive years about not having children started looming up again," she writes. "'You'll regret it. You'll be lonely when you're old.' At the time, I'd easily sloughed them off. Now I kept thinking about where parenthood might have led us."
Reading comments like these, I had an inkling that Coffey wasn't as sold on her child-free life as her book title implies. Or that she may have written it to finally free herself of the guilt brought on by her mother. She later clarifies, however, that it's not regret she's feeling. It's more, as a friend helps her realize, "counterfactual curiosity, wondering about ways you could have lived life differently." Ultimately, Coffey concludes that "the life I chose is the one I wanted."
That knowledge, though, doesn't help Coffey and Goering circumvent the realities of aging. One of the more poignant and humorous moments in Instead comes when they decide to play it safe and move off their island to an inland co-housing project where meals and chores are shared by neighbors. It's a cloying mismatch from day one. They quickly sell the house and move to Spain, where Georing's near-fatal accident takes place.
Coffey is almost 20 years older than me, but our lives have parallels. I, too, have had an overpowering desire to see the world since I was a girl. And I had childhood experiences that made me ambivalent toward motherhood. As a child-free adult I've also felt as if people perceive my life as more frivolous and less meaningful than that of a mother's, and I've even been told outright that I'm selfish. Unlike Coffey, however, I had support from my parents. Instead of feeling guilty, I was free to make the best choice for me at the time I was able to bear children.
I picked up Coffey's book hoping that it would be a ringing endorsement of a child-free life. But I quickly realized that Coffey is too honest to oversimplify such a fundamental, complex choice. What she offers instead is an articulate grappling with the great cosmic irony of being a woman: whether you bear one child, many children, adopt, or have none at all, each of these decisions will bring joy and pain. This reality should bond, rather than separate women, no matter which path we choose.
"Having a child is taking a big risk," Coffey wrote me in an email. "Deciding not to have children is also a risk. Life is a risk. You have to follow your own heart, trust your gut instincts. Don't make the decision to make someone else happy. Make it entirely for yourself."
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