My generation has been told having a baby is too difficult but no one mentioned the joy
I’ve spent the past few years thinking a lot about motherhood. Three summers ago I moved into the flat I live in now with my then-boyfriend and almost immediately painted over the lemon tree mural that graced the walls of the room that became our study. It was painted for the previous owners’ baby and it felt caught between a warning and a promise.
Almost exactly two years after I painted over that mural, I found out I was pregnant. Fast-forward another couple of years and this morning, against that same wall, I kissed my son goodbye as my husband got him dressed to go to nursery. I’ve been a mother for 12 months now, and despite it being the toughest, most magical year of my life, if I could go back and tell myself it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought, I would.
The decision to have a child hadn’t been an easy one for me to make. I never identified with the images of motherhood I’d been presented with; I’d never found myself wanting at the sight of a babygrow. But as a heterosexual woman in a committed relationship, in her early 30s, babies cropped up all over the place. A huge, unspoken question mark: was I going to blow up my life, or not?
Because that was what I had been led to believe having a baby would do to me: annihilate the life I had worked so hard to create. I knew I was fortunate – I was a homeowner in London with a career I loved, a great circle of friends, a wedding on the horizon and several adventurous holidays a year. We hosted midweek dinner parties and devoted whole weekends to hangovers and idleness. A baby, we had been told, would end it all. Perhaps we could stay merrily child-free and spend our midlife getting really good at making cocktails, going to five-star hotels and spending the ungodly nursery fees on luxury skincare instead.
I had several reasons for not having a baby: it seems borderline cruel to raise a child against the backdrop of the climate crisis and impending international conflict, for one. Childcare costs continue to keep women out of the workplace, and I knew that it would be my work, rather than my husband’s, which would be compromised. I worried that the time and energy I poured into writing – a creative outlet that happens to pay my bills – would be sapped by motherhood. I also didn’t know whether my husband and I would encounter fertility struggles; I still count the fact we didn’t a huge privilege.
A year on and many of those things remain the case. I flinch at every new headline that spells doom for our existence on this planet. I now cram five days into three days a week – and as I work for myself, if the baby’s unwell I’m the one who foots the bill. I’m grateful to have a good nursery around the corner, but we’ve had to economise to make it work.
It’s hardly surprising that the birth rate is plummeting. According to the Office for National Statistics, the fertility rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1939. We’re part of a worldwide trend: the global fertility rate has halved over the past 50 years. If we carry on at this rate, almost every country in the world will have a shrinking population by the end of the century. There are several complex socio-economic reasons for this; among them the expectation that women should do the heavy lifting of raising children while contributing to a society that doesn’t prioritise affordable childcare.
But there are also the whispered conversations that don’t make the headlines, the ones that I had myself before having a child – dozens of times over, with strangers I’d not met, after I made a research project of trying to work out if I should have a baby and turned it into a book. It’s a notion that a child-free and questioning friend raised in my living room just the other week: that maybe having a baby is just too difficult.
I know this feeling well because I lived with it for years – far longer, actually, than I’ve lived with a baby. The reality is something that nobody really told me: that motherhood is far better than I could have imagined.
Over the past year, as I’ve slept less than I could have ever anticipated and endured worse mental health, as I’ve laughed more and delighted in the smallest, most inexplicable nothings (the extremity of joy from watching a child who has just learned to smile, clap, crawl or speak is not to be underestimated), I’ve thought about the stories we tell about motherhood.
The interesting thing – to me, at least – is how they’ve changed over the generations. My child’s grandmothers were expected to raise us while maintaining the often isolating illusion that babies were infinitely charming things that would only improve your life. Over the past 20 years, however, things have started to tilt the other way (I like to think of Rachel Cusk’s boundary-breaking book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother as a kind of watershed). Women have made the crucial space for themselves to talk about the often grisly realities of raising children; somewhere down the line mentioning the good bits got pushed aside.
I was barely out of my first trimester when a colleague dismissed my plans to get a Kindle, so I could read while breastfeeding – after all, I wouldn’t read again once I had a baby. A few weeks later I was told not to worry about where I’d put my desk, because I wouldn’t be writing again after I’d given birth. I was told that I’d undergo a change in my cognition not experienced since puberty. All of this by other women, two of whom were mothers themselves, with a kind of well-meaning glee. I’ve lost count of the times people told me how little I’d sleep, how rarely I’d go out for dinner, how I’d never stay in a nice hotel again (contrary to their warnings, I’ve managed all three). Even as I was turning up and speaking at book festivals, a four-month-old strapped to my chest, people questioned my ability to do so. Sometimes it feels like we are so insistent that parenthood should be one kind of thing that we are incapable of imagining it to be anything else.
Because while it is impossible to imagine quite the level of physical and mental fatigue a wakeful baby can induce, or the depth of the resentment you might feel as your non-birthing partner heads out to the office, it is also impossible to envisage the enormity of the experience of having a child. The heady contradiction of claustrophobia and precious intimacy that breastfeeding can induce, for instance, or that having a baby babbling in your bed at 6am can feel like a delirious daily marathon.
My matrescence has been as brutal and as wonderfully life-changing as anyone else’s. I’ve felt lonely and deeply content and blissful and trapped. I’m grateful to the women who have found the space and energy to step up and tell their stories, but I wish society allowed them to talk about the good things, too. Motherhood is too beautifully complex to be binary.
Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival by Alice Vincent is out in paperback on May 2 (Canongate, £11)
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