On the eve of this annual celebration, Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there. I know a good many of you, and I know how much the motherhood experience has filled your life.
I see how you look at those who haven't gone there yet and those who are still not sure whether they want to and those who are trying very hard using the wonders of modern technology to get there. You see the childless women you love and you can't help hoping that one day they will feel what you feel. "Oh, I can't explain it," you mothers say. "This feeling when you have a child of your own. There is nothing in the world like it. Oh, wait until you see."
I'm not suggesting you are being patronising to those of us without children. I know you mean every word and that your children have brought you joy beyond measure. I see that you want your friends and your sisters and your own children to experience that joy. For many of you, motherhood is central to your identity as a woman.
In lots of cases becoming a mother was a massive life ambition that was crying out to be fulfilled. You would not have felt complete without your babies. I'm not saying you don't have problems and struggles with motherhood, just that for you it means almost everything to be able to call yourself "Mother". Everything. So I mean it. Congratulations. Happy Mother's Day. (Especially you, Ma.)
A view from the other side. I'd never much thought about the word childless before that morning I was chatting with my brother in America. He has two children and he threw the word into a casual conversation we were having about the nature of friendship. I was asking him how much he saw a certain couple these days, old friends of his, and he said something like "we don't see them much any more because they are childless." And he wasn't being dismissive. Just stating a fact. Childless. It sounded like a disease.
I'm one of those sitting on the fence about the whole baby thing. I can't seem to muster up enough enthusiasm to give it a proper go. On the one hand, if I became pregnant I don't think I'd be upset, but on the other hand if I found out that I couldn't, I don't see myself running off in a panic to the nearest fertility clinic. Confusion reigns. And a lack of commitment. I'm easy, I say, in the face of baby-making, as though someone were offering me pasta or pizza. But this is not easy.
I'm ambivalent about the issue and it feels strange because motherhood is not something you associate with ambivalence. The clock is ticking and I'm supposed to want this more than anything else in the world. But if there was a choice between my finally getting it together to spend nine months writing a novel I could be proud of or spending the same amount of time creating a baby, I'd have to seriously think about it.
I've been reading a wonderful blog called The Waiting Game (2weekwait.blogspot.com) written by an Irish woman who is bravely documenting her struggle to conceive. She has just had two embryos transferred into her uterus and she is waiting as they "snuggle in".
As she catalogues the emotional, physical and financial cost of her journey, I feel grateful that I don't think I will ever want a baby so desperately I'd put myself through that. But for her, it's everything. I respect her journey, I even feel enormously moved by it, but I can't share the feeling. Not for the first time in my life I hear myself asking: "Is there something seriously wrong with me?" Well, if there is I am not alone. "If I want to hear the pitter-patter of little feet, I'll put shoes on my cat." You come across "fun bumper stickers" such as that one while Googling the word childless. There is a whole community out there dedicated to a life spent not producing children. Groups called No Kidding, websites that declare themselves militantly as "child-free zones". Women who actively don't want to reproduce and who are not fearful of a future without children.
Apparently, childless is not the politically correct term for it any more. I must remember to tell my brother that the new expression is child-free. So, for the moment, I'm child-free. But the truth is I'm not. There is Fionn, Bláthín, Mella and Rossa; there is Hannah, Emma and Daniel; there is Charlie, and there is Peter and Niel. There is Ethan and Rowan and Stefan. There is James and Matilda, and another Charlie, and Shane and Peter.
It's possible I may never have a child of my own. No fruit of my loins, no ego-boosting reproduction of me, no person to look after me in old age, no small person to talk about when small talk with a stranger runs dry, no wailing reason to get up in the morning when I'd prefer to have a lie-in and no little person to bring me into contact with bigger people I'd prefer not to engage with. It's very likely I will be entirely happy about this situation. And that "less" may turn out to be more.