I never set out to write a book about motherhood. Especially not before I had a baby myself, at a point where I didn’t know if I even would.
And yet somehow my debut novel Preloved ended up full of different perspectives on parenthood, and the absence of it. Officially it’s a book about a woman volunteering in a charity shop – but as I wrote they would emerge, again and again, these musings on children; what it means to have them, and what it is to be one. My protagonist Gwen finds herself adrift and isolated in her late 30s, after her friends have all performed the time-old routine: 'settled down', had babies, moved out of London to somewhere more sensible and swapped in-person friendship for Instagram likes. Meanwhile her oldest friend Suze is struggling in her marriage, having realised that she doesn't want kids while her husband does.
Woven through the main story are vignettes, ostensibly about items in the charity shop but really about the way objects become vessels for our relationships. Here too, there are meddling parents and grieving parents, guilty daughters and ungrateful sons. There’s a father branded a ‘bare minimum parent’ because he won’t contribute to the school WhatsApp. A woman sucked into a pyramid scheme under the promise of buying her teenagers’ affection.
There's even a whole chapter capturing the sick-soaked delirium of the early weeks after giving birth, which I wrote, audaciously, two years before actually experiencing it. Though I was relieved to find it was pretty accurate.
I’m among one of the last of my friends to have a child – partly due to circumstance and priorities, working out if I definitely wanted one, then waiting a while for it to happen when I realised I definitely did. As such, I lived for a few years as one of the cheerfully, then not so cheerfully, child-free. I rejoiced in my freedom and lie-ins and my intact pelvic floor, quietly lamenting the loss of one friend after another to the sisterhood of soft play centres. I celebrated each chubby arrival while worrying it might never happen for me.
Now, with a dribbly three-month-old filling my days and clogging up my camera roll, I've switched camps. And I won’t lie, it feels odd – like I'm cheating on my past self, or at least on my main character.
I now know that there is no place for posturing or ironic eye-rolls in those early weeks and months in the trenches
“It feels like I’m leaving a fun club to join a much less fun club,” I admitted to one parent friend when I was pregnant.
“I get it,” she replied, without judgement. “But the thing people don’t tell you is that having kids is so much fun. It’s just a very different kind of fun.” She was right, thank god. It’s the kind of fun that sees you applauding a loud up-the-back poo like it’s the Last Night of the Proms, but it’s fun nonetheless.
In Preloved, I’ve attempted to do justice to those tricky years, and the complicated emotional gymnastics whereby we work out whether we definitely want to do it, this thing that everyone says is heaven while making it sound, often, like hell. If – and there are volumes in that ‘if’ alone – we’re lucky enough to be able to.
Plus the uncomfortable truth: that we can never get an impartial perspective, because (almost) no one in the world will tell you that they regret having children.
"It was necessary, Gwen realised then, for both things to be true at once. It needed to be true that parental love was a uniquely magical, unknowable, stupefying thing that made all the pain and poo and sacrifice worth it. She’d seen it in the eyes of enough exhausted parents to know: they needed it to be true. People needed that pay-off in order to continue the human race. But at the same time, it needed to be true that a life without children could be every ounce as rewarding, every bit as fulfilling, every bit as meaningful as one with. If this reproductive doublethink was ever exposed, society might crumble."
For a while I liked to think of parenthood as a bit like New Zealand. I could fully believe that it was a beautiful place, that it would take my breath away, that it might be amazing to go there – but also that it was totally fine if I didn’t. I could be perfectly content with a life in which I never go to New Zealand, because there are so many other adventures to have. And let’s be honest, it’s a very long and expensive flight.
(The irony is not lost on me that having had a baby now means I’m probably less likely to go to New Zealand, at least any time soon.)
To be clear, Gwen’s situation is not mine, and nor is Suze’s. I had the privilege of a long-term partner who also wanted kids, and for every advert or Insta post sending my biological clock into overdrive, there would generally be a knackered friend recounting their third bout of nursery school norovirus in a month to balance things out. But still – having felt many feelings during my child-free years, there are certain things I’m determined never to do or say.
For example: I swear to god, for as long as I live I will never tell anyone without kids "you've never known a love like it!"
Because sure, it’s true that I’d never known love like the love I now have for my daughter. But I’ve also never known love like the love other people have for their sister, or their dog, or Wolverhampton Wanderers. I can’t fully know the love my friends have for their partners, or their jobs, or their babies either – because we are all different people, and we all love differently. Countless types of love can shake us to our core, but it isn’t quantifiable. It can’t be measured on a Richter scale.
I’ll never tell another woman with stupidly long hair that she’ll have to submit to the mum bun once a baby comes along. Because it turns out that if you’re ok with prising it out of a tiny, clammy fist every 38 seconds, you don’t! See also: “sleep now, while you can!” (with this bladder?), and the multi-purpose “just you wait…” accompanied by teeth-sucking and ominous head shake.
There are a whole load more unhelpful divisions once you get to this side of the wall
Likewise telling expectant parents that “life will never be the same again”. Again, true – but also, just kind of how time works? Tomorrow isn’t the same as today isn’t the same as yesterday, and that fact stands whether you’re procreating or not. Life moves on, and any number of big internal or external changes can suddenly fling your world into disarray. There’s no denying having a baby is a life-changing experience, but I think we need to stop pretending it is THE life-changing experience.
Furthermore, it’s a scary and unhelpful thing to say to people who are already on the train to nappyville. There were many things I didn’t know about having a child before I had one (perineal massage springs to mind), but “it’ll change your life forever” was hardly a secret. It’s right there at the top of the press release.
However, if the headline challenges of parenthood are well publicised, then I’ve also lost count of the number of times in the past few months I’ve cringed at how little I ‘got it’ before.
The mild frustration I used to feel at friends with kids not being able to travel across town, or leave them at night, or skip out on a family Saturday to mooch about with me – I get it now. I get that it isn’t even about shifting priorities so much as the dual desire of wanting so badly to do those things, while also feeling the only place you make sense now is exactly where you are, boobs-out on the sofa, maybe forever. I know that digital support networks can be every bit as powerful as a real hug, and I also know that when a friend with kids doesn’t text back for hours, or weeks, it isn’t through lack of care – it’s because they physically don’t have the spare hands. I know that “no need to reply” are magical words, and “we’re bringing food” even more so.
Then there’s the hilarious, pigheaded belief that I somehow wouldn’t be one of ‘those’ parents. The ones who make having babies their entire identity. The ones who turn their kids into a content farm. The ones who clap at poo.
I now know that there is no place for posturing or ironic eye-rolls in those early weeks and months in the trenches. Babies fill up our conversation and our social feeds because they’re all-consuming, often literally. We clap at poo because that poo is a collaborative project. It’s the best work we’ve produced all day.
And if there is an arbitrary line separating those with kids and those without, I’ve quickly learned that there are a whole load more unhelpful divisions once you get to this side of the wall. Breast vs bottle. Routine vs baby-led everything. ‘Gentle’ parenting versus… well to be honest, I’m still unclear on this one. Rough parenting? Flinging your child into a pile of broken bricks and hoping for the best? Anyway, for every moment of baby-having bonding us together, there’s an unhelpful dogma trying to drive us apart.
I understand now that biology has programmed the sound of your own offspring’s cry to cut through you like cheese wire, so that it is physically impossible to focus on the conversation you’re trying to have on the other side of a BBQ. I get the way rationality sometimes goes out of the window, replaced by the gut-twanging certainty that the one time you let your baby out of your sight will be the time it gets, for example, eaten by a passing bear.
And I’ve learned that “a bad night” doesn’t leave you tired in the pleasantly fuzzy way of rolling into work after a heavy sesh the night before. It makes you feel as though you’re underwater, dragging your limbs along at half speed while your baby grows like a time-lapse weed, and the world whirls by above your head.
Or maybe that’s just me. Perhaps it feels different to you. And maybe you don’t need to be a parent to understand that; maybe you just need to have insomnia, or some other force keeping you up all night against your will. Maybe none of these feelings is unique to parenthood at all – we just package them up that way.
The truth is there isn’t a single, binary divide between those with kids and those without. Rather, there are a million different intersections and connections between everyone’s lived experiences, babies or no. There are things we can never fully understand about other people’s lives, and places where we cross over and suddenly see each other in sharp relief. In writing a whole heap of different, fictional, parent/child relationships in Preloved, I realised we can probably use a little more imagination and empathy when it comes to people’s real life stories too.
Before having a baby, I hated being told that I couldn’t possibly understand. Now I realise I really couldn’t understand, not always, not fully – but that’s fine. Feeling seen is wonderful, but we can love our friends blindly too.
And make no mistake about it, I also know that I’m still in the amateur league. I’ve only had one baby, a mere three months ago, so I still can’t fully understand. I don’t know what it’s like to teethe or wean yet. I don’t yet know how it feels to have a toddler, or two under three. So much of parenting so far has felt like driving at night, seeing only the tiny patch of road illuminated immediately before you, the rest of the journey a foggy unknown. Hell, I probably will give into the mum bun somewhere further down the road. But only when I’m ready, and not because society says I have to.
Until then, I’m happy to identify with the character I made up, who picks clumps of baby sick out of her hair before buying a pair of improbably high secondhand stilettos. She’s a messy composite of the person she was, the person she is now, and the person she wants to be. Just like we all are, really.
Preloved by Lauren Bravo is published by Simon & Schuster, £14.99