When I asked my mother why she decided to have a baby she looked confused. She said: I don’t know, that is just what you did. I envy the simplicity. To me it seems like a privilege lost to the vestige of time: we no longer have the luxury to just ‘have them.’ Nowadays, it’s a choice, and while having a choice is great, making a choice is, well… pretty damn hard.
Of course, I understand that feminism is choice. A choice means options, agency and dignity. It also means being an active participant in the decisions you make for your life, and taking responsibility for the consequences of that choice. It means actively choosing to contribute to our carbon footprint, consciously adding to the world’s overpopulation problem and intentionally continuing the existence of human beings, who really are the world's biggest problem.
Of course there are some people who would disagree. In 2022, Elon Musk tweeted: “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”, a problem he’s seemingly tried to solve himself by having 10 children from three different women. Possible negative outcomes of population decline are increased economic pressure on the workforce and insufficient care for the elderly - all valid concerns that to me pale in comparison to a dying planet.
So on the one hand I believe that having a child is the weirdest thing you could possibly do in this world; morally, environmentally and vaginally. On the other hand, I have recently become incredibly broody (a degenerative brain disease that means when you look at a baby you want to eat it). How can I reconcile this want with the world we live in? How can I justify it to the world, to myself and, maybe most importantly, to the child?
We create people as if every single one of them would want to be created, when, really, you don’t know anything about these children. Having a baby is like throwing a £160,000 surprise party for someone you’ve never met. What if they asked you why on earth you would throw them this party? What are you supposed to say? “Hey sweetie, mummy was very hormonal and that’s why she put you in this post-apocalyptic landfill. Good luck!”
But my biggest anxiety of all has nothing to do with climate anxiety and other world worries. My biggest anxiety of all is that even if I wanted to have a baby, I don’t want to be a mother and I don’t think it’s fair that for me those two are linked. Having a baby and being a mother are two very different things. Having a baby: fun challenge you can do in your thirties instead of tough mudder. Being a mother? Horrible second job.
I already have a job, one I care about a lot. I’ve worked really hard to get to where I am in my career and motherhood just doesn’t seem something I’d be able to combine with it. Add on top of that the fact that mothers are supposed to be perfect, a vestige of all morality, whilst simultaneously being completely dismissed by society, and you have a formula I simply don’t want to go anywhere near. It seems way too hard, and incredibly unfair.
In my darker moments, I’ll envy women of the past for their lack of choice. The fact that they were just expected to have kids without any of the crushing world-worries we deal with today. Of course, this is a ridiculous thought. One, it reduces women of the past to some sort of homogenous blob who didn’t question their purpose in life and two, as much as making a choice is hard, I would never want to be left without it.
When I was in my twenties I believed I might avoid this dilemma altogether. Having children was the furthest thing from my mind, and whilst it was always a very distant possibility, I could also envision myself as a childless woman in my 50s, with a thriving career, an art collection and a Stanley Tucci type husband who keeps it tight and loves to cook.
Alas, I want a baby. So I try to be okay with it, I try to focus on the fact that I am a human being and having babies is a big part of many human journeys. I try to focus on the fact that society is changing, and that ‘being a mother’ can mean something different for me than it was for the many generations of women that came before me. I try to remember that I have a wonderful partner who has been adamant that he wants to share the responsibility 50/50 (yes, parents, I hear you laughing).
A friend of mine asked me whether or not I felt weird about talking about this choice before even knowing if I could have a baby and honestly: no. I actually want to be an active participant in this decision, which means I have to look at it from all sides. And if my partner and I start trying and it turns out we couldn’t have a baby, well… I’m a millennial. Preparing for a future that’s never coming to fruition is our bread and butter.
So I think I’m going to try, after all I just want to make Elon happy.