Forget those other new year’s resolutions – the one thing we need to do, says Polly Vernon, is stop grilling each other about kids
I got a puppy. She is a dark apricot labradoodle, 14 weeks old at the time of writing; she’s called Rita (as in: Heyworth, Ora, Fairclough, Sue And Bob, Too, yes), and to call her the best decision I ever made would be to undersell her but…This article is not really about her. This article is about all the people I meet because of her, people who never spoke to me before (because: London) who now stop and chat like we’ve been bezzie mates for years, because they need to go through me before they can drop to their knees and have my puppy fling herself joyfully into their outstretched arms, thereby making their day instantly, infinitely better than it would have been, you are welcome.
Do I mind? Hell, no! It’s like living in this weird bubble of melty grinny goodwill, in which, everyone – total strangers, people who knew you by reputation and thought you a bit of a twat, people you fell out with in 2017 – is unbelievably delighted to see you (if only by association). But I have noticed a lot of them – if only ever the female ones – ask variations on a particular question, over and over, a question I think raises a point of busted etiquette. After the Obligatories (‘OH MY GOD, HE’S SO CUTE! Oh, sorry, sorry: she’s a girl! Awwwwww! How old? What breed? What’s her name? OH MY GOD, SHE’S SO CUTE!’) comes a speciously related, distinctly unnecessary follow-up: ‘I bet your kids adore her, don’t they?’ (or similar).
Those of you who’ve read my stuff before will possibly know I don’t have kids. You might also know this is a… I was going to say ‘choice’, but my childfree existence is much more than that. It’s a joyous rejection of everything society really deep down still expects of me (of every woman, at the end of the day), and it’s based on an instinctive, absolute knowledge that motherhood wouldn’t suit me (this came to me when I was a child), backed up by a few decades of experience, intellectual reasoning, and the fact that, even though everyone told me a biological clock would erupt at some point – it did not. Unsurprisingly, given I know myself better than anyone who ever said: ‘Oooh, bet you’ll regret it!’ to me, to the current moment, I can say with absolute confidence: I have never regretted anything less.
Give or take Rita.
But, then – how to react to all the puppy interrogators? If I simply say: ‘Uh, I actually haven’t got kids,’ they might pity me (ugh). If I add: ‘Never wanted them, awful business, can’t imagine why anyone does – terrible for the planet’ that sounds prickly to the point of being unconvincing, and as for the other stuff I teeter on the verge of saying (‘I totally could have had them? Stable relationship, financially viable; oh, and like, super-fertile? Had an abortion or three, as it happens…’), that’s venturing into the realm of just being poisonous.
And it’s not as if they mean anything bad by it. They look at me, all caring and maternal to Mistress Fluffington Fluffy Bottom of Archway (my dog has many names, also a few songs), and that triggers a not unreasonable assumption; they have kids (it is, I’ve noticed, only ever mothers who ask), so are casting about for another point of connection, and also: society has conditioned us to exactly ask this of every woman older than 30. Have you got kids, have you got kids, have you got kids, have you got kids? As I already said – feminism and decades of progress be damned! A woman’s first duty is still assumed to be procreation; anyone who, like me, has denied it will tell you that, as for those who want to have kids, but can’t…
Ah yes. Them. The ones struggling with fertility issues, with miscarriage, with the IVF rounds that won’t take; those women who do have biological clocks, who want children as surely and desperately as I do not, who are getting to the point where they know they just have to give up, admit defeat, and so grieve, silently and endlessly, for people never born, never even conceived… What’s it like for them to exist in a world where others ask, often, casually, about the thing that causes such extraordinary pain, more pain than anything else? If I find that question – the kid question – a little awkward, a little complicated, if I have to take a breath, moderate my emotional response, make a concerted effort to keep my tone light, to not be a total bitch in response: what on earth is it like for them? What sadness and confusion, what sense of shame, of failure, overwhelms them in response to those words?
Casual, everyday references to assumed children seem like such a mild thing, such a friendly thing, such a nothing, really. I have no doubt they’re intended that way. But given they’re potentially imposing deep pain on another person, reopening a barely-sealed wound, leaving them winded, gasping, incapable of answering you, it might be worth leaving them out of our repertoire of light chat with passing strangers. Denormalise a question as personal and private as wondering how another woman’s reproductive organs/life choices are shaping up; give her puppy a cuddle, move along.