Childlessness

Choices, grief, and narratives

Photo by saeed mhmdi on Unsplash

Maybe you were surprised by the photograph of a lone man accompanying this headline?

Let’s start by talking about the (lack of) narrative around childless men. (Sorry, I’m going to use that word even though it is also problematic, as discussed in the next section, because this is the label being given to people who don’t have children, whether by choice or not. In other words, I’m not trying to label; rather, I’m trying to understand the narrative around the label.)

While it may seem ‘lucky’ that oftentimes men without children face less questions or judgment from society, sometimes they want to talk about it and have nowhere to go.

As this article in GQ discusses, it can be “hard to be a man who can’t, or won’t, have children.” Research shows also that men without children can be as “broody” or “depressed” as women in the same situation.

This article in The Guardian talks to men “mourning the family they never had”:

Dr Robin Hadley, 58, and childless by circumstance, recently completed a PhD exploring the experiences of involuntarily childless older men. “I found,” he says, “there was little difference in the desire to become a parent between female and male childless individuals. But that study also indicated that for some male participants, not becoming a parent had a greater negative effect. That’s because there are no narratives around childlessness for men.”

Which brings me back to the first article in this series on Parenting where we asked if ideas around parenting are too artificially gendered?

However, the fact remains that society still sees these roles differently. Perhaps there is more judgment on women who do not have children as well as more questions for them. I’m not trying to get at is it harder for men or women, because I think each individual’s journey is unique. I only begin with this opposition to consider more silent and visible narratives in juxtaposition.

What is childlessness?

The term itself is something that many are trying to erase but it has a narrative to trace as well. Why erase it? Because it suggests that having children is normal. It also places the ‘burden’ of having children on women. Most men are not questioned about the reasons they do not have children, at least to the same extent as women, although as seen above, this can also be detrimental. And, perhaps paradoxically, more childless women than men have “positive attitudes” about their childlessness.

It also challenges to categorize people into those who don’t want and those who couldn’t as well as those who have lost children, for whatever reason, with the addition of the term ‘child-free.’ An investigation of both terms by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian led her to some difficult online “misogynistic” communities but also clarified to her the issue of using the terms at all:

I was interested in how people without children may feel about that, so I’ve been asking them on- and offline whether they see the use of “childfree” as an improvement. People who had chosen not to have children generally preferred to be referred to as “childfree”, but those whose “childlessness” was involuntary, due to infertility, bereavement or life circumstances, felt erased by it. Many complained that both terms positioned having children as the default, when it shouldn’t be (“I’m just a woman living life,” said one respondent). Why define by deficit? Indeed, I’d say the overwhelming majority disliked both words, with one being seen as stigmatising and the other gleeful and nasty in its implication that parents somehow need “liberating”.

Doing this kind of research is important but not fun. Just plugging the world “childless” into google gives you heaps of videos about why you should be having children. Interestingly, the difficult stories of people wanting children or who have lost them are not the first to come up nor are the ones about rational reasons some people don’t want to have children.

But there’s some positive as well. Older involuntary childless communities are forming, including those with men, to share their grief over not having children. And research is setting things straight. While a lot of people assume (voluntary) childlessness is a new phenomenon, Population Europe and others have shared information showing its nothing new at all. It’s not some twenty-first century problem that necessarily needs solving, although some twenty-first century realities like urban populations, the cost of childcare or further education, and extended families living farther apart might influence someone’s decision not to have children (or to have fewer).

Let’s look at the narrative surrounding a couple of celebrity women (who have entered the narratives themselves) and then a really beautiful book by Meg Mason.

Celebrity women

Michelle Yeoh

Michelle Yeoh made history by being the first woman of Asian decent to win the Best Actress title at the Academy Awards this year. The Malaysian star who was a beauty queen and professional ballerina before starting her acting career in Hong Kong has long done nearly all of her stunts including those in the Oscar winner this year. If you want to hear my take on the film, I recorded a five minute podcast on why I loved Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is also a great article on RogerEbert.com that discusses why “It’s about damn time” that she got some recognition. (If you’re still not sure, check out “How Michelle Yeoh’s Stunts Overshadowed Jackie Chan’s in ‘Supercop.’”)

Yeoh used her award speech to talk about how important her win was for children watching who “look like [her]” but also to thank her own mom and mothers everywhere:

"I have to dedicate this to my mom, all the moms in the world, because they are really the superheroes, and without them, none of us would be here tonight."

-Michelle Yeoh at the 2023 Academy Awards

Although Yeoh does thank her “godchildren” and plays the role of mother in the film, she is not a mother in real life, at least of the traditional kind (as she may likely mother her godchildren or others, including her partner’s adult son…romper tells us “she is a proud stepmom and grandma”).

Yeoh has opened up about not being able to have children and this leading to the reason for her divorce from Dickson Poon (she now has a long term partner - Jean Todt). In 2018, Yeoh told you magazine:

Did she want [children]? ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘Unfortunately, I couldn’t. I tried IVF, everything.’ Was she philosophical about the situation? ‘At the beginning, no. I was desperate. I love kids and saw myself surrounded by them. But there’s only so much you can put your body and mind through. It comes to a stage where you have to accept it, move on and deal with the repercussions. And in a Chinese family, [having children] means a great deal,’ she says softly.

She further explains that this was the reason she divorced her husband, so they would not be “bitter down the road.”

It’s an interesting choice to talk about the intimate nature of both trying to have children and the reasons for her divorce. Ultimately, she may be helping others going through the difficulty of trying to have a child. While she is superhuman in so many ways, she was not able to have something that she wanted so badly, and part of the trajectory of her life is grounded in this aspect as well as the way she understands the narrative as fitting into cultural expectations or meaning.

Jennifer Aniston

For many years, the media grilled Jennifer Aniston about having children and she refused to answer why. They even went so far as to call her selfish on several occasions. As Time Magazine summarizes:

A persistent tabloid narrative holds her up as a totem not of female success but of failure; she couldn’t keep Brad and may be leaving it too late to have kids. Now she has bitten back. “I don’t like [the pressure] that people put on me, on women—that you’ve failed yourself as a female because you haven’t procreated,” she tells the fashion magazine Allure. “This continually is said about me: that I was so career-driven and focused on myself; that I don’t want to be a mother, and how selfish that is.”

The article also goes on to discuss the plight of other voluntary childless women, defending her ‘decision’ while unaware that Aniston was indeed trying to have children:

No matter that the instance of women who remain childfree at the age of 45 has risen sharply across industrialized nations, encompassing about a fifth of the female populations of the U.S. and my home, the U.K., our cultural assumptions remain entrenched against the possibility of happy, balanced childlessness.

The narrative created just emphasizes the craziness in speculating and questioning her about it at all. Eventually just last November, things reached a breaking point where Aniston felt it easier to come clean about her IVF trials in her 30s and 40s, perhaps simply to squash the perpetual questions that seemed to elude her ex male partners.

Originally in an interview with Allure, she discussed these matters as well as the media coverage:

But there was certainly pain in the past. The hurt of the "Does Jen Have a Baby Bump?" headlines was compounded by "the narrative that I was just selfish," says Aniston. "I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn't have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn't give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don't have anything to hide at this point."

The interview was picked up by everyone. Fashion magazines, the BBC, personal instagram feeds…as if it changed everyone’s feelings about “Jen” that she had indeed wanted children. Whatever had been her choice in the past, the media had been cruel. So cruel that in 2016, Aniston wrote an Op-Ed to the Huffington Post 'For The Record, I Am Not Pregnant. What I Am Is Fed Up.' In the piece, she talks about the nature of celebrity stalking but also discusses the way narratives around women and their bodies and choices is toxic: “The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing.”

Do you think this is changing? Is it changing a little because of the courage of celebrities like Aniston to speak up? Or does it simply reflect reality?

Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler doesn’t shirk the title of ‘childless’…instead she faces it head on to explain why this is her happily made choice. In the following videos, she uses both humor and strong language (“shame” “horror” “selfish”) to describe the women who do not have kids, whether by choice (which she is mainly but not only talking about here) or not. She also includes the voices of other women in the second video.

I love when humor can help to dissect a difficult narrative. Watching someone say that America is run by “childless cat ladies” (in regards to leaders like AOC) is so horrific, where do you even start? But Handler puts it right back on the presenter. Humor, even when political or personal, catches people off guard and allows us to reconsider the way we may feel about something. You can feel Handler’s anger while she laughs, as if it’s therapeutic to open up a rift.

In fact, that’s exactly what she did. Many felt threatened by both videos (and she made the second in part to explain more fully the sarcasm in the first one). And then, in turn, “people [mocked] the conservative outrage.” It didn’t really seem to be moving us forward.

A writer for Cosmopolitan summarized comments on the Daily Show video:

After scrolling down the thread, I realised a large chunk of the comments are full of rage – mostly from people appearing not to get the tongue-in-cheekness of it all, and who have instead interpreted the sketch as a personal attack on their own choice to have a child.

The same writer channelled Tina Fey’s Mean Girls (a modern day Crucible) to describe the phenomenon and seek a change in society:

Without sounding like the crying girl from Mean Girls, why can't we all just get along? Who even has the energy to start online beef over someone else's life that has nothing to do with their own? C'est tragique.

Although rage, stereotypes, and misunderstandings made up so much of the dialogue around these videos, maybe just the fact that people are talking about it are helpful. By stating ideas perhaps once private, such as the childfree cat-lady takeover of democracy (!!), we can then start trying to understand where these fears and anger are coming from.

What’s driving this rage and even hatred? Is it more deeply and invisibly rooted in economics or religion or one’s own self loathing? Is it about trauma or misogyny or a lack of critical thinking skills?

Sorrow and Bliss

Of course, there are many literary protagonists who are childless, male or female, but few explicitly discuss it. I’ve seen a few novels lately that do; the one that really stands out to me is Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss. The book is not only an excellent read due to this topic but also because of the family relationships explored and issues surrounding mental health. Beyond this, the book is as touching as much as it is funny. Mason delivers prose on a level of careful diction that made me want to be sure I ingest every single word, for fear I might miss a delightful turn of phrase or important background information.

I previously reviewed this book for A Thousand Lives, which you can read here.

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I don’t want to say too much about the topic for fear of spoiling the story. However, the novel asks questions about mental health and having children; i.e. how might a child affect one’s mental health, especially if one is already diagnosed with a mental illness? In this case, Mason cleverly avoids ever stating the diagnosis of her protagonist.

She explores a romantic relationship that needs more honesty. And she explores the protagonist’s relationship with her sister without sugarcoating the difficulty on the sister of having children. Essentially, the book is about being honest with oneself and those one is close to. It sounds simple, but it’s not so easy. And when it comes to the issue of having children or not, often our own honesty is clouded by millions of expectations and narratives that surround us. The book asks how we can strip those unserving expectations away and live our authentic lives, with or without children.

Have you read other books that deal with this topic or seen other compelling texts? Do you think the narrative is getting better or worse? What are the reasons you think people react so strongly to this topic?