The Daily Mail has published an article, written by Samantha Brick, titled "The agony of not being a mother: At 55 and childless, why I'm so sick of apparently 'cool', smug women boasting about their well-off, child-free lives and ignoring the grief of others, like me." It's getting a lot of comment across the internet. Due to a paywall, I'm not able to read the full article word-for-word. The title and summaries say enough for me to get the gist.
This same writer had an article in The Sun three years ago with a title about breaking up with friends as soon as they get pregnant, and wrote about being "happiest around the pool with her childfree friends."
Hmmm. Clearly the author has some issues. Consistency, and working for decent "news" publications, to name just two.
Other than for the aim of being sensationalist - which given the publications she writes for, explains a lot - the tone of both articles is, to put it mildly, unpleasant, and devised to create division. After all, it's what The Sun and The Daily Mail feed on. I am sorry for the writer. She is clearly disappointed and grieving at being childless. And maybe her childfree and parent friends don't understand her disappointment in not being a parent. We all know that can be hard. But at 55, is she still unable to see any benefits of her No Kidding life? If so, that is just plain sad. Because as I have written multiple times before, there are plenty of benefits of a life without children, even if we did not choose that life.
Ironically, just yesterday I saw a post elsewhere commenting that, even in the midst of grief for the loss of a life partner, there might be aspects that we can enjoy. Cooking what we want to eat seemed to be one of the most common things. It does not mean we wanted this. It just means we get to eat mushrooms and/or pasta (in my case) more often. I'd give it up if I could have D back. But I enjoy them when I eat them. Just as living life without children brings benefits, even if we would have happily given them up for the children we wanted.
And those benefits, which we need to be able to see to embrace our lives fully, are what we share with childfree women. Along with the judgement of society for not having children (for whatever reason), the biases of health and elder care situations which rely on children (to varying extents) when we grow old, the devaluation of our lives because we are not parents, the exploitation of workplaces, the infantilisation (infantilization for the search engines) of women without children, etc etc etc. Surely there is more to unite us than divide us.
Yes, I've probably said all this before. Notably here. But it's worth mentioning again.
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