Saying No to Babies

They’re gorgeous, adorable, irreplaceable and just not part of her life’s plan for this woman

Babies are beautiful and I’m head over heels in love with my new niece who, some say, looks a tad like me.

I also have a three-year-old nephew with angelic blond curls and a cheeky grin who adores his Nana and Lala (he can’t quite pronounce Alan, his grandfather’s name). Couple this with the fact that he refers to me as ‘Uncle’ Irene and I’m quite doolally for the boy – which is all the more interesting that I am also giddy at my recent life-changing decision to not have any children of my own?

Turning 40 next year has made the idea of going into that decade with a toddler a hideous notion coupled with the rather obvious fact that my less than perky eggs might make the baby-making process difficult.

I’m not exactly sure where 40 even came from? Wasn’t it yesterday I was hanging around my mum and dad’s house dreaming up ways to meet Simon Le Bon when he arrived in New Zealand as part of the round-the-world yacht race?

And yet, as advanced in baby-making age as we are, it’s as if a whole generation of women, my generation, have looked at their watches, collectively stopped taking the pill and climbed back onto their husbands. Suddenly, all my high school girlfriends are either giving birth or knocked up.

Thankfully, while most left the baby-making to the last minute, all have had success in the production. And to those fine mothers I can only say well done that a need was met; a life event ticked off the list.
Part of my wonder at these happenings is because my baby-making decision has been so bedraggled. And the honest truth that lies behind my lack of childish desire is … gulp … because, from my point of view, having kids seems so ... suburban.

Not the part where you have kids who are at school and able to fend for themselves, but the plethora of older parents wandering around town with babies strapped to their fronts, pushing toddlers in three wheelers. Suddenly, these older types are talking about nipple rash and childhood development and taking part in school activities with the zest and energy usually reserved for corporate project management.

And they always want to tell me about their ‘baby journey’ and how it’s the most fulfilling thing they’ve ever done and how life before the baby Jesus wasn’t really life.

It’s as if the idea that the very act of caring for someone other than yourself lifts you to new moral heights.

Now I’d believe this if someone were to mother a smelly old homeless stranger and give them bottles of milk, but to make the conscious decision to spawn and then say, ‘it’s the giving of oneself …’ is a tiny bit ludicrous.

The truth is I’ve never been a suburban type of girl. I assumed I was, after all, I got married somewhere along the way but rather tellingly never changed my name (I’m still at a loss to know why modern women do this without even the blink of an eye).

My parents have been together for as long as my eldest brother is old and yet, they aren’t a conventional couple either. An interracial couple (Nuiean and English) my parents had the kids but also decided to take on a new business when most couples were planning their retirement and they continue to buck conventional thinking and norms.

I’ve never had the urge to settle down and to this day have never seen the attraction of putting down roots and staying put. It’s not that I move often or even travel extensively but I’m permanently attracted to the idea of being free to spread my wings if the circumstances called for it.

Like most, I did always assume I would have kids. Not in the way some women are born to have children – the types that, before they’ve even met a potential Daddy, spend hours in babies-wear shops – a tad weird when there is a perfectly good MAC shop in the vicinity.

My husband very clearly advised, from the beginning of our marriage, his desire to not have children for various reasons. I just assumed that he’d change his mind when I decided that the time was right.

And for a couple of times there, I did think the time was right. I even made pacts with myself, when we arrived home to Auckland from London, when we stopped using recreational drugs, when I lost a good proportion of my body weight and yet, stubbornly, my husband would point out that nothing had changed for him.

Our ‘baby talks’ would go round and round, and always with perfect logic.
If I wanted babies, the possibility would be that I’d have to find another willing partner. The reality is I didn’t want to have kids with anyone other than my husband and if the choice became ultimately about my real-life husband versus a non-existent but perfect baby then the husband would always win.

To give him his dues, my husband always maintained that he loved me enough to not want to lose me if the choice was between me having a baby away from him.

These discussions were never fraught or accusatory. In fact, most were clinical, and conducted in an interested yet slightly removed way.

The truth of the matter, I finally worked out, was not that I wanted a baby, it was that I felt, and continue to feel, left out. Nearly everyone I know has kids and to not have any is to not belong to that exclusive yet overly subscribed ‘Mummy Club’. Women are meant to have babies; that’s how we are biologically made, so to go against this is to go against nature.

I’m not saying having children is all we are here for, but our bodies and hormones and physical workings are designed to fulfil that very role.
It’s like having a perfectly good bread maker but never making bread.
And yet, my baby-making impetus never really kicked in. I’m 99 percent sure that, if pushed, my husband would have acquiesced but I never really pushed.

I suspect that my desire to be a part of the crowd is not as strong as my unconscious desire not to be part of a club.

An older woman I once worked with told me that she never spent Christmas with her extended family. She always preferred to go skiing with her husband and leave the rest of the family to the overeating and wrapping paper. I remember being slightly shocked at this attitude to Christmas but also secretly impressed.

The past Christmas and New Year were spent with extended family and, although it was enjoyable, the getting up early and clambering over children ripping hundred of presents apart soon lost its attraction. Add to that a G-rated New Year’s Eve, where we spent a chaste evening getting a little drunk and playing Wii with the kids, meant I was ready for bed before 10pm, let alone midnight.

My forties may be childless but they will consist of more travel (perhaps a six-month stint in Paris), increased fitness, new clothes and who knows. That’s the freedom and the beauty of it all; not having any ties or expectations on my time and having the money to do all the things I want to do. So am I choosing travel and shoes over children? Quite possibly. Does that make me a shallow and selfish person? Yes, yes it does.
Someone said, ‘But what about when you’re old? Who will look after you? And once you die who will be your living legacy?’

After working in a geriatric home when I was young, it quickly became apparent that many of the old people never had relatives visit them.
I also know that we are born alone and that we die alone. Being surrounded by faces that look like mine on my deathbed might be comforting but perhaps not being on the deathbed would be more comfortable.

I intend to go into my dotage wearing a tracksuit, drinking too much and behaving badly. I’ll be an eccentric and slightly embarrassing aunty but I’ll never have to meet daughters-in-law who hate me and end up the child to my children.

Perhaps I’ll just get a puppy.

Irene Pink

Irene Pink will be appearing at the International Comedy Festival in her solo show Metamorphosis.
Auckland 24 April - 1 May at The Classic Studio
Wellington 3 May - 8 May at The Fringe Bar
For more details go to www.comedyfestival.co.nz