When did motherhood become a curse?

I should preface this by saying I’m not a broody kind of girl, or whatever the caricature of a 30-year-old woman is supposed to be these days (it’s hard to keep up, sometimes). I like newborns: their squidgy cheeks, and their instinctual need to curl their finger around that of even a stranger. But once they start talking and walking, my interest wanes.

I dislike the way we patronise toddlers with baby babble, and the untruths we tell them. “What a brilliant drawing of me,” we say, as they hand us a scribble depicting a monstrous creature with a monobrow and ears like Dumbo. This is not unusual among my friends.



None have kids and I can name two who are pregnant. A topic of conversation is often how the male partner in the relationship is keen for kids, while the woman is unsure. “Easy for them to say,” they tell me – the bloke doesn’t have to push out something seven-and-a-half inches wide through a canal often a third of the size.

It’s a cliché to bemoan the UK’s fertility rate, which is now at its lowest since records began in 1938 . There are obvious reasons. To buy a house we need double the household earnings we did in the 1970s , while UK childcare costs are some of the highest in the world .

But I wonder whether there is another cause at play, too. Merle Bombardieri, “America’s ‘baby decision coach’”, recently explored with a Sunday Times journalist whether she should have a child. Bombardieri noted from her experience with clients that women are “terrified because all they’re reading online about are.

.. postpartum depression, feeling as if one has lost one’s identity”.

She highlighted we forget that such feelings are “often temporary, and they’re often mixed...

with a lot of joy”. Meanwhile, Peanut, one of the biggest parenting apps, recently surveyed 5,000 women , and found that 91 per cent reported becoming a mother had brought more joy and fulfilment than they expected. That 84 per cent wanted a more balanced depiction of parenthood, including its positives, caused them to launch a campaign called “More Joy”.

Indeed, when I hear the word “mum” I picture the perma-frazzled face of Anna Maxwell Martin in the sitcom Motherland , on a perpetual quest to offload her children onto other parents or a childminder. The first episode of Breeders , the other “warts-and-all” Netflix show about parenthood is simply entitled “No Sleep”. The paradox is that to even accomplish this bloody burden of a kid, we first have to go through the burden of trying for one.

A 31-year-old friend who fell pregnant recently told me how shocked she was at how straightforward it had been. Stupid as it may sound, I was too – we’d only read newspaper features about how it was nigh-impossible to conceive. Read Next Spare a thought for the Tories – they would never get away with Labour's NHS reforms That’s not to say such narratives aren’t crucial.

I am struck by how many women I know have found salvation in the likes of Elizabeth Day ’s accounts of miscarriage, and discovering they aren’t alone in their grief and heartache. Talking about the complexities of motherhood and the wonder of being “childfree” is rightly intended as a counterbalance to the freakish natalist preoccupation of right-wing men , of JD Vance and his childless cat ladies. It is acutely important this perspective isn’t stigmatised or painted over with pastel-hued, tradwife representations of motherhood.

But what if we’ve skipped over the possibility of a more nuanced perspective on motherhood: the idea that, say, the immense highs of it can coexist with the extreme lows, and that the beautiful things in life involve sacrifice rather than untrammelled restrictions? That’s one of the things I think I and my generation struggle with (and perhaps explains our interest in open relationships ). That said, I don’t think our wariness around children comes from the selfishness so often attributed to my generation. We fear having our hearts live inside someone else’s tiny body because it’s accompanied by a feeling of immense responsibility.

Therapised millennials and Gen Z are so aware of things our parents did wrong, and that we owe it to our children to be the perfect caregivers because it’s our choice to bring them into the world. We don’t want to “wing it” in a world of shaming around formula milk and Mumsnet forums. And yet, so much about having children defies rationality.

Despite my inherent lack of broodiness, I know that the last time I developed feelings for a man, I felt all sorts of visceral, bodily sensations that made me want children in a way I could not explain on a cerebral level. My generation is probably admirable in its desire to be logical, attempting long-term projections and calculations about the worth of having children. And yes, there are many parents who really do regret having kids, many of whom wouldn’t admit it to you.

But there are a lot more parents who will tell you that they did just “wing it” when it came to having kids, and are – truly – glad they did..