Sarah Roberts

World Childless Week Ambassador

Social exclusion and friendship wounds can be one of the really painful parts of childlessness. The “#friendship apocalypse” of involuntary childlessness, coined by Jody Day, describes the years when friendships can be lost to parenthood. Developmental psychology calls this the “social pruning” of matrescence (the transition to motherhood), which to us, can feel like “dump or deprioritise your childless friends”.

The transition to parenthood can be overwhelming, and our newly parenting friends often reach to professionals and other parents for support and connection. As parenthood can take over their lives, it can dominate our friendships with them as well. This can be significant change.

At the same time, we may be still hopeful of parenthood and/or facing our own significant life transition from potential mother into permanent involuntary childlessness. This can be painful and activate trauma and difficult emotions in us. The pathways of parenthood and non-parenthood can feel like repelling magnets and can leave us wondering if our friendships have the capacity to survive.

We can feel like we are standing behind a one-way mirror peering into the lives of our parenting friends, yet separate, apart, our lives and full-selves unseen. Even when we show up to support our friends, there can be so much we can no longer say. Over the years this gap can grow into a chasm as we find ourselves in very different lives and ways of being in the world. In some friendships, there is so much damage, it’s better for our wellbeing to walk away.

Involuntary childlessness can wreak havoc with our friendships, destabilise our social connections, our sense of place and belonging, and frankly can be experienced as a reckoning with our identity and life as we had known it. Many of us struggle to show up as friends when we are reeling from the existential crisis of unrealised parenthood morphing into permanent childlessness. We can experience childlessness as a deep loss, and both relational and identity wounds.

Sometimes we can be left wondering why our grief isn’t seen, whether we will ever feel like full adult women, and what life and meaning look like now. We can also experience the secondary losses of family, friend, social and professional support networks inadequately equipped to respond to our needs. This all happens in a broader social, cultural, historical, political and economic context. This is the invisible soup we all swim in, often unnoticed.

When we don’t have good explanations for these experiences, we may fall back to older patterns of blaming ourselves. We might feel stuck, consider it our fault on some level, or carry the burden of unworthiness and regret. Childlessness can be experienced as a gendered wound, where we don’t feel like full adult women and men alongside our parenting peers. When we aren’t seen and our stories held, we can withdraw and it can leave us wondering what is wrong with us, struggling to process our experiences and inhabit valued social roles.

I know, I did. The loss of motherhood broke my heart, but it also went deeper. For me, it felt like an annihilation of self, and I was left wondering why.

As a meaning making being, childlessness awoke within me many questions, as well as curiosity and a burning passion to understand. The first thing I wondered about was what is motherhood? What had I assumed about it? Why did it matter so much to me? Why was I grieving so deeply for something I never had? There were many more questions that have fueled the last decade of my life as a childless not by choice woman, and in my work as a counsellor for childless women, a post graduate social work student and certified bereavement practitioner training.

In my search, I came across normative patriarchal motherhood as an explanatory framework for understanding the context in which all women, whether parenting, childless or childfree, navigate their fertility, reproductive identity and orientation, reproductive choices, agency, desires, expectations and lived experiences.

Gloria Steinem suggests that at the heart of patriarchy is the control of women’s fertility, which includes women’s sexuality and bodies. We see this when women’s choices and agency are diminished. During their fertile years, younger non-mothers can be framed as potential mothers, and older non-mothers devalued or rendered invisible.

Adrienne Rich’s book “Of Woman Born” in 1976, defined motherhood and founded maternal feminism. In that same era, childfree academic scholarship which included pronatalism began. There have been a few pioneering CNBC academics (eg Gayle Letherby) but it is only in this last decade that a body of serious academic lived-experience, childless-not-by-choice scholars are emerging.

Social research methods acknowledge the importance of the lived experience perspective in framing and undertaking research. We bring a different way of knowing and being to involuntary childless research. This paradigm shift illuminates our absence from academia, and perhaps reflects our absence in social and cultural spaces. We don’t fit into the roles of sanctioned mothers or “liberated” child-free, and the absence of our authentic voices allows the negative stereotypes about us to go unchallenged. These can filter down into communities and social relationships.

Rich’s work founded maternal feminism, and explored both the power and powerlessness of motherhood in patriarchal culture. Many of these foundational concepts can assist explaining our experience as non-mothers as well.

The central feminist critique of patriarchal motherhood positions motherhood as the basis of female identity and what it means to be an adult woman. It idealises motherhood as the only legitimate choice for women and only allows mothers to embody the positive attributes of the motherhood archetype. It sets impossible standards and gives license to be harshly critical of any woman who deviates from this norm.

Women who choose not to be mothers are seen as rejecting womanhood, and rather than a legitimate right to choose, women can be labelled as defective, selfish, carefree, career women and not serious or whole women. Women who are childless not by choice are pitied, because whilst they meet the patriarchal norm of desiring motherhood, they fail to live up to being real women. In workplaces we can be labelled as ambitious, unfeeling career women with no personal lives or meaningful responsibilities or connections.

In many white dominant cultures, patriarchal motherhood positions the ideal or normative mother as white, married, heterosexual, gender conforming, able bodied, of the right age (not too young or old) and middle class. In many cultures, the traditional patriarchal family can still be the dominant ideal. The mother is wife to a husband and she assumes the role of economically dependent nurturer or both worker and primary nurturer. The husband assumes the role of provider.

Whilst much has changed for women in the workforce, even now, working mothers take on a disproportionate amount of the caring, domestic labour and mental load in raising children. This can make our parenting friends significantly less interested, present, aware or available in other previously significant friendships.

Whilst many women do choose these socially legitimatised norms, the problem arises when they are considered the only legitimate option, and those who don’t conform are seen as deviant or unnatural. Any other version of being is seen as a deviation from this expected norm and a meaningful life or true connection without children is not considered possible. Sometimes, being a parent can be seen as having a monopoly on universal human qualities like empathy, love, meaning etc.

In our competence obsessed culture, many women try, but the “ideal mother norm” is impossible to achieve, even for women who tick all the normative motherhood boxes. Sadly, most of us are unaware of this context in our lives. Our inability to name patriarchal motherhood and dialogue about the complexity of it, can divide women and leave us all feeling like we’re not good enough.

Unsurprisingly, women without kids are at the bottom of the heap. Valourizing the stay-at-home mum or super-busy working mums as the gold standard of adult feminine achievement, hobbles us. As childless women, we are often isolated and unsupported as we are left to grapple with the choices that remain given the circumstances of our lives.

Both pronatalism and patriarchal motherhood don’t fully explain my desire for motherhood, or for a period in my life as a homemaker, or my failure to conceive. When I step beyond gender identity into being human, for me, being a mother and raising children was a part of the expression of my humanity. This desire is hardly universal. It’s very subjective. Many can experience great ambivalence, complexity or no desire at all. For me, explaining my yearning for motherhood was much more than social construction ie playing with dolls, and we don’t understand why some women clearly choose to be childfree.

Patriarchal motherhood does offer an explanation for some of the vision I carried about what motherhood might be like, what needs it might meet, and perhaps some of my assumptions about its absence from my life. Including who I have become as an fully realised adult woman without kids.

It also offers an explanation for our experiences of being de-valued, stigmatised and socially excluded as childless women and suggests there are range of legitimate life choices and valuable social roles for us. This includes the adult woman who has been undone by life, is changed by it, has learned to carry her grief in all its complexity and emerged toward wholeness.

The lack of grief literacy or awareness of the impact of patriarchal motherhood in our friendships, goes a long way in explaining their failure to hold these complex conversations and survive these major life transitions. It also offers some understanding of the barriers to building meaningful relationships with other people’s children.

We chose motherhood and we failed. And perhaps the most intriguing part of our story, is not about getting over it, but how we integrate our story, who we become as a result of our experience and what happens next?