Anonymous
In case you don’t want to read the whole thing, let me start with the premise of the year: Two things can be true at the same time. I can feel happiness that I don’t currently have children, but I can also feel sadness that I have not had them.
Below are some of the thoughts I’d had over the last year, as they happen, in my mind.. like a Netflix documentary.
4 September 2025: When I first moved into my house there were two couples just down the road who had newborn babies, clearly of a similar age. They were small, and in newborn prams. Every Thursday I worked at home, and glanced out of the window in the morning when these babies became older, and I’d see them being carried to the car for nursery, then toddling to the car, then being able to open the door and climb into the car seat themselves. This morning, after an early September downpour, I looked out and saw the two children emerge from their respective houses, both smartly dressed in the first day of school uniform. How it is that this much time has passed, that these little people have grown up from not able to feed themselves to being able to walk to school, and I am still in the same situation, still sitting, still thinking, still wanting.
19 October 2025: ‘My main news is that I’m pregnant again’. I feel nothing. It’s not someone I’m close to, an old acquaintance that I’d wished happy birthday to. I feel resigned. Like I now know that this won’t happen to me. I am in the process of trying to move house. I see myself staying in this area for a few more years until my parents become in need of more help and I move to be closer to them, four hours away. I don’t picture these plans with anyone else in my head. I think of living in the south and the thoughts ‘if the current trajectory of me on my own continues then I will never be able to afford to live in the type of house and life I would like, therefore I will have to move north’ ring in my head. But I don’t see myself doing this with a family in tow, juggling that. I see myself just doing it as I have done now for seven years, on my own. I see myself as a single older lady, like I’ve looked at curiously through society’s eyes for so long, but I see myself as one. So ‘my news is that I’m pregnant again’ is met with indifference. That’s great. Your path goes that way, mine goes this way. See ya.
Amendment; 15 minutes later: I feel irrationally angry and took it out on a clothes dryer.
4 November 2025: For once, can John Lewis (or every other Christmas advert) not centre around a fucking family?
6 November 2025: This morning I felt like I had accepted that I wouldn’t have children. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hit me like a truck, sometimes, and make me feel horrendously sad, too. Acceptance doesn’t have to mean happiness or contentment, not yet.
16 November 2025: I read a passage in a book yesterday, while on a train to spend the weekend with my oldest school friends, the women I think of as sisters, and yet still find it hard to express myself fully to. It’s from Conversations on Love, by Natasha Lunn, and she writes about an interaction with one of her oldest friends: “… Soon her sons return from school. It is then I feel the bittersweet depths of long-term friendship. First, I watch her in action, a wonderful mother to these three children, and wonder whether I will ever be a mother myself. Then I look into her children’s faces and realise that I do not know them. It is an odd feeling, to realise these three people at the centre of her life are strangers to me, as I am to them; a reminder of the gaps in our knowledge of each other that exist today… But what’s strange and unexpected is the surge of love I feel for her children in this moment. I do not know them, but I know I want them to be happy, to feel loved, to feel safe in the world, because they come from a woman I share a history with.” As I spent time with my friend’s children, and they chatted to me about Tintin, and what they were doing at school, I saw my friend in them, and I thought of the other children, and I saw my friends in them. It was quite an emotional moment, and I turned to look out of the window to hide the tears that flooded my eyes. So much of my pain and confusion about children is the impact it has on my relationships, and yet this passage altered how I see them. It gave me strength, to share with them later, some of how life was from my side, of how I burden a lot on my own, and I keep a lot in, and they were all quiet, and they listened, and I felt listened to, cared for, validated, and important. It would break their hearts if they knew I felt anything but those things from my previous interactions, but that is how it has sometimes felt.
27th December 2025: Today and yesterday felt like the first time ever that I’d actually felt fine with not having a family. Maybe it was seeing my mum so stressed at Christmas, or hearing my dad’s constant jibes that made me think that I didn’t want to have to feel this level of tension for the rest of my life. Or climbing higher into the hills and passing isolated houses, and picturing myself keeping a cosy home, tending the garden, living the single, independent life that is different to the one that I live now, in suburbia. I’m surrounded by families, suburbia is designed for families, and here I saw a window into a living environment that didn’t have that at the focus, and it seemed actually, really enjoyable.
10th February 2026: A text message from a close friend: “I am hiding in the bath… Although K [husband] has just been in… I do feel very pulled between everyone in the family… R [daughter] wants to make biscuits, J [son] wants help buying jeans, K is sulky because I’m with the kids and not him, throw in football and tap shows and food. But I also know I am so lucky”. What do I say to that, as I sit alone on my sofa, recovering from an operation where I’ve largely done everything myself for two weeks? So fucking insensitive.
14th February 2026: A conversation with two of my (also childless) cousins, while we go away for the weekend, focusing on this area of our life and how it impacts us. We all have a complicated relationship with our childless status. But I have come to realise, as I look at busy parents, screaming children, expensive holidays, boring conversations with toddlers, the isolation of new parenthood, that actually, I’m really glad that I don’t have children to mess up my life at the moment. I can do what I want, when I want, and I like that. That doesn’t mean I don’t have complicated feelings about it, and if I was suddenly presented with the opportunity to have a baby, I expect I would, but at the moment, there isn’t any regret, only relief. A weird feeling.
17th February 2026: Another friend uses the phrase ‘as a mother’ and it makes me want to leave the group chat.
15th March 2026: I happen to be visiting my brother while it is Mother’s Day. I make a plan to go for a walk while he and my niece are getting breakfast in bed for my sister in law, and right before I go my niece has a total meltdown because what she wants for breakfast isn’t in the house. I escape, relieved once again that I don’t have to spend my days dealing with irrational children. The beach is really windy, and I eat chocolate buttons while bundled up against the blowing sand. There’s a little bench overlooking the estuary. My mind stops thinking all the overthinking that usually happens today and I cry a bit. Happy ‘day of the year where the complicated feelings really make themselves known’ day. Also, side note: the irony of Mother’s Day is that most fathers seem to spend the day organising it so the mothers have a break from their children.
6th April 2026: “So sorry, I didn’t realise that S (son) had a school sleepover this weekend and I have to take him there so I have to cancel our plans on Thursday”. The classic ‘cancelled for children’ again. I ponder it as I drive home after Easter, how I am my own priority because I’m clearly no one fucking else’s. It gives me permission – and freedom – to do what I want, when I want, to say no because I can. But also, fuck parents.
I must have stopped writing. Rather than getting to one moment of time and looking back over the year I thought I’d take notes as I went along. These moments haven’t stopped, I still feel feelings about my childless status, but maybe I’ve stopped noticing them. Something feels different this year. Maybe it’s turning 40. Maybe it’s spending more time with friends who are in the same state as me, maybe it’s moving house and starting afresh. Maybe it’s moving away from those two families with their growing children, maybe it’s my friends children getting older and therefore less consuming. It just feels different.
