Jody Day
Issues with female friendships (particularly with those who become mothers when we do not) are such a common part of the involuntarily childless experience that I later termed it ‘the friendship apocalypse’ of childlessness. And although I wouldn’t wish this painful experience on anyone else, it did come as a huge relief to me to discover that it’s something many childless women can identify with; truly, I just thought I must be a rubbish friend!
I’m sixty now, but let me turn the clock back a bit to my early forties when I first hit the buffers of thwarted motherhood. I’d been on that track since my late twenties and, convinced that motherhood was a ‘when’ not an ‘if’, had kept up with all the ‘other’ couples in my then-husband’s and mine’s circle as they become parents; the way I saw it, their kids would be my kid’s friends one day. I followed their milestones on Facebook and sent Christmas cards and birthday cards, despite the diminishing returns on my investment. I watched them post photos of parties and joint holidays that I only learned about in retrospect. It was painful, but I was doing this for my kids. Except I didn’t have any. And then once I didn’t have a husband either, I might as well have slid off the map into ‘here be dragons’ territory. I became the bad fairy at the christening, pushed out of mind and off the invite list.
In 2012 I gave an interview (which went viral) to The Guardian where I talked about my experience of childlessness and how it was impacting my friendships. Naively, I thought it might help my friends understand and empathise with my experience, but as I didn’t yet understand the pronatalist-driven status quo supporting their behaviour, the article instead sealed my exclusion from the group. I used to joke that as a single, childless, middle-aged woman I was ‘social plankton’, the bottom of the social food chain, and that the only invites I got were to dental checkups. But this self-deprecating humour belonged to ‘Red Jacket Jody’; in my private life, I was often excruciatingly lonely and wondered why friendship seemed to be such a challenge for me.
Many childless women have felt anticipatory grief when yet another close female friend announces their ‘happy news’, and even though they often reassure us that ‘nothing will change’, we know that it will and that it has to; modern motherhood can be an overwhelming, all-consuming and surprisingly private affair. And although around 1 in 5 women are reaching midlife without children, and both voluntary and involuntary childlessness are on the rise, it’s still seen as a deviant identity for women under patriarchy (er, JD Vance anyone?) So much so that many women without children are actively or passively shunned by mothers, even by family members, when they try to form relationships with their kids. Sometimes it seems that the ‘village’ it takes to raise a child can feel more like a gated community.
The friendship issues that can get stirred up when we long to be mothers but have to watch from the sidelines can be treacherous to navigate. So much so that in my book Living the Life Unexpected I referred to it as ‘the baby elephant in the room’ - the thing that we don’t know how to talk about. Female friendships are built on shared intimacy and vulnerability, of revealing the most private truths of our lives, but when motherhood/non-motherhood stirs up envy, that’s something we don’t know how to talk about.
New mothers may be mourning the loss of their pre-motherhood identity, and envy their childless friends their freedom, imagining that their friends’ lives resemble what theirs were like before parenthood (when in fact the ‘freedom’ of involuntary childlessness may at times feel intensely lonely and, for a while, saturated with grief); childless friends may find the grief and envy of witnessing their dear friend’s arrival at the promised motherland excruciating, yet find it impossible to articulate that without sounding bitter or unsupportive. (I recognise that the dynamic can be very different if you are childfree by choice).
Envy is one of those emotions nice girls aren’t meant to experience, and it’s both painful to feel it, and to feel it hit you, because it leaves no room for nuance. But if we can’t talk about it, envy can lead to a slow withdrawal of intimacy from the friendship until it becomes a parody of its former self, or ghosts into memory. I recognise now that I lost a few friendships to unprocessed envy when I got married at twenty-six, and again when I met my new life partner in my early fifties after spending my midlife single.
Whilst childless women can feel hurt that their mother friends are unable to make time for them anymore one-on-one; mothers may feel hurt that their childless friends don’t understand that unless they’re prepared to fit around their fast-changing schedules or muck in with family life, it’s just not possible to see them. Yet one of the tough experiences that many of us who are childless share, particularly if (as in my case) everyone you knew who wanted to become a parent, did so, is that although mothers’ lives have expanded to include more people, ours have mostly likely contracted. I know that some of my mother-friends who survived the #FriendshipApocalypse years thought that my life at the time was full of parties, travelling and socialising, whilst theirs were ones of being stuck home with the kids. Yet who did they imagine I had left to socialise with? Children often bring a whole new tribe of people into your life; childlessness not so much so. And why, as a woman in my forties and fifties, did they imagine I’d still be doing the sort of things we’d done together in our twenties?
Over time, having metabolised my grief and rediscovered my innate sense of worthiness, any envy I might once have felt for those who had become mothers dissolved and I found it easier to hear their difficulties and empathise with their struggles without judgement. However, it still saddens me how little imaginative empathy is directed towards the challenges of living life as a woman without children (by choice or chance), and often without a partner too, whether it be the existential dark night of the soul many of us pass through as we grieve the loss of the family we longed for, or the lifelong challenge of living outside the only acceptable pronatalist identities for women, those of ‘partner’, ‘wife’, ‘mother’ and perhaps one day, ‘grandmother’.
Sometimes, part of the experience of childless/mother friendships can be that as their children grow up and together we pass through the menopause transition, things may begin to change again: sometimes we get our friends back for a while only to watch them once more submerge their identities into doting grandparenthood; other times they can adore their grandchildren and want to invest in a wider range of friendships than simply those that share the grandmothering experience. And just as it seemed that we couldn’t have predicted what ‘kind’ of mothers our friends would become, it seems the same holds true for grandmotherhood…
Female friendships have been the site of some of my greatest joys and biggest heartbreaks. They hold a mirror to my anxieties about my likeability and offer the opportunity for riotously healing belly laughs and the bone-deep comfort of being fully known. As my colleague, the writer and therapist Stella Duffy says, ‘Post-menopausally, we’re all infertile’. Maybe now, as I unravel into my croning, the dark honesty of this time of life might just be the compost friendship needs to thrive? I do hope so.
Jody Day addresses the experience of involuntary childlessness and provides a powerful, practical guide to help those negotiating a future without children come to terms with their grief. This friendly, practical, humorous and honest guide from one of the world’s most respected names in childless support offers compassion and understanding and shows how it’s possible to move towards a creative, happy, meaningful and fulfilling future – even if it’s not the one you had planned.
Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women and a World Childless Week Ambassador. Along with a panel of NomoCrones (nomo = not-mother + crones is not an insult!) ranging from their mid-fifties to mid-seventies, she’s hosting a webinar for World Childless Week on Thursday 19th September on ‘Friendship Across Life’. All ages welcome. You can find out more and register here