The lives of non-mothers: ‘I really wanted a life without children and I wanted to know why’

Nicole Louie is more than aware of the enduring stereotypes of women without children: “The crazy cat lady, the sorrowful barren woman, the selfish child-free woman, the overambitious career woman… the pitiful spinster, the immature woman, the incomplete woman, the cold-hearted woman, the unnatural woman,” she writes in her debut book, Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children.

“[There’s the assumption] that you have no say in that solo life — if you find someone in their 40s or 50s and they’re not married, people assume she couldn’t find someone,” Louie says, rolling her eyes at the laziness. People also assume if you’re a spinster and happen to have a cat, you’re a cat lady.

There’s also the myth that somehow endures that women without children don’t like kids. “That’s one of the most hurtful ones for me, because I love children. I adore playing with them. When my friends see me with their kids they go, ‘Oh wow, you really love children!’”

The Brazilian-born writer, now living in north Dublin with her husband Ben, had wondered early on in her life about what a life without children might look like. Back when she began realising that motherhood might not be a life choice for her, role models were scant. No women Louie knew had lived or wanted to live life without being a mother. She sought out conversations with child-free women as a means to interrogate her own choice more fully.

“I wrote the book because I couldn’t find stories like mine — I panicked a bit about going through that life without knowing what it would look like,” Louie says. “I had no examples of the life I was living at the time and it was scary. It felt a bit like walking in the dark. All I saw was motherhood, and the mothers around me were not particularly satisfied with their lives, which skewed my view a bit. It took me a while to find women who are perfectly happy without children, who have found a lot of meaning.”

Aware, too, that a woman’s life without children is rarely told in its fullness in media, literature or cinema, Louie sought out interviewees from across the globe, and conducted interviews with them over the course of a decade.

These women’s circumstances varied wildly. Some had interesting jobs and noteworthy careers; some didn’t. Some were in their 60s and gloriously independent and self-sufficient, while others were still processing life without children.

Some had wanted desperately to become mothers, only to realise in their 40s that it might never happen. Others had experienced pregnancy loss. One interviewee, heartbreakingly, recalled an instance in which a parent removed them from a family genealogy project because they didn’t have children — a situation that leaves Louie aghast to this day.

Some of Louie’s interviewees were still in the process of deciding whether or not they wished to become mothers. In one or two instances, women became pregnant not long after conducting their interviews with Louie. “In one of the cases, one came out of the interviews and realised that she hadn’t thought about motherhood — she just thought she had thought about it,” Louie says.

Others Like Me isn’t a call to arms or a manifesto. Instead of being analytical or rooted in the polemical, the book is an extremely human look at the lives of women without children. Alongside her own story, Louie presents the first-person stories of 14 women living without children in their full complexity (although she travelled the globe to 25 countries and spoke to 33 women in total).

Louie also charts her own journey as someone who interrogated the possibility, then chose to live a life without children. Non-motherhood, Louie is at pains to remind people, is a rich spectrum of experiences, few of which chime with the cliches.

One woman, 37-year-old Burcak from Turkey, stands out in her memory.

“It was one of those stories where you could see the purpose and meaning in her life. She wants to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world — she had already climbed two, 10 years ago, and who knows how many since then,” says Louie. “While we both decided not to have children, nothing else in our lives looked the same.”

An interview with 44-year-old Swedish skincare therapist Magdalena became a “turning point” for Louie.

“She absolutely wanted to have children more than anything in her life, and was someone who was willing to die to get pregnant — who was absolutely ready to stop her cancer treatment to do another IVF round,” says Louie. “To sit across from a person who wants motherhood that much, and realising I’m the opposite in every way, and yet still be able to have respect and hold each other’s stories… to meet the women who had to look at the size of their grief made me appreciate the fact that I had a choice. It also made me really question, ‘Are you absolutely sure you don’t want that?’”

Thirty-four-year-old Peruvian anthropologist Andrea, meanwhile, had to battle at length with the medical profession in her country to access a tubal ligation procedure — a permanent form of contraception.

“One of the hardest things for her was that she had to talk to a psychiatrist and then her husband also had to talk to a psychiatrist, not about him, but about her state of mind,” she says. “The way [the professionals] worded it to her was, ‘You could be ruining the life of your husband here.’”

Louie is keenly aware that men who choose to live life without children have a very different experience than women do.

“I was having a conversation with my husband yesterday about him going to get a vasectomy, and I asked if [the healthcare professionals] are giving him any big evaluation or anything? He said no. I was joking to him, ‘So no one is sending you to a psychiatrist’s appointment then?’ Not only that, they are also not going to ask your wife how she feels about it?’”

Growing up in Brazil, Louie’s formative years partly informed her decision to not have children. Her mother, who became a parent at 18, had endured a number of romantically complex relationships. Her grandmother before her had experienced domestic violence. Both women found many other challenges when they reached motherhood; among them traumatic births and financial hardships.

“I do believe in formative experiences and memories that can really shape you, but I don’t believe they shape you forever, and that you don’t have the power to further shape yourself,” Louie says. “So I thought, ‘OK, let me try to understand the baggage that I’ve carried up to here.’ My mother and grandmother were basically my ‘North Stars’ and they were very unhappy — at least that’s how I perceive the experience.”

By the time Louie reached her 30s, her life had turned out quite differently. College-educated and now married to Erik, she was living and working in Dublin, stealthily climbing the career ladder in one of the major tech giants.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I could have a very meaningful motherhood experience,’” she says. “‘Maybe this would be different.’ I then really had to decide for myself, despite the different experiences, ‘What do you want, regardless of what happened with your mom and grandmother?’ This was a big turning point for me, because it was no longer about carrying emotional baggage that wasn’t really mine, and then deciding for myself, ‘No, that’s not what you want.’”

When Louie had made a decision not to have children, some difficult conversations followed. Louie’s mother found it hard to understand her daughter’s decision to remain child-free, and often questioned it. In Louie’s first marriage with Erik, the two had agreed they did not want children, yet the conversation resurfaced after a while. Erik admitted he wasn’t as sure about his earlier decision about not having children as Louie was. After much discussion, the two decided to part. In the book, Louie reveals that Erik did eventually go on to become a father.

“Absolutely, there was a lot of love, but neither of us was interested in completely giving up on the future version of ourselves,” Louie says.

Speaking about her first marriage, Louie mentions a quote by Mary Oliver: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.”

“While Erik’s change of heart [about wanting a child] was hard to experience as his partner at the time, in the end, I saw it as a gift because it was what led me into the depths of myself and to the understanding that I really wanted a life without children and that I also wanted to know why that was the case,” Louie says. “For myself. Not as a wife. Or as a daughter. For me, as a woman.”

Some time later, Louie met Ben, began dating and the pair married. While he was largely undecided about children when they first met, they both realise that they are very much on the same page now. “When I met him, I was already writing this book, and I think it is such a big red flag that he would have run the other way immediately if he had wanted to,” Louie says.

Friendships with long-standing pals also shapeshifted when Louie revealed how definite she felt about living a life without children.

“I worked really hard in rescuing those relationships and placing myself into their lives,” Louie says. “In writing the book, I’d heard so many stories of ‘I lost my best friend’ or ‘I lost my sister because they didn’t think I would understand’. Yes, you have a child, I don’t, but I can still understand. I can still support you.”

Back in Brazil, Louie’s best friend from childhood, Gabi, gave birth to two longed-for sons. Louie was delighted for her friend, but in one scene in the book, she recalls a meeting in which Gabi eventually revealed her struggle with parenthood. Though the two could effortlessly talk about anything else, Gabi felt she couldn’t really open up with Louie about how hard motherhood could be.

“So you don’t think I can understand your struggle because I don’t have children?” Louie asked her friend when they eventually met up.

“I know you can understand. But you can’t feel it.”

“To me, that scene illustrates two things: a temporary disconnect and the desire to talk through it and reconnect regardless of our parental status,” Louie says now. “First, we realised we had stopped sharing a big part of how we felt with each other after she became a mother, but only in relation to how she felt about having kids and how I felt about not having kids. We still shared many other feelings about being a woman, being married, working, and in that scene, we understood that both of us had kept a part of us at bay, and that while we won’t be able to share everything with each other, the reason should not be simply because I have kids and she doesn’t. It should be because sometimes we feel better talking about certain things with someone who might feel similarly. And that is absolutely fine.”

Does Louie feel that, when it comes to mothers and non-mothers, never the twain shall meet? The ongoing media narrative at least hints at an ongoing tension between the two.

“It’s too complicated to pinpoint, but I do have a big problem with lack of nuance,” says Louie. “I think, in the ideal world, it would be ‘you do you’, because you know your circumstances, and you can decide what’s best for you. I’m not particularly thrilled with the way parents will correct [someone] when they say, ‘I love my life without children,’ and they immediately have to say, ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’ Sometimes they feel they have to put their happiness at the centre of someone’s comment.

I also don’t like the opposite when [someone without children] might say, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have fun,’ or ‘You will never know what it’s like to be free again.’ There will always be people who have children, and some who won’t. The other person’s circumstances don’t invalidate your life.”

‘Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children’ by Nicole Louie is out now via Dialogue Books

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