6

Apocalypse, Baby

Along with a compulsion for #proposalfail, listicles, and the dubious online articles of Psychology Today, in my thirtieth year I became obsessed with working out the ages of characters on television.

Previously, programs for me had been divided into shows about kids (right up to the college years, and maybe a little slippage on the side), shows about adults, and shows about families. But now I found myself wondering continually, how old were the various spreads of adults? How old was Elaine on Seinfeld? How old were the titular Friends? How old was that New Girl? When I first watched those shows, the answer seemed ‘older than me’. But was I now older than them?

Specific ages were only emphasised if they were unusual. I knew Lorelai Gilmore senior was thirty-two and junior, sixteen, at the beginning of the first season. Tony Stark graduated from MIT at age eight. Everyone else was a smeary, socially appropriate ‘ish’. This on-screen obsession might have been a continuity of the habit I had as a child, of staring out the window of the school bus at the teenagers and trying to see the future. On the bus I wondered, would that be me in a few years’ time? In front of the television I worried, was that supposed to be me, now?

‘How old do you think they are supposed to be?’ I asked my friend, as casually as possible, while we sat on the couch eating spaghetti and watching a television drama.

‘Thirties?’

‘Like, late thirties, right?’

‘Hmm, I’d say mid-thirties.’

The distinction seemed both important and flimsy. They were whatever age you were supposed to be when you worried about children and your mortgage, or being single forever. They were everypeople, snap-frozen, with no future or past, their problems derived from an outline of our own. They lived in colour-by-numbers worlds.

We ate our spaghetti, occasionally heckling the screen. And then a scene came on that stopped us both. It was a nothing scene, graded night-time green, as though the curtains couldn’t quite cover the harsh fluorescent streetlights beyond. A rich white woman (they are often rich white women on television) is sleeping. We hear the child crying before she does. She stirs, reluctance in every limb. The crying is loud and desperate. We know that she needs sleep. We know that her marriage has broken down and that she is in a toxic relationship with her boss and that she is cracking up under work pressure. But that is not important now. The child cries out again: ‘Mumma!’ She opens her eyes. She pulls herself from expensive sheets as if wrenching her body up out of a swimming pool and onto wet concrete. She’s dragged through the room by those tears. The camera lingers in the bedroom, shoots her heavy footsteps from behind, her agonisingly slow walk down the hall towards her crying child. There is a tiny pause in his tears, and she stops mid-step. Maybe it’s over. ‘Mumma!’ he cries anew. Her hands cover her face in a gesture of true despair. She starts walking, slow footfalls, down the hallway again.

‘Fuck,’ I said to my friend, moved by the everyday brutality of the scene — a rarity in TV land.

‘Fuck,’ she replied.

And then I was momentarily filled with a sense of deep relief. ‘I never have to do that,’ I said.

My friend laughed. It was a flippant thing to say. But to say it out loud produced a feeling of certainty that I seldom have. I never have to do that. An incantation. An affirmation. It’s a sensation I have felt at other times around children, too. I never have to do that, I’ve thought, watching parents teach their kids to share or say thank-you. I never have to do that, I’ve thought, even when watching my friends’ kids play with them adoringly or listening to smart, lively children tell their parents about their day at school.

This is the one aspect of adult life that I have resolved. I know for sure that I don’t want a baby. Not now. Not ever. I am one in a fluctuating number of women who are childless. Our existence is charted alarmingly in statistics. We are labelled as selfish, blamed for greying populations in covert and overt ways. We are subjected to endless questioning by friends and strangers. These questions range from the snobby (‘Don’t you think educated people have a responsibility to breed?’) to the dynastic (‘Aren’t you concerned about your legacy?’) to the quasi-religious (‘Don’t you want to pass on your beliefs?’) to the batty (‘But don’t you just want to kiss their little baby faces — aren’t babies just sooooii cuttteeee?!’)

My answer, a resounding no, provokes raised eyebrows, concerned monologues, or a war call indicating the discovery of a heartless woman, a cold fish-bride/witch to be ejected from the hearth of all that is LOVELY AND WORTHWHILE.

One benefit of passing thirty is that while the questions still get asked, people accept my answers. They no longer smile knowingly and refer to my biological clock, a pea-sized time bomb set to explode somewhere in the space between gut and vagina at a preordained age (thirty, it’s always thirty). It used to be inevitable that I would turn into a genetically programed baby machine, unable to shirk the imperative to replicate. Now I’m just a weirdo. A strange genetic abnormality. Or a ruined, over-educated woman who doesn’t understand what it is to be human.

The biological clock is just another misogynist metaphor, but there is a cultural clock, and it is ticking loudly enough to keep me up at night. What becomes of the childless woman? Our culture insists that she is a lonely individual who will rue her choices and die unloved and unsatisfied. She is anathema to the future. Fine. I go to sleep each night ready to awake as a comic-book villainess.

News about diminishing birth rates around the developed world has flared up from time to time over the past few years. Young people aren’t breeding in Italy; they aren’t breeding in Japan and Greece and the well-to-do parts of North America. Or, if they are breeding, they are waiting too long to breed enough. In 2016, former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth Lord Sacks declared that European society would ‘die’ because young people ‘did not want the responsibilities of bringing up children’. Pope Francis delivered his edict against childless millennials in 2015: ‘A society with a greedy generation,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society . . . The choice to not have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.’

He was right, of course. Denuding yourself of the belief that the future redeems the present and past had its existential downsides. And the Pope is old; it made sense he’d fall back on intergenerational sledging rather than consider the reasons why children have become such hefty burdens.

But when he had a go at dogs, things got personal.

‘It might be better,’ spake the Pope, ‘more comfortable, to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog. Then, in the end, this marriage comes to old age in solitude, with the bitterness of loneliness.’

This was too much. There was no reason to bring companion species into this kind of demagoguery. Dogs aren’t to blame for women choosing not to have babies, capitalist patriarchy is.

Slowly the statistics, if not the opinions, are starting to support this. In 2014, a report on fertility by the Pew Research Center showed that older women with advanced degrees were suddenly having more children, despite the generally declining US fertility rate. Why were these women breeding when the conventional wisdom said they would not? Fertility treatments were partly responsible, but so was an increasingly equitable distribution of labour in highly educated households. Men with masters degrees (that is, greater incomes and more-flexible working hours) did more chores. Historian Stephanie Coontz argues that how much work men do around the house after the birth of their first child is the single biggest factor in determining whether a woman will want to have a second.

Generally, the mainstream media skirts around these kinds of findings. More-liberal sources emphasise cultural change as the determinant for procreation, and preserve a degree of sympathy for a generation who can’t afford to own homes, couples for whom a dual income is a necessity but childcare is still too expensive, a GFC–shocked cohort who are understandably cautious about economic risks. Conservative sources are less understanding: selfish, educated women the world over are to blame for ageing populations and future economic disaster, and we know this because globally, where education levels for women go up, fertility rates go down. But as we can see from Coontz’s analysis, statistics on their own can be misleading, and they can also be weaponised to bolster opinions.

In order to better understand statistics about women and babies, you need to know your terms. The commonly cited total fertility rate (TFR) is a speculative calculation. It refers to the number of children a woman will have if we sudden-age-forward through her whole life. It can be adjusted continually. If we are down by .08 this year, there is always a chance we will be up by .1 the next. The TFR cannot take into account new fertility technologies. In opinion pieces and editorials that decry the ageing population, the TFR is often linked to the replacement rate, that is, the number of babies that need to be born to make up for population loss due to death. Immigration is not taken into account when calculating replacement rates. In Australia, the replacement rate is approximately 2.1, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

These numbers, in concert with negative attitudes towards single mothers on welfare, insist on the importance of replacing our dead with middle-class babies. But given that we currently need more than 1.2 Earths to survive at the rate we are consuming, and that middle-class kids use way more resources than kids from lower socio-economic households, it’d probably be better not to.

What we are talking about, then, when we talk about fertility, is not only babies and their bright or not-so-bright futures. We are talking about class and class consolidation. We are talking about national borders and immigration. We are talking about culture, its so-called ‘character’, in the way a person (let’s call them a racist, for clarity) might say a new immigrant cannot replace a dead settler/coloniser. We are also talking about our fear of ageing and death and our knowledge that the way things are going, there will be no support for either in a decade or two. And finally, we are insisting women’s bodies be tasked with nurturing all these things.

Recently, my doctor asked me if, given my advancing age, I was interested in freezing my eggs. ‘You know, just as an insurance policy.’

She handed me a brochure for an egg bank. ‘You can store them for later!’

Insurance against what? I wondered. This was, I suppose, a threshold moment. I had been identified as a person who might later have the means to avail myself of reproductive medicine and claim my inalienable right to a baby of my own. If I froze my eggs, I might be able to have my baby at fifty with a very tidy husband, or eight babies and a little light celebrity, like Octomom, putting the TFR in a spin and causing an echo of opinions across the media of the future.

But I don’t want a baby. I don’t want to be a mother to any of this.

It probably doesn’t help my wasted fertility that I am compulsively drawn to catastrophism, disaster, and the end of things. I’m one of those people who wakes up on a forty-degree day in April and says, ‘Any minute now, this whole suburb is gonna be underwater.’ This is healthy or unhealthy, depending on your perspective, but my unshakable feeling that things cannot continue as they are may have impacted on my inability to make decisions about the future. I’m not building bunkers and stockpiling canned goods, but I’m not investing in oil companies and taking out massive loans, either. And so, it shocks me how little we talk about what it means to have a child in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Whenever someone proclaims that we need to think about the future of our children, I’m a little taken aback. No spoilers, but it’s not looking great. Of course, no one wants to hear this kind of thing. No one gives the time of day to the dude on the freeway with the ‘End Is Nigh’ sign. Nor should they. But if you are that dude, even part-time, the traffic on the freeway, all those cars carrying all those people to school, to work, seems like a big fat joke.

While I think the human race will meet heat death or inertia before we stop breeding, if governments are concerned that there will not be enough young bodies to prop up economies, it might be a good idea to schedule an economic policy overhaul for some time in the next fifty years. Here’s a hint: the harder it is for women in these countries to have a reasonable quality of life in addition to babies, the less likely they are to have them. Women are shrewd like that.

This shrewdness is not the same as selfishness. Neither are selfishness and childlessness mutually exclusive. I know parents whose sense of self simply incorporates their offspring at the expense of everyone else, and childless people who work tirelessly for others. The conception of childless freedom as synonymous with hard clubbing and flash holidays on islands with unadvertised colonial histories — a perception that is particularly prevalent among op-eds on the declining numbers of millennial mothers — is even more problematic. I might be an educated, childless woman, but I find the trope of the wild, unencumbered chick with money to burn on shots and shoes irksome. This isn’t the life I have or want. In fact, I think the predominance of this representation is part of what is freaking me out about adulthood. The fact that childless women like me are consistently portrayed as overgrown, overfunded teenagers suggests that the only real way to be an acceptable part of adult society is to have a baby.

There are statistics that show the association between adulthood and parenthood leads some of the poorest Americans to have children young, outside of a stable relationship and therefore in a more vulnerable economic position. ‘Having a baby can be a marker of adulthood,’ Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic in 2014. She described an American economy where unskilled jobs are outsourced and computerised, and young adults without sufficient education are unable to secure anything beyond the ‘low paying and dull’. ‘Meanwhile, babies are great,’ she added. ‘They’re like a little mini-job that you get to love. Plus, being a mother is being someone.’

Parenthood is a way to ‘become a successful adult when all other paths are blocked’, Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin confirmed.

Meanwhile, the representation of childless adults primarily as consumers masks all the ways that having children is an economic, not just a social, imperative. Australians spent $3.9 billion on baby merchandise in the 2008–09 financial year, with disposable nappies accounting for almost a quarter of this. In the United States, parents spend one trillion dollars a year on their children. As Goldman Sachs put it, enthusiastically, in their report on marketing to Millennial Mom, ‘Parenthood is a catalyst for new ways of spending.’

The narratives we have about babies and what they do for the life of the parent change according to the cultural and historical moment. As critic Laura Kipnis has pointed out, the stories about ‘maternal bonding’, which figure the love between mother and child as borderline divine, emerged around the time of the Industrial Revolution (when women could finally leave the house for work), and strengthened again with the introduction of child-labour laws. You can’t leave them at home, you can’t put them to work. Someone has to look after them, and mothers need some sort of reward for their time if there’s no actual pay attached.

It seems similarly conspicuous to me that the dyad of the selfish and selfless has emerged in this moment of peak capitalism, in which fast fashion, entertainment, international travel, resort holidays, and designer drugs are more readily available to the middle classes than at any point in history. It’s crucial, in late capitalism, that everyone envies everyone else, and spends money accordingly. Being unfulfilled is the foundation for aspiration. It is our economic responsibility.

My own decision to remain childless has nothing to do with parties or shoes (you don’t need to have a child to stop drinking in the shower). I made the decision, I think, before I even knew there was a decision to make. As a kid, when my dolls were not in space, they were less likely to be my babies than my peers. We sat together in a completely genderless, interspecies classroom where bunny, baby, transformer, and wombat puppet all spoke with one voice (it was my voice, obviously; there was no one else around to speak). Occasionally, when another little kid came over for a play date, the classroom broke up and the attendants were positioned atop one another for some interspecies fun times — smooshed together violently, as we understood the practice of copulation. When other girls wanted to take the next step and give birth to these dolls, I was totally sicked out. It was not a fun game. You just knelt there, fussing over the friend while she wailed and moaned, slowly pulling the fully clothed Cabbage Patch Kid from under her butt.

As a teenager, I liked to talk about child-rearing as an ethical project. Would you live in the city or the bush? Would you send a daughter to school or teach her at home, Rousseau-style? What was your position on amniocentesis and aborting so-called chromosomal abnormalities? At sixteen, I was fascinated by these questions. I liked my imagined family with Annie, where everything was accounted for and agreed upon in advance. When that fantasy dissolved, I tried to transfer it onto my first boyfriend.

He was five years older than my naïve seventeen. We had our own rented apartment above a Portuguese restaurant, and it seemed to me that we had it all. Then why was I spending so much time in bed eating home-brand corn chips and watching the first season of Big Brother? Was something missing from my life? Did I need a baby to really get into this grown-up life? We talked about babies a little less abstractly, though of course we could both see that we were probably too young, too broke, too in love. We talked alternatives — travelling or getting a dog. We even got as far as the pet store, where I cooed over a shivering miniature pincer in a baby pen. But even that was too much too soon. We compromised again, chose two fat young rats and dubbed them Joey Methyltryptamine and Afghan Kush. (He was well into weed and Aleister Crowley. I was well into The Ramones.) It didn’t take long for the rats to go feral and take up residence beneath the stove. They emerged occasionally, grease-smeared and wild, to scavenge instant-noodle scraps off the peeling kitchen counter. When we broke up eighteen months later, my boyfriend set them free in a local park. A year later, I pulled Cassady from under that caravan in Humpty Doo. Just as the Pope feared, I have not felt the baby urge since.

As I progressed through my twenties, I began to really notice how hard mothers work. Again, let’s not pretend that mothers work harder because they are naturally suited to childcare, and stubbornly insistent on working outside the home as well. They work harder because there is not enough infrastructure to support them. They work harder because they have been taught to. Noticing this helped me to remember, or perhaps realise for the first time, how hard my own mother worked, both domestically and in her profession. In having me, she undertook her own project of ethical parenting. She didn’t home-school, but neither did she allow television, American novels, pop music, fashionable clothes or magazines, plastic toys, or snacks containing refined sugar. When I was a toddler and my parents were still together, my mother made her own fruit leathers and pasta. She took me to macrobiotic playgroup. Later, she read me ambitious old books such as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Waterbabies. When I was in primary and early high school, after my parents had separated, my mother worked long hours and came home at seven each night to find her tween daughter sprawled on the floor in front of a television blaring with American accents and jingles, a trash angel amid the empty cracker packets, organic peach pits, and apple cores.

‘I’ll pick them all up at once!’ I remember yelling at her one time, as she stood over me expectantly.

She had placed her bag on the dining-room table. Gone to the kitchen. Poured herself a scotch. Then she began chopping vegetables and boiling water for our dinner.

Looking back, I’m embarrassed and appalled.

I’m also surprised that she didn’t teach me a few recipes and have me cook and wash up. A few years later, I met Annie, who, at thirteen, was the household grocery shopper and primary cook. She and her mother were a team. Surely I could have been roused to similar domestic efforts? Serge, too, had a single mother who worked long hours and shouldered all of the domestic labour. Why did they do this? I’m sure it’s a pain in the arse to teach kids to cook and clean, but isn’t the payoff worth it? One convincing argument was guilt. My mum did all the domestic chores because she worked. Because her marriage had ended and she was drowning in debt. I think for her, self-flagellation was preferable to admitting that she had not managed to pull off the ideal. I have some of this instinct in me — I try to keep it in check. Not having children helps. No one tells me that I am selfless, and it’s a real load off.

There is one important way that being childless does equate with freedom and selfishness. When you don’t have a child, you are free to be morose, to be depressed or angry or impulsive or joyful, without someone thinking you feel this way because of them. My parents, both so loving and supportive, were also moody people. As I child, I learned to interpret the way my mother turned her key in the lock, or the sound of my father’s Zippo lighter flicking shut. I knew, by these cues, what the tenor of my immediate future would be. I quietly wished someone would call my Dad and ask him out for a beer; I longed to have heard my mother’s car in time to slay the trash angel before the time of judgement. I know now that my parents’ moods had nothing to do with me, but children, in their narrow cocoons, are selfish by design. They think they are the centre of everything, and very little tells them otherwise.

Even in the first-person accounts of wilful childlessness, no one wants to deemphasise the value of children. Authors feel compelled to state that they do not dislike children. In fact, they love them. They hang out with them all the time. They are wonderful aunties/uncles/godparents/mentors. Children are so important, they insist. I don’t feel defensive on this account. Some children I have met are really cool. Quite a few of them are jerks. The ratio is not dissimilar from that I encounter in the adult world. The idea that all children are wonderful, joyful, caring sweetie-pies is rubbish. It is also a key fallacy on which to build a narrative of adulthood as a kind of moral decline, such as the one in Big.

My psychologist asked, in one of our appointments, if perhaps I don’t want a child because I feel like I could fail at it. She is wrong. She forgets that I am special and I can do anything. (I should have my mother call her.) Even without a house, a reliable income, a family who could help with childcare, or a strong community network, I can imagine rising to the task of parenting. I can imagine pulling myself from bed in the middle of the night. That’s why the knowledge that I don’t have to is so relief-inducing. I cringe at the titles of recent books such as I Can’t Even Take Care of Myself and Childfree and Loving It! Unlike the authors of these insistent titles, I don’t think passing up on progeny is the fast track to a great life. Finding meaning without children is difficult. I’m still grappling with the idea that I live my life, as Harry Dean Stanton puts it, ‘well-steeped in nothing’, but I don’t think that a lack of meaning is a good reason to have a child. I have seen too many friends have children and then sink back into that same aching nothing, still plagued by the existential questions that bother me in the small hours.

Instead of insisting that children add instant meaning to adult lives, perhaps it is time to think more about why we feel bereft of (or perhaps entitled to) meaning in the first place.

‘Aren’t you worried you will regret it?’ is the final question in the arsenal of the disbelievers.

It’s this regret that I was supposed to insure myself against by freezing my eggs. My generation is so obsessed with the spectre of regret that we have an acronym for it, FOMO, fear of missing out. But, as one childless girlfriend puts it: ‘You know what, it’s better to regret the baby you didn’t have than the one you did.’

But could I change my mind? they want to know. I always say no, though this is not entirely true. Perhaps if I was to wake up one morning soon in a parallel universe in which I have a partner who I love as much as Serge but who, unlike Serge, cannot stand the idea of life without a child, cannot be talked around to it. And if this partner also respected — loved, even — my need for solitude, understood that writing sustains me; if they said to me, as I stood silhouetted in the bathroom doorway, crying, holding the plastic stick covered with piss and tiny blue ticks, ‘Please, let’s have this baby. Once it’s born, you can go ahead and do what you need to do to preserve your sense of self; you are more lovable and useful to us in doing so. Pursue the ideas that enchant you. I’ll take care of all the grunt work of child-rearing, as well as supporting you in every endeavour. You will always retain at least fifty per cent say in major decisions about our lives. You just need to pledge your love and play with us on the rug in the evenings after you eat the healthful dinner that I have prepared. And even if some nights you only want dinner and not to talk or play, we will still love you forever, and follow you wherever you want to go.’

If, in other words, this parallel-universe partner said, ‘It’s okay, you can be the Dad,’ then, and only then, would I reconsider my position.

Now that many millennials are leaving their narcissistic years behind and selflessly forming families of their own, profiles of my generation as parents are beginning to show up in the media. In December 2015, Time ran a cover emblazoned with a typically hyperbolic headline — ‘Help! My Parents are Millennials’ — above a picture of a baby in one of those fancy Swedish four-wheel strollers that look like robotic insects and self-destruct in the first year. The baby’s uncannily adult features (compared to millennials, babies are Renaissance-level mature again) are arranged into an expression that says ‘good grief’. From the magazine’s right margin, two anonymous, perhaps even genderless, but certainly parental arms aim smartphones at this little dear in the headlines like hunters at a zoo.

Smartphones, social media, and the internet feature heavily in Time’s characterisation of millennial parenthood, with good reason. Many of today’s parents start documenting their children online from age foetus, with sonograms posted on Instagram and Facebook, followed by birth shots and important milestones, from crawl to kinder — will these parents continue to document into adolescence, or will puberty signify the beginning of the next generation’s digital individuation? Time will tell. Time will no doubt tell us too. Meanwhile, here’s a statement for the times: my Facebook page is covered in babies. There are babies sucking, crawling, cuddling, clapping, and co-opting my social network.

For a while, Facebook was dominated by the ‘motherhood challenge’, in which women posted five photos that made them ‘happy to be mothers’ and then tagged five other great mothers in their network, inviting them to do the same. These photos became indistinguishable from one another in my feed and also, poignantly, from a news item that dominated Australian media outlets the very same morning. My city’s major daily ran with a front page featuring a similar photo collage: images of smiling and gurgling refugee babies, slated for deportation to offshore processing centres. The headline was ‘Babies Bound for Hell’. There was no mention of their mothers.

While I quietly judged the women of the Facebook motherhood challenge, noting their inelegant timing, there were others who took to trolling, and even posting a ‘childfree challenge’, featuring photos of themselves napping with bottles of plonk, stacks of cash, international air-travel tickets, and molecular degustations, all of which were far more gratuitous and distasteful than the onslaught of babies.

The internet impacts everything we do now, and arguably for millennials more than any generation before. It is a place to perform the self, to make connections and seek information. I cannot tell you how many times, while trying to write this book, I have slipped into a digital trance, snapping back into focus just as I hit search on terms as asinine as ‘how to write a book in less than three months’ or ‘should I eat carbohydrates before I write a book’. I can only imagine what you would find yourself searching when you haven’t slept in days and your baby hasn’t stopped screaming for just as long. One friend says she was sucked into a rabbit hole of forums and dubious articles after searching ‘how do I tell if my baby is a jerk?’

‘I got a bad case of mummy finger,’ she laughed, using the new hospital slang for repetitive strain injury of the thumb. ‘Sometimes I wonder what he thinks our phones are. To him, it’s just this box of light that all the adults are totally transfixed by, that has the power to make them go completely still and silent.’

While the internet also helps connect parents who might otherwise be isolated, social media jealousy and guilt reaches its apex when the lives being compared are not our own but our children’s. Millennial parents are anxious about their children’s development compared to the other sprogs in their feed. They are wracked with envy or derision over shots of homemade organic baby food, elaborate cakes, smiling children participating in craft activities. It’s a ‘mompetition’.

Intensive-parenting trends, such as attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding, and other conceptual approaches centring on children’s wellbeing have paved a moral terrain. ‘Parental determinism’, the concept that parenting is the key determinant in the future lives of their children, has made getting through the day like cutting across a minefield for many parents. (And this is despite the fact that where a child is born, to whom, and what school they go to are the single biggest predictors of adult prosperity. Today, statistics carve up school districts into prophetic zones for the future wealthy: the statistical line that divides Sydney almost exactly in half, predicting the future income, health, and even life expectancy of babies born to the east or west, and the colour-mottled map of London showing a deep purple ‘knowledge class’ at the centre of the city, fading out to the pinks and blues of ‘service’ and ‘working’ classes on the outskirts of the megalopolis. In some ways, a child’s personal adult taxonomy is designed before they are out of nappies, let alone able to tap dance for Instagram.)

Such grave responsibility also has a significant impact on adult identities. ‘As the “work” of parenting (emotional and physical) expands to engulf more and more of parents’ lives, clearly the time and energy available for everything else will be drained,’ argued Charlotte Faircloth, founding member of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent. ‘This fits into a wider conversation around risk consciousness and the demise of confidence about how to approach the future. Put simply, our paranoia about parenting is a symptom of a society that feels less and less certain about what matters in life, and why.’

This statement resonated with me. It helped me to connect my feelings about performed parenting, babies as a central determinant of identity, and my sense of adult life as unformed and disconnected. Children are objectively important, and require care, attention, stimulation, education. In lives that lack centres, it makes sense that these concrete tasks could fill the void: if we cannot name the moral terrain of our lives, we can make parenting our crucial moral task. And if this results in giving too much space to our children, it is only because we do not know what that space might otherwise contain. It’s time, then, to have an adult conversation about it. Such a move is necessary if we are to create an engaged, connected, and intelligent adult culture.

I hit peak child-bearing age at a time in which adult culture was distinctly undervalued. The Australian government paid new parents five grand per baby, and the media maligned mothers for spending it selfishly, on big-screen plasmas and clothes. Meanwhile, our first female prime minister was attacked for her childlessness, for her too-clean kitchen and empty fruit bowl. In 2007, Liberal senator Bill Heffernan said, ‘I mean, anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren … they’ve got no idea what life’s about.’

In the United States, female reproductive freedom was also under attack by conservative politicians. In 2012, US Representative for Missouri’s 2nd congressional district Todd Akin told a local news program that women who had been victims of ‘legitimate rape’ would not need abortions as they were unlikely to become pregnant. ‘The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,’ he said. ‘But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.’ The punishment, in every case, seemed to come down sharply across the backs of women, and it’s a preference that is increasing in 2017, with President Donald Trump making a global gag rule — which prevents US-funded NGOs from providing, cancelling, or issuing referrals for abortions — one of his first actions in office.

Now, as then, the deadlocking of the female body to the sacred task of maternity sicks me out. As does the suggestion that a woman without a child can never understand the life of a woman with one, women’s intellects and imaginations being limited to the things they have experienced firsthand, naturally.

Unfortunately, these sentiments were echoed by well-meaning female friends, hopped up on post-birth hormones.

‘You’ve never experienced love like this,’ gushed one new mother when I visited her.

‘It’s amazing to think that I will never be alone again,’ said another.

I concentrated on controlling my facial expressions.

Meanwhile, in the tabloids, we were having a mommy moment. Celebrities by the dozen were taking to glossy magazines and lifestyle television shows to claim that they were just ‘regular moms’. I picked up a gossip magazine in a waiting room and became incensed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s claim that she was of this ilk, ‘just a regular mom wiping butts and warming bottles’. Sure, I thought, and stacking your millions. (Some years later, Paltrow would be vilified for allegedly not allowing her children to eat carbohydrates.) A few pages on, the actress Minnie Driver claimed her regular-mommy status too. Women’s magazines featured parent-and-toddler fashion spreads. Find out what Brooklyn Beckham or Pax Jolie-Pitt wore to the Yo Gabba Gabba! live show.

I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and found it chillingly prophetic. In Egan’s future world, adults text one another in a vowel-stripped baby babble rather than talk because subtext has become exhausting, tone an unnecessary way to complicate meaning. Texting is, one character says, ‘pure — no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments’. Meanwhile, toddlers, nicknamed ‘pointers’, monopolise culture through their natural aptitude with smartphones. Manhattan — the capital of grown-up culture, where the women of Sex and the City brunched, and so many of the art and music movements I adore emerged — has become, in Egan’s dystopia, the place ‘where the density of children is highest in the nation’. Babies fill Times Square, and the sepulchral streets surrounding Ground Zero — ‘An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left.’

if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt? one adult texts another.

It would be two more years before I read Lee Edelman’s No Future, a polemic against the power of exactly this insistence, which he calls ‘reproductive futurism’.

‘What,’ writes Edelman, ‘would it signify not to be “fighting for the children”? How could one take the other “side”, when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?’

While I was often called to defend my choice not to have children, I realised, as I waded through the swamps of pro-baby popular culture, that no one had ever articulated to me why they wanted a child. It was supposed to remain sacredly obvious, I gathered. Far from being a topic around which adult positions could comingle and mutate through impassioned debate, most of those I knew dodged accounting for their choice to procreate. Many, in fact, claimed that their baby was an accident. These accidents, I observed, usually occurred after the couple had quietly established that they wanted kids at some point and then promptly stopped using any form of birth control. This, I thought, pushed the boundaries of the term. It was the sort of accident I might have if I decided I did not want to go to work today and then turned off my alarm and went back to sleep.

Why did everyone want to tell me about their child’s nap schedule, or sweet temperament, or let me in on the intricacies of their bowel movements, yet no one could tell me how it felt to want a child? I decided I needed to talk to someone who had been open about their desire for a baby. I called Stacy, a friend of Annie’s with two children, whose existence she had spoken about long before it was manifest. Did she always know she wanted kids? I asked in an online chat thread after a few pleasantries.

‘Oh, I always knew! Yes.’

Stacy promptly invited me over for lunch at her home, one hour west of Melbourne in a small, deindustrialised country town with a growing population of urbanites pushed out of the city by high rents and low prospects. Tree-changers, they have been dubbed in the media, though there were not so many trees around Stacy’s huge, rented home in the centre of the town.

As soon as I walked through the gate, I saw the trends outlined in descriptions of Millennial Mom. Though Stacy was born in the late 1970s, missing the cap for some definitions of Generation Y, she fit the profile from Time; she was the very woman whose habits Goldman Sachs evaluated for spending implications. Her three-year-old daughter was reading a library book on the lawn when I arrived, munching on a homemade sausage roll covered in what looked suspiciously like chia seeds. The little girl was a delight: soft-spoken, thoughtful, and cautious. Stacy ushered me into her bright kitchen and the girl asked politely if she could watch something before her nap. Stacy handed her an iPad, and the child shuffled off down a hallway lined with organised boxes of toys.

Stacy’s broad kitchen table was spread with an array of fermented vegetables in jars — her award-winning sauerkraut, as judged by the local agricultural show. A brightly coloured craft project was laid out in the adjacent room, felt and pegs and baskets of this and that. Useful boxes, as they called them on Play School when I was little. The whole thing was pastoral, neat, idyllic, and, in a way, enviable.

‘Millennial parents put self-expression first,’ said the marketing profiles. ‘Millennial parents are more idealistic.’

‘So what did you want to talk about?’ Stacy asked.

‘No one ever tells me why they want kids,’ I explained.

‘Right. Because it’s just something you do.’

‘Exactly.’

Stacy told me about her childhood. She was the eldest girl in a family of four and was often tasked with looking after the younger kids, feeding them and putting them to bed. It was not the first time I’d heard a story like this. Anecdotally, it seemed to me that people who played carer roles from an early age were more comfortable with assuming them later on, a fact that makes perfect sense and is probably obvious to people who grew up with siblings. One new dad I interviewed in my search to find someone to talk about their desire for children spent his teen years caring for his developmentally disabled brother, and attributed the comparative ease of transitioning into fatherhood and then single fatherhood to that experience. ‘It’s just what you do,’ he told me when I goaded him to complain or rant or protest.

I’m not sure it’s what I would do, I had thought then, and I thought it again now in Stacy’s kitchen, sampling her pickles and picking apart her life.

‘I was eight years old, making two-minute noodles for dinner and helping with homework,’ Stacy said. ‘I knew then that I would never feed my own kids shit food.’

I nodded, helping myself to another quinoa burger.

At age eleven, Stacy started planning for a family of her own. ‘I even have a list somewhere I wrote back then of exactly the man I wanted to marry.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yeah!’ she said. ‘No beards!’

We both laughed. Chris, her husband, is thoroughly bearded.

Stacy had a glory box, too, still at her parents’, filled with ‘cheap crap’ that never made it to her married life, though in some sense her entire twenties were a glory box. Right up until the age-thirty deadline, which was very real for her, Stacy collected crockery, beautiful old toys and puzzles, and experiences.

‘I didn’t want to have kids until I was thirty,’ she said. ‘Now we can show them pictures of us in Paris. They can see we had a life before them.’

The phrase ‘a life before them’ resonates with loss on paper, but listening to Stacy, I got the sense that it was waiting to have children that was more difficult. She did it not because she wanted that life she had without children, but because she wanted to present it to them, like a human glory box, filled with experience rather than with napkins. She probably also did it because of the contempt that our culture reserves for mothers who are too young. There is a window, between too young and too old, and it is about the same amount of time as a graduate degree.

I looked at Stacy’s fridge, tacked with drawings and photographs. ‘So you basically got everything you dreamed of.’

‘We don’t own the house.’

‘No, but it’s a very nice rental.’

‘That’s truuuuue,’ she said, cracking her appealing, fox-like smile. ‘Then why are we so fucking unhappy?’

I smiled. Because happiness is not indexed to achievements, I thought. Instead of saying this out loud, I paraphrased Tom Waits: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you a hundred thousand dollars wouldn’t fix.’

Stacy broke into laughter. ‘That’s true, too. Then we could take a holiday and put a deposit on a house. Then we could afford some daycare.’

Stacy insisted that she does not feel pressured by her peers on Facebook. Her ethical parenting style and DIY aesthetic (not dissimilar from my own mother’s early Whole Earth Catalogue aspirations) was all her, and she stuck to her guns even if it meant explaining what a sweatshop was to her kids when they demanded some cheap imported toy at the supermarket (I never have to do that, I thought). Her insistence and her reasoning simultaneously problematise the kind of research that takes place in order to identify trends. Millennial Mom might have a strong profile that is open to exploitation, but the millions of women who make her up have come to these conclusions for many different reasons. One thing we know for sure about millennials is that they are more abundantly and carefully marketed to than any previous generation. Are good intentions cheapened when they are used in marketing strategies? Probably. But cynicism isn’t an antidote.

If Stacy is locked in a mompetition with anyone, it is her own mother. She hated seeing the waste her parents generated, the impractical way they spent their money. ‘I wanted to see if I could do a better job,’ she said, laughing. ‘I wanted to make better humans.’

If you put aside the vengeful glee in this, it’s an undeniably civic-minded sentiment. Stacy is a bake-sale and PTA kind of mother, but an updated, cooler version. She is active in her community, always available to help out with some worthwhile cause. It’s a good adult life, if a hard one, in the way that living idealistically is often hard — and because her oldest child is only six, she is only at the start of it.

Stacy handed me a jar of similarly award-winning pickle on my way out the door. I’m glad for the future that she has children. I’m still equally glad that I don’t have to.

On the drive home, I thought more about community and friendship. I had wrongly assumed it was the childless who were excluded from communities, comprising happy, self-contained families. Selfishly, I hadn’t thought of this lonely drift from the other side.

When researching marriage, I’d had the opportunity to visit the home of a non-monogamous triad. A family with two women, a man, and a small kid, all sharing the load together and working without models towards a different kind of adult life. Love was the main factor in this decision, Gillian, one of the women, told me, but it also turned out to be intensely pragmatic. ‘None of my friends with kids have time to themselves — it doesn’t matter how much support they have. I’ve watched the women I know have kids and then kind of flounder. The jobs they get afterwards are nowhere near as good as those they were getting before. Plus there’s the boredom. Parenting is relentlessly boring,’ she said, with such candour I felt ready to move in with them myself. ‘We work it out between us, and everyone has time to do the things that make them feel whole.’

Feeling whole, for Gillian, came not only from family life but also from creative endeavour, paid work, and opportunities for travel. For her, parenting was isolating, but parenting in a monogamous marriage would have been impossible. How could you maintain a life beyond your family when there were only two of you to care for the child?

‘I can’t even finish my thoughts sometimes. I hate it,’ Stacy had said, when I asked her about how she finds time for herself or for friendships. ‘One friend called three times last night, and every time was still bedtime. Bedtime goes for three hours here. If your friends work nine to five, it hardly leaves time for a chat. It’s so hard to maintain that contact, and you really yearn for it.’

How, I wondered, could we bridge this gap? I vowed privately to be more engaged, to be more patient when catching up with girlfriends while their children play between us; but I also knew that this effort would only help a little bit, and could only be committed to short-term. The organisation of work, the domestic space, the city, all conspire to make it difficult for parents and nonparents to form close-knit communities. This distance is also a hangover from a long and concerted effort to keep women out of the public sphere, out of the streets and cafés, out of democracy. Labelling women selfish because they choose not to have children when doing so still means undertaking more than half the domestic labour, in addition to working for a wage, is a last-ditch attempt to consolidate this effort and, as usual, wherever there is a new paradigm or a so-called choice, there is a set of consumer patterns to solidify it.

The statistics on childlessness suggest distance is not just emotional but also geographical. In 2013, Newsweek declared a ‘postfamilial America’. Harry Siegel wrote that

the strong correlation between childlessness and high-density city living has created essentially two Americas: child-oriented and affordable areas, and urban centers that have become increasingly expensive and child-free over the last 30 years — not coincidentally the same span over which middle-class incomes have stagnated. 

Seattle, apparently, now has more dogs than children, a fact that would appal the Pope but I find appealing.

Why then, when I got back to my city, did I find myself standing beside the local primary school for a long time, too long, hanging off the fence like the kind of creep your mother warned you not to talk to, watching the children play? Why then did I find myself asking the same question women who don’t want the things they’re told to want have been asking themselves for centuries — that is, what the hell is wrong with me?

Behind the fence, the children were unperturbed by my scrutiny. There were patterns in their play. Hierarchies, negotiations, expulsions, and allegiances formed and dismantled. I can’t be a parent, I thought, because I don’t want to teach anyone the rules to the game, and I don’t have the heart to tell them not to play.

When the bell rang, these disciplined bodies turned, rigid and quick, as though they’d received a shock of electricity to the temple. Small tornadoes spun out across the field, gathering folders and bags and lunchboxes, leaving chip packets and forgotten jumpers in their wake. For a moment, the cacophony of laughter and shouting rose to crescendo. Then it disbursed, like a flock of birds squawking before a storm. The field was suddenly quiet, still, as though no one had been there in months. It was just the kind of empty space on which an apocalyptic imagination indulgently superimposes a new world.

A ball of cling wrap skipped over the basketball court like a tumbleweed.

‘Everyone is having babies!’ I wailed at Serge in a bar. ‘What are we going to do instead?’

‘I dunno, darlin’.’

Serge was still reluctant to talk about the future. He was forever stressed. Forever sorting through his own private adult angst and leaving me to mine. If I thought about it too much, I would cry until my ears popped, until the pressure split straight through my skull.

Early on, Serge and I had constructed a very romantic adult fantasy. Strictly Hollywood, it involved eloping, making music and art together, living all over the world, being a totally self-sufficient community of two. As the years passed, not only did this fantasy fail to materialise, but it also began to seem totally impractical. Where would the money come from? Also, humans like to be around other humans. A community of two, romantic though it may be, was hard to sustain. By the time we figured this out, many of the people we knew were solving the problem by making more people. The cult of romance feeds seamlessly into the adult fantasy of the nuclear family. Before the age-thirty deadline, I had never looked past the romance, glutting myself on it — all those rom-coms and road movies, first-person pop music — until it oozed out my pores and formed a haze across my eyeballs, across the reality of my assumed social and cultural imperative.

But I don’t want to have a baby.

While the Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that couples without kids will account for 43 per cent of families by 2031, they do not provide their names or addresses, or the places they like to hang out. My life might one day provide an example of a different kind of adult existence for my friends’ kids, but for now, my future is like that playground after the bell rings.

Serge stared at his phone, sighing at something in his newsfeed or inbox. Distractedly, I took out my own device and scrolled, sipping my wine, hardly noticing as my fingers tapped in the search: ‘What do adults do?’

A storm of screech rose up from the palm of my hand.

MAKE THEIR BED. My life felt contingent; I often said to people that I could not make a solid plan — keep my current foster dog, for instance. OWN TWO SETS OF SHEETS A PET OR CHILD because I did not yet know WHICH BREED OF DOG ARE YOU? the shape of my adult life HOW TO DESIGN YOUR PERFECT LIFE. Would I stay in one place or move around? THESE TINY HOUSES WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO THROW OUT EVERYTHING YOU OWN Would I get a permanent full-time job? 7 UNCONVENTIONAL WAYS TO GET YOUR DREAM JOB WHY GEN Y ARE SMARTER THAN WE THINK HOW TECH CAN MAKE YOUR CAREER BY 30 Would I buy a home? TOP 20 WAYS TO SAVE FOR A HOME DEPOSIT, FAST! Would I MARRY (WHY THESE CELEBS WON’T TIE THE KNOT) Serge? The answer to every question 20 THINGS YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR PARTNER/BEST FRIEND/EMPLOYER led to the next, and so forth, until 100 WAYS YOU CAN GIVE BACK I felt like I was a little kid spinning around in circles INCREASE YOUR CIRCLES OF INFLUENCE with the deliberate aim of becoming dizzy to the point of passing out. BEDROOM WORKOUTS THAT WILL BURN YOUR BUTT GET YOUR DREAM BODY SWEAT IT OUT Of course, the best part of this game TAKE THIS QUIZ TO FIND OUT WHICH SIMPSONS CHARACTER YOU ARE was always when, lying on the grass, GARDENING FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE you suddenly realised that the sky had stopped spinning and your body seemed solid once more. That was the point you could get up and try it all again.