I recently learned there is a growing industry in coaching women on whether or not to have children. I’ve started to picture them sometimes, these coaches with their tea and tissues, merrily sketching out flowcharts, calculating the predicted longevity of the NHS perhaps, the likelihood of our planet becoming hostile to human life before the theoretical child turns 21, the hormonal appeal of matching “mummy and me” outfits from Zara, etc. And then, presumably, sending the client off with an answer. Permission to live a certain life.
I am regularly fascinated by the way we are led to believe that there could ever be a correct answer to this question – a relatively new one, and one complicated by the anxiety caused by the economy slipping backwards while the science of fertility leaps forward. And I am regularly livid, too, at what seems to me to be a terrible incuriousness, an avoidance of complexity, around anything related to motherhood. The new choice-coaching industry thrives alongside an ongoing discourse about the ways we talk about motherhood, after the publication of a Vox piece late last year, “How millennials learned to dread motherhood: to our generation, being a mom looks thankless, exhausting, and lonely. Can we change the story?” The internet lit up. Well, my internet at least, an internet of women between the ages of 30 and 50, swaggering, thirsty, cynical, eager. And while I usually enjoy nothing more than a brisk debate about the politics of motherhood, this one left me oddly cold.
