As a childless person, many feelings are aroused by Facebook’s annual floods of back-to-school photos but sadness is not one of them.
I am not entirely childfree by choice. Of the many madnesses I indulged in during lockdown, perhaps the greatest was restarting IVF fertility treatment I had begun and abandoned a few years before. Maybe it was the sudden unasked-for break in work to think about my life’s broader trajectory, maybe a broader existential terror provoked by an immediate global threat to human existence.
