What do you do if you always imagined a house full of children, but don’t want to be a biological parent? This was the dilemma facing one of my schoolfriends, the standup comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean, who lives on Ynys Môn (Anglesey) with her partner. Like many people in their 30s, they were surrounded by friends embroiled in the maelstrom of babies and young children. But the prevailing narratives around motherhood didn’t really speak to Kiri, nor did the hard, thankless work of it appeal to her (to quote one of her jokes, “I see what my friends have got, and it’s the fucking Manson family … chaos, violence, no one’s washing their hair, everyone’s talking about sacrifice. It is a cult.”)
Foster caring isn’t something that many millennials consider – the largest age group of carers are people in their 50s – but when Kiri and her partner heard an advert on the radio appealing for more carers, it felt right. In her new show, Peacock, she talks about the vetting process, which included many hours of training and more than 60 hours of interviews. Rather than being put off by how exhaustive the recruitment is, though, there was something reassuring about it. There are no qualifications for becoming a biological parent, no exam you have to sit, and no real way of knowing if you’ll be good at it before you embark. I, for example, naively thought that having been a young carer for my brother, and later an au pair, an aunt and a godmother, would mean I would be somewhat prepared for motherhood. Yet nothing truly prepares you, and you are humbled in profound, often mortifying, ways.
