7 hours ago
11
It was summer, and I was sitting on the washing machine in the kitchen, listening to my mother tell me the best thing about having children. It wasn’t intended as advice per se – as she saw it, it was simply an outcome of motherhood – but I took it as such. Recently single and aged 30, becoming a mum couldn’t have been further from my mind, but I remember clearly what she said.
Having children, she told me, meant she’d always had a little friend. Or, in the case of me and my sister, two friends. As a result, she rarely felt lonely. From a young age, she would take us to galleries, to the supermarket, sometimes to work. Normal parenting stuff. Except she was divorced and largely on her own, so it would just be us, and she would talk to us like we were old friends. Big stuff or small, she didn’t discriminate. She talked, we listened – given we were preschool, I imagine us as Tom Hanks’ inanimate volleyball Wilson in Cast Away – but we remained incredibly close until she died in August 2020.
I now have two children myself, though I came close to not having any at all, and of course that would have been fine. I don’t know how much her “advice” played into my decision, though I imagine on some level the emotional resonance of what she said twisted my arm, twice. I was aware that my largely happy childhood would be no guarantee of the same for my own children, not least because our preferences always differed vastly – my mother only really wanted to be a mother. If I were to have children, I wanted a whole family. Also, I have had kids at a very different time, with the destruction of our planet so much clearer and our world so much less stable.
In some ways, her advice was terrible. My sons make me angrier than any friend I’ve ever had. They demand an inconceivable amount of time, and intuitively know my weaknesses and how to exploit them. Unlike my friends, and in fact more like a car, they are also very expensive. But they also make me feel fuller than anyone else I know. I’m sometimes embarrassed by how much I love them. Perhaps my mother’s wording was wrong, then – they are probably closer to companions.
Arguments about having or not having children are often made in economic and environmental terms. But this bypasses the instinct – the unshakeable feeling – that visited me when I suddenly felt like I had to have children. And the curiosity! Imagine having someone to talk to or go on holiday with, but also argue with and probably, at times, fall out with in spectacular, life-altering fashion, but always in the hope that you will make up later.
You cannot know ahead of time what it is that you are choosing, for good or bad. Friendship is no reason to have a child. But I don’t think my mother’s “advice” meant that either. As my sons slowly assert their separateness, I now see what she said as a description of what our relationship had become as adults. She wasn’t telling me what to do. She was telling me she loved us.
