Pregnancy, nappies and school runs? Single, childless, and loving it!

Who needs pregnancy, nappies, school runs and incontinence pants? And that’s just the children, says Aileen C. O’Reilly.

It cannot have escaped your attention that at this year’s Hay Festival the penny finally dropped...

Speaking at the annual literature & arts festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, announced that unmarried, childless women are “the healthiest and happiest”.

Well ... quelle surprise!

In under an hour the news was all over every social media platform — although I’m assuming men were the only ones surprised by his ‘shocking’ revelation.

Men, according to the latest research, need to get married to ensure they live longer while for women the key to joyous longevity is to make damn sure he doesn’t put a ring on it ... but he’d better keep a condom on ‘it’ himself as well.

Despite coming from a very happy home with two siblings and two parents who still quite obviously get a kick out of each other, I must admit my childhood was never filled with dreams of marriage and babies — I happily played at being a nurse and stuck sewing needles in all my ailing dollies arms (who I gave rather impressive measles outbreaks with a red marker before piercing their ears repeatedly with thumbtacks) but dreaming of sashaying up the aisle in a big white guna and promising myself to one man for eternity never even crossed my mind.

I was going to be far too busy as a leading prima-ballerina to be bothered running a home or popping out screaming, messy, icky sprogs from under my starched tutu — of course considering the sorry state of my 7 toed footsies now it’s probably just as well I fell into writing at an early age and put my leotard-clad leaping about behind me.

“Women are only starting to do now what men have done all along,” says psychotherapist Marie Walshe, Clinical Director of Leeson Analytic.

The fact is our expectations from life have changed and we’re only starting to explore the possibilities of remaining single. We don’t need to get married and have children any more in order to take our place in society.

“If we get married it’s because we choose to. If we have children it’s because we’ve decided with our partners that that’s what we both want. We’re equals and in many cases we may be earning more than our husbands.

"These days the husband may very well be the one who ends up at home minding the children.

“We’ve got the education and now we’ve got the money. We’ve the right to a career, the right to be a lesbian — the right to live the kind of lives we want for ourselves without having to be dependent on a husband.

“Men get minded in marriage — that’s why they live longer,” she laughs, “but society has moved on, thank God. Why shouldn’t women be as happy in their lives as men have been for years?”

I have lots of friends who have kids and the step they appear to have taken with such unthinking certainty baffles me — when did they get so grown up that they decided they just HAD to have babies?

When I still don’t appear to have evolved past that 20-something dread of getting “caught out”.

Some are full time mums, others do that crazy space-time-continuum juggling of full-time careers and kiddies where they get an hour’s sleep and realistically run the risk of finding mashed turnip in their work bags every day.

Despite the joy of having been in several really wonderful (tempestuous) relationships I have never felt the urge to procreate and spend my time running around after a cute pooping, burping, screaming bundle or three.

And I still refuse to apologise for this.

I was never ready to be that much of a selfless adult and I reckon I’ve done the whole world of parenting a great service by not contributing to their nappy strewn clique.

Just to confirm, I would be that mother caught trying to send her child back to eBay in bubble wrap with a strongly worded letter vis a vis unmanageable noise and unforeseen poo output levels.

I have friends who, in their 40s, still dream of having a child of their own, friends who can, and other friends who can’t even after endless rounds of invasive soul-destroying IVF, friends who are single and would willingly have a one night stand if it only meant they could be pregnant.

I try to understand it but it utterly baffles me as I look down at the stomach I have spent so long flattening and wouldn’t stretch in this manner if you paid me even double what Kim and Kanye are paying their surrogate.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that I live beside a national school and have to wade through that sea of unpredictable barely harnessed energy every morning (compete with bikes, scooters, puppies and footballs) to get to the bus stop or perhaps it’s the wrecked, hollow eyed, sleep deprived wrongly buttoned up parents I see depositing their offspring that’s taken any supposed cuteness out of the scenario.

Most of the time, in my 20s and 30s, I wasn’t even ready to be an adult at all. An advert currently running on TV espousing fancy incontinence pants for new mums has just copper-fastened my belief that I am in no way missing out — I DO NOT want bigger boobs (a fringe benefit of stretching your abdomen to the size of a giant seal apparently) and I DEFINITELY don’t want to be peeing every time I laugh — I laugh a lot. I’d go through packs of those new discreet fancy pants in a week. Realistically I’d end up wearing the kid’s nappies myself.

The weird thing is, now that I am finally ready to engage with this adulting business, I still don’t want kids — and it’s absolutely nothing to do with my concern for our seriously threatened planet.

Although I must admit that environmental scientist and UCD academic Dr Cara Augustenborg has made me feel rather good about my dearth of maternal urges.

She is quite clear on the subject of procreation — with the current state our planet is in she questions whether it’s right to even have children at all.

“I chose to only have one child,” she admits.

“When you constantly hear reports saying by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish or that 82% of cities could face at least one severe storm event in a given year, it’s impossible not to factor those kind of projections into your vision of the world your children will live in and question whether or not you’re doing the right thing by bringing another life into such an uncertain world.

Of even more concern to me is that when it is my daughter’s time to consider having children around 2040, she will have an even more significant decision to make as climate chaos and ecological limits become more pronounced.

“At the moment, I feel there is a 50:50 chance we might transition fast enough to a fossil-fuel-free, more sustainable society and avoid the worst of these impacts.

"However, if nothing changes in the next five years, I think we’ll have missed our window of opportunity and my daughter’s adult life could be quite difficult in comparison to mine, particularly with respect to access to food and energy since we’re so highly dependent on imports.”

Sobering facts and figures we all need to be aware of ... especially if you are in the broody bunch or just assume you should give the parents grandkids because, well, it would be rude not to.

Admittedly, the idea of ‘settling down’ makes me itch to take off and run for the hills. Having weekly arguments with a significant other about whose turn it is to put out the bins, which giant nappy pack is more absorbant or having to be genuinely considerate to another person pre-8am just isn’t appealing on any level.

Am I a spinster? Does that singularly damning, cobweb strewn term even apply anymore? If it does then I’m a carefree, willing, happy Spinsterella who loves her career and likes her men recreationally — for weekends away, evenings out, as friends and for romance that isn’t based on walking up the aisle before heading off on an all-inclusive honeymoon in IKEA.

Realistically I would happily say that the only way I’ll make it up the aisle is unbesmirched by mashed turnip and in a box — and that’s absolutely OK with me, baby.