Capsule talks to the editors behind the new essay book, Otherhood: Essays On Being Childless, Childfree & Child Adjacent about expanding the conversations and the communities around ‘otherhood’ for people who don’t have children.
“Infertility essays typically conclude with a final paragraph in which the author reveals that they have had a baby. This is not one of those essays. In this essay, all the babies are dead.”
That’s the opening sentence from writer and editor Kathryn Van Beek’s essay, from the anthology Otherhood: Essays on Being Childless, Childfree and Child Adjacent. The book of essays was created by three Kiwi writers: Alie Benge, Lil O’Brien and Kathryn, and it was born out of the frustration of not seeing stories like theirs portrayed in the media at large.
The three editors, who had never met before, started this process on Twitter, as a response to a piece by writer Kate Camp, called No Miracle Baby To See Here. They each got looped into a conversation, started by Lil, about how there should be an anthology about motherhood-adjacent stories. What started off as a ‘someone should do this!’ Twitter chain quickly gathered steam; by the end of the day, they had drafted a pitch letter to send to book publishers. They were going to be the ones to do it.
The result is Otherhood, an honest, funny, devastating, and brilliantly written collection of stories from over 30 different writers, of how they ended up on a child-free path. Some of them wanted that path – Alie writes about being in a DINK [Double Income, No Kids] relationship and slowly feeling more empowered to choose a child-free life. Some of them are not on that path by choice – both Lil and Kathryn went through rounds of IVF, multiple miscarriages, with no rainbow babies at the end of a long journey.
Some of the writers endured health challenges that left them unable to conceive or carry children. The ‘definition of otherhood’ slowly expanded – two of the writers lost their only children to suicide and are now left asking if they can still call themselves mothers. There are odes to being a step parent, the power of aunties, how we make families of our own in unexpected ways. The book pulls no punches, but it creates both a conversation and a community around what lies on the other side of a path less travelled.
“I think we thought the book was going to be about people who have stepped outside of societal expectations,” says Lil. “But it became more about what makes a fulfilling life.”
Choosing A Child-Free Life
For Alie Benge, growing up in a religious household meant that having children felt like an inevitability. “I had always assumed that I would have children, even though it seemed… pretty boring,” she laughs. “Everyone tells you: ‘this is what makes life meaningful, and once you have them, you’ll be so happy that you did.’” But a few years ago, The Guardian released an article about people who had regretted having children – and it crystallised the concerns that Alie had long harboured about motherhood. “As soon as I read that, I just knew that that would be me. I’m so grateful that somebody was honest, because if I hadn’t heard that perspective, then I might have had kids, and regretted it, and joined this quiet group where nobody wanted to admit that.”
In her essay, DINKS On A Plane, she writes about being referred to as a spinster when she was newly 30, and the idea that choosing not to have children is a selfish one. But, she writes, “selfishness implies taking something from someone, hoarding something that should be shared. I’m not hurting anyone, or taking something anyone else is owed. I only want my life to be my own.” But still, it’s a question she admits she has grappled with for years. In writing her essay and in helping co-create Otherhood, Alie says she just wants people to see they have a choice in who their life belongs to. “I hope that people can see different options for their life, because I never saw that.”
Accepting A Child-Free Life
For both Lil and Kathryn, they wanted part of Otherhood to cover the less-discussed, but more realistic journey of going through IVF. In Lil’s case, it was important to show this experience through a non-heteronormative lens. As she puts it, wanting kids and being in a same-sex relationship means that your baby journey starts with research, and big decisions. “’Who will carry the baby?’ ‘How will we get sperm?’”, she says. “Only in recent history have queer couples been able to have children with help from clinics… so we need to bring those experiences to light, because we’re not going away.”
Many of the writers featured in Otherhood are LGBT+, people who have also grappled with choosing the parenthood path or veering away from it – and don’t see their experiences covered in either the media or pop culture. “It’s that idea of ‘woman’, as well, and who falls into that category,” says Kathryn.
The three editors were at the recent Auckland Writer’s Festival as part of their book launch, and Kathryn notes that in some of the sessions they attended, “’Womanhood’ was used synonymously with ‘motherhood’, and in particular, straight motherhood,” she says. “And there are a lot of people in the audience who don’t see themselves in that.”
In Lil’s case, her essay No Masturbation Allowed came five years after she and her then partner stopped their IVF process and she wanted to bring that wider perspective to the story. “When you’re going through IVF, you are so bogged down in the details – what your levels are, your egg count, your this, your that, and all the miscarriages. It is a list of bad things that happen,” she says. “But [we] didn’t want to dwell in that kind of area. We want to acknowledge those areas, but look at what the bigger meaning is – for people who have moved on from that process, what have they taken from their experience?”
With Kathryn’s essay, I Am Not On A Beach, she writes beautifully, brutally and with the darkest of dark humour about the three baby losses she experienced, the three children she does not get to see grow up. It was equally as important for her, she says, to show people in the thick of that heartbreak that there is a life on the other side.
“I leaned pretty heavily into my bad feelings to write it, but in my normal life, I feel quite happy with my life!” she laughs. “Every now and then, I might have a bad day, or my husband might have a bad day, but you get on with things and make the most of it. Those feelings may lurk around, but I wanted to show that you could go through a bad experience, or want something and not get it, and life will still be great.”
Otherhood: Essays on being childless, childfree and child adjacent edited by Alie Benge, Lil O’Brien and Kathryn Van Beek, Massey University Press, $39.99 is out now.
