This is what life is like without kids
Ten hours' sleep a night and no responsibilities? It's fabulous, darling (well, some of the time)
Hello! And welcome to The Honesty Box.
Last week I wrote about whether I should do a little facial refurbishment in the form of botox/fillers/lasers, and if you’re one of the people who wrote to me about their experiences with such things – thank you.
People who have tried these seemed to love the results. “Getting it done once in a while makes me feel better inside AND outside,” was one comment emailed to me, while another woman said Botox and fillers have “made a big difference.”
Of course, I have spent the past seven days noticing smooth, youthful, plump faces all around me and at the laser hair removal clinic yesterday I was overwhelmed by posters for fat freezing/face rejuvenating/skin tightening/eyebrow raising/buttock lifting/body sculpting treatments.
If I try any of these things, I’ll let you know how it goes, but to be honest I found it a bit much. For now, I’ll stick to eating well, exercising, dyeing my greys, lasering my legs and sleeping – which brings me on to today’s topic: the benefits of not having kids.
On Friday night, I switched the light off at 9.30pm and slept straight through to 7.45am on Saturday morning.
I had planned to watch The Traitors (a show where 22 strangers stuck in a Scottish castle play murder in the dark with Claudia Winkleman in standout knitwear – essential January viewing on ‘real’ TV) at 9pm but couldn’t keep my eyes open.
This was partly due to a series of early starts last week: I was writing news coming out of Davos, the annual conference up a Swiss mountain chock full of prime ministers and investment banking CEOs, which required me to be in the office for 6am.
Having 10 hours’ uninterrupted sleep like I did on Friday night would be a luxury for most people, but for me it is possible pretty much any night of the week. (I can hear parents publicly screaming at this. I am sorry.)
Not having children (plus being freelance) often means I can choose my sleeping and waking hours. I have a super king size goose down duvet with a white waffle cover.
I have silky sheets and deep, soft pillows. I sometimes ask my cleaner to iron my pillowcases.
I go to sleep curled up on my left hand-side and often stretch diagonally across the bed in the morning for a few minutes’ lie in.
(I also sleep with earplugs to fade out the moped engines and door slams – the front door is about two metres from my head and vibrates very loudly when anyone in the building closes it, so I am only 90% smug about my sleep set-up).
This - along with things like booking a last-minute trip to Lanzarote and the odd three-hour weekday lunch with a friend - is where life can feel fabulous. And it’s not something I ever considered when I was longing for children.
As I’ve written before, I spent my 30s searching for a husband to father my future kids, but I didn’t find one.
In my early 40s, I was told there was a very low chance of IVF working and chose not to do it solo.
Then there was a global pandemic, which I went into single and 42 - crunch time for a woman’s fertility – so I attended numerous lockdown Zoom dates from my childhood bedroom (read all about that here) - yet remained single.
And now, at 46, I am on the ‘other side,’ because, barring a miracle, or a lot of money and effort, I have accepted that it’s not going to happen.
Farrah Storr (read her newsletter
) wrote in The Times Magazine last Saturday about choosing not to have children, saying she wished there was a “blueprint” for it beyond her parents’ gay neighbours and an elderly widow, who seemed to enjoy lives of gardening or travelling.This I relate to – the way I saw it, you grew up, got married, and had babies, and I didn’t consider what life could be if you didn’t.
I love both gardening and travelling, and, far from being shallow, as Farrah wrote, “this stuff counts.” Why? “It nourishes you. It helps build the person you want to become.”
The journalist Hannah Betts, 52, also wrote about life without children in the magazine, and along with describing a blissful time with her partner, she said: “It took me a long time to work out who I am and now I get to be her, while allowing for constant reinvention. I think of this as ‘selfed,’ in the sense of an identity embraced.”
I admire these women and was encouraged by what they wrote - we need more women and men talking about their experiences of not having children to help younger people decide whether to try to conceive or not, or to accept whether it happens or not.
But I get that this feeling of fabulousness is likely to go up and down.
The combination of being freelance and not having kids is great for the most part, but work is not guaranteed.
On the plus side, being childfree means I have more time and energy to keep learning and being courageous and putting myself out there for work, a hugely important part of my life and identity.
I will likely have more responsibility for my mother as she gets older, though as Farrah wrote, her relationship with her mum has deepened since she decided not to have kids. I feel the same.
Sometimes I will feel ‘childless’ rather than ‘childfree’ (both are complicated terms - read what I wrote about them here) and I will feel sad about that.
And, while life can be fabulous, unlike Hannah and Farrah, I don’t have a partner and that sometimes grates. But I know that when I do, I’ll be less likely to have a diagonal lie-in or get my 10-hour nights.
And as with many happenings in life, there’s usually a different angle to see things from. While I might get less sleep with a man in my bed, I have a solution: daytime naps.
Gorgeous writing as always Lucy; these things can polarise & even be written in extreme and black and white ways but you have a way of capturing the grey and the complexity... xx
Love this! I’m younger than you - about to turn 30 - and have never wanted children, so I’m aware that my starting point in this discussion is very different. I’ve written before about how it only occurred to me very recently that I could choose something to do ‘instead’ of getting married and having kids (I’d love to get married but have had almost no luck on the dating scene to date, pun not intended), and that’s part of the ‘30 on purpose’ which is driving me at the moment - I’ve just moved from Scotland to Bristol and I’m planning to take a year out of paid work to go back to uni. My godmother doesn’t have kids (I’ve never asked her how she feels about it) and that’s meant that I have always had an alternative role model available to me from childhood, which I am incredibly grateful for.