For some time past, I have been labouring under the weight of an obscure burden. Something inside of me — inhabiting some dim, doom-lit chamber — has been playing up, and crying out for help. At first sight, its actions appear confused and erratic, but peer a little closer, a little deeper, and there is an obvious thread that hangs between them. I write songs with titles like ‘Motherhood’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Demise of a Family Unit’; I lose weeks in the miasma of abstruse researches, digesting papers on demographics, birth rate graphs, and geoeconomic detritus; I lurch from one exercise routine to another, thinking now of my heart, now of my bones, and now of the link between diet and hormones. I talk endlessly of the future, constantly adapting plans to give the veneer of control, and await, with a growing intensity that borders upon lust — or insanity — the moment in time when my labours might finally bear fruit.
In the dark and heat of the present moment, all of this might seem obscure. But take a breath, and it becomes quite clear. To put it simply, for some years now, I believe I have been suffering from the anxiety that I might never have children.
Of course, this anxiety is not the brute, biological force of the female. Rather, it is the nervous and blithering practical rationalism of the male. Which for me, a nervous and blithering poetical songwriter, is often expressed in lyrical thoughts. If I were to put an image to this feeling, the first that comes to mind is apt but crude: it is the image of a baby, strangling its father.
Look at those tiny hands clasping at the reddening neck. The child in the picture, of course, is my unborn son, and that neck is my neck.
Melodramatic, I know. Especially because, in part, this feeling of anxiety that I might remain childless comes from my relative success as a proto-family man. After all, I count myself very lucky to have as my partner one of the most beautiful and supportive women imaginable. We have been lovingly and joyfully together for many years now, and I know that she will make a wonderful mother. Between us, we enjoy a more than adequate (and historically speaking, almost outrageously bountiful) level of material comfort. Although we don’t earn a huge amount of money, we both enjoy what we do, and excel in our respective fields. (Look, for example, at how well I can write). And we have an attractive Regency-style roof over our heads, living as we do in a well-appointed flat in a flourishing seaside town that some readers may be familiar with.
Yet somehow, this is not conjugal success enough for us to have thus far produced a child. In fact, conjugal is not the right word, as my ‘partner’ and I are not married. We would like to become so, yet it does not seem the right thing to do before we are quite settled in the world. It is telling in itself that in the English language there as yet is no adjective to describe the joint fortunes of such a couple. We form merely one molecule of an indeterminate mass of ‘young people’.
Ours is a new, unsettled reality that has not yet properly been described. It is like a newborn, in its first days of life, which has not yet been named. For me, it is a reality that is best characterised as possessing the quality of deferment (strange name for a child). Everything, in my formative years, has been deferred: the satisfying job — after the degree, which I dropped out of; the happy home — after the deposit has been saved, which is now barely possible; the wonderful wedding — after the home has been bought; and now crucially — the most deferred thing of all — the beautiful children. They will emerge, well, after what exactly? In a sense, my existence up until now has been a series of unconnected afterlives.
This new reality of the 2020s is also characterised — for the young individual — by loss of control. She has no control over the housing market, and can barely afford to pay the extortionate rents, which seem to keep rising forever. She has no control over the now uber-globalised economy, which sees affluent remote workers from all over the world flock to cities like London, pushing out existing residents to towns like Hastings, causing rents here to rise even higher, meaning she may have to move entirely from the area she grew up in. And she certainly has no control over the historic inequality that persists, in a now horribly indebted and ossified state, into the current era, destroying her ability to save, to accumulate any form of meaningful wealth which might sustain her psychological stability and allow for proper and happy engagement within the community, the town, the country.
Or, dare I say it, the family. It is no wonder, with such historic unweavings in the fabric of reality, that people like us are leading lives that at times feel completely comfortless. It is no surprise that many of our days are full of anxiety, and that we worry we might never become parents. The idea of starting a family now often just feels like an intractable difficulty that it’s best to — yet again — defer.
More people than ever are doing so. Here’s one of those facts I’ve anxiously digested recently: for the first time in recorded history, more than 50% of women now remain childless by their 30th birthday. Birth rates in the United Kingdom continue to fall to new lows.
And it is precisely this sense of fall that is one of the great problems of our age. To put it simply, I believe that many people, including myself, are not having children because everything seems worse than in the past. It is a defensive move, and there is of course a practical logic to it. But it is in our very nature — in our very innocence — to want to reproduce. What does it say about an age, when so many people are being prevented from following their nature? We are being denied the full bounty of our inheritance.
There are some who believe younger generations might simply be choosing not to have children. Esteemed demographer Danny Dorling suggested as much in a recent book. This seems to me to be about as natural and happy a ‘choice’ as a child deciding not to have a father. We are animals; bearing young is what we do.
A more accurate assessment of what is going on now can be found in words from a hundred years ago, from the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci: ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’
For the time being, the invisible hands of my own little monster — my still unborn son — remain gently clasped around my throat. The pressure is such, that I can barely get my words out, and find a name for the little man. I wonder if I ever will…
