Most women are mothers, but a minority are not. They are women who have not felt attracted to parenting, but who renounce the labels that are commonly used to define them, such as “ambitious” or “selfish”, and demand more and better communication between them and their mother friends.
“I am 36 years old, half of my friends are pregnant and the eternal question of whether I should be a mother returns to my head periodically like a boomerang,” writes the illustrator Raquel Córcoles, better known as Moderna de pueblo, in an Instagram post that is close to 200,000 ‘likes’.
“I am a convinced anti-natalist. And even seeing it so clearly, the fact of having to make an irrevocable decision (which not only affected me) kept me bitter for several years. It is rare that a woman can get rid of that”, replies the writer Carmen Pacheco. “Is there a club for non-mothers where you can talk about these things without being jumped on your neck?” asks the painter Carla Fuentes.
Women who have freely decided not to be mothers are an inconspicuous minority. For many people, being a woman is synonymous with being a mother and those who decide not to be one carry a series of labels, such as excessive professional ambition, lack of maturity or hatred of children, which have nothing to do with reality.
“I am an English teacher in an academy and I love my work with children, but I have always been clear that I did not want to be a mother,” says Irene Hernanz, 39, author of the blog No Maternidad, which aims to be a space for dialogue. and encounter for this often invisible community. “As a woman of almost 40 years, I have barely had a couple of friends, and some acquaintances, who have expressed their intention not to bring children into the world. And that I have a fairly active social life halfway between Barcelona and Madrid ”, she points out.
In Spain, more than half of the women between 30 and 34 years old (52%) have not yet had children. Percentage that drops to 27.8% among women between 35 and 39 years of age and to 19% in those 40 years of age and over, according to the latest fertility survey published by the National Institute of Statistics in 2019. 62.1% of childless women between the ages of 30 and 34 and 57.5% between the ages of 35 and 39 intend to have them in the next three years.
It is estimated that there are around 10% of women who freely decide not to be mothers. The term Childfree, translated into Spanish as ‘without children by choice’, is used to designate those women who have always been clear that they did not want children, which excludes women who have wanted to have them, but have not been able to, either for biological or social reasons. The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the word childfree since 1913, but communities without children by choice are practically non-existent in Spain.
In fact, a Google search with the keywords “communities of non-mothers in Spain” or “club of non-mothers in Spain” refers to the Malasmadres club, a community that fights to break the myth of the perfect mother and achieve the reconciliation, and a few more pages about how late motherhood is in Spain. Not a single page with information about women who freely decide not to be mothers. You can check the results of the first five pages of Google (something unheard of) and still find absolutely nothing.
Nor does the language have a proper name for women who do not have children. The woman who has offspring is a mother; the one with grandchildren is a grandmother; the one with nephews, aunt; the one who is not paired is single; the one who has lost her partner is a widow.
When is a Tinder for non-mothers to find women with whom they share interests beyond parenting? asks Ángela Sabio, a 40-year-old designer and ceramist from Valencia who has never wanted to be a mother. “All my friends have children between the ages of zero and three and I feel left out of their conversations about the choice of daycare, the color of the poop or the jars. They are going through motherhood and their interests and needs have nothing to do with mine, ”she adds.
“When most women become mothers, they completely change their priorities and focus on the baby, at least during the first years,” says therapist Pilar Herráez, who specializes in accompanying women with doubts about whether to become a mother. The arrival of a child transforms everything, both for the mother and for the people around her, including her friends. The writer Silvia Nanclares explains in her book Who wants to be a mother (Alfaguara, 2017) that since she turned thirty she began to call the babies of her friends “friend thieves”. “Beginning to have mom friends was quite a revolution in our ecosystem,” she writes.
“To maintain these relationships, you have to give in on both sides,” says Herráez. “We non-mothers have to understand that our friend has a child that demands all of her attention and that we are not her priority. And the mother friend must empathize with the fact that the sphere of parenting is something alien to someone who has never wanted to be a mother. If both give in, the moments of meeting appear sooner or later.
“Throughout history there have been women without children to help raise their mothers,” says Irene Hernanz. Before it was customary to raise in a community, in a tribe, however now these tribes are divided between mothers and non-mothers. “If one day my two children are sick, I don’t think about asking a non-mother friend for help,” the perinatal psychologist Paola Roig recently recounted on the podcast The secret life of mothers. “From here I want to make a call to create a community with our non-mother friends. Since they are not mothers, you do not think about her and it should be the opposite, ”she explained.
“In a way, we are condemned to ostracism and social isolation,” says Sabio. “In our society, the woman is the breadwinner of the family and if you don’t have children, even if she is unconscious, society punishes you. There are many parenting groups and even quite a few support networks for women who have not been able to have children, but we are invisible. And, beware, this is not a battle between mothers and non-mothers, what I long for are more women with interests beyond the scope of parenting ”, he adds.
“A series of stereotypes that are very far from reality fall on non-mothers, such as that we are traveling all day because we have a lot of money or that we are very selfish, but no. We are here, ready for a day plan. call us. Sometimes I think that I have started writing the blog as a cry for help from a cave, because I feel that I am once again one of the nerds of the institute, looking for the group of friends with glasses far from the popular ones. I feel very alone in my choice ”, claims Hernanz.
To be or not to be a mother is something crucial in the life of any woman, but do you choose? What about the maternal instinct? Precisely the innate desire to be a mother has become, in recent years, the object of scientific research. What is it about exactly? Do all women have it? Is it a biological call or a social construction? Is it an innate tendency to protect and care for the baby or does it have to do with a genuine desire?
“According to scientific evidence, the maternal instinct does not exist,” says Herráez. In fact, an instinct is the response to a stimulus. The Israeli sociologist Orna Donath denies the existence of said call in her book Regretful Mothers (Random House Mondadori, 2016), where she collects the testimony of 23 women who, despite adore their children, if they had to decide now, knowing what means and implies, they would choose not to have them. The book, which has sparked much controversy, defends the thesis that a good part of maternal desire is actually social pressure.
That would explain why most women, even those who have never had that call, doubt at some point between the ages of 30 and 40 if they want to be a mother. “Women are pushed to motherhood from childhood. The media, advertising, movies, books, etc. they also reinforce the idea that being a woman is synonymous with being a mother,” explains Herráez.
“Some women do not feel the desire to be mothers, but at a certain age they feel afraid of not being one,” she adds. Phrases such as “the rice is going to pass you by”, “children are the best thing that will happen to you in life” or “who will take care of you when you are older?” contribute to that pressure. “Why doesn’t anyone question the innate desire to be mothers?” asks Sabio.
