Unless we’re talking about pizza toppings or how much of a bottle of rosé we’re drinking, can we just retire the phrase “having it all”? We were never exactly clear on its meaning to begin with, and it’s only become increasingly hollow—most recently evidenced by the latest cover of Time that pegs it as “not having children.” Let the flame wars begin.
After last year’s attention-grabbing cover story on attachment parenting, Time is very well aware that motherhood—and whether or not you’re doing it right (you probably aren’t)—is a hot-button issue that can instantly spark the kind of heated debates that generates very valuable publicity for the mag. So I’d be the first to admit that it was a stroke of genius to work that same controversial angle and expand the target audience by including women who don’t have kids, couched in terms of un-motherhood. It’s like the Mad Hatter’s unbirthday! Except not as fun.
And despite the beach boyfriend on the cover, the “The Childfree Life” is explained as a women’s issue because “our culture often equates womanhood with motherhood.” That is true to an extent, but the piece also kind of reinforces that notion by spending several thousand words defining the women interviewed for as “childfree” instead of just as “women.”
However, the piece does bring up a lot of pertinent observations, relevant to all modern women, in regards to why many of us grow up assuming that we will eventually have children, and how that assumption only fucks us up later in life.
As author Lauren Sandler points out, we’re raised to believe that becoming a mother is a social imperative. But recent generations have also been raised to want an education and a career. It creates a conflict somewhere in our 30s in which “[w]ithout independence, we’re failures. With it, we’re selfish.” So, like everything else about being a woman, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
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