For most of human history, it was expected you’d get married and have children. In 1949, 78.8% of all households contained married couples. Couples married earlier (in 1950, the median age of marriage was 23 for men, 20 for women) and had more children (5+). The single found themselves in a small minority.
Today this is changing. More and more people are questioning traditional conceptions of the nuclear family. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center analysis of census data, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered–that is, neither married nor living with a partner. The Beaver to Cleaver notion of marriage and family is now a choice—not compulsory.
Yet some stigma still remains. Many continue to view marriage as the ideal. If you do have a partner but choose not to walk down the aisle, your relationship is viewed as less serious, almost juvenile. To use the terms “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” past the age of 30 is a pathetic cry for help.
If you have consciously chosen not to get married or have children, to be intentionally uncoupled, you’ll be met with pity or disbelief. “You might still change your mind,” I remember my therapist saying when I confessed my desire to be child-free. Other people’s reactions are just as condescending:
“You’ll regret it.”
“You just haven’t found the right person.”
“You’ll never know true love if you don’t bring life into this world.”
“Who’s going to care for you when you’re old?” (These same people conveniently forget that many couples with children still wither away abandoned and alone in nursing homes).
For many, the idea that a woman would willingly renounce her role as wife and mother is inconceivable. Surely, she’ll “change her mind” when she finds that “special” someone. A woman—the idea goes—could never, never be happy alone. If she relinquishes diapers and pacifiers, she’ll be a lonely spinster, a pathetic cat lady, a pitiful cautionary tale.
I’ve been confident in my choice not to have children since my early 20s. I never dreamed of blissfully holding a beautiful baby. I never fantasized about my wedding day: the cream chiffon of my gown, the sugary sweet taste of vanilla buttercream frosting. I certainly never romanticized the “miracle” of childbirth (ripping your vagina to shreds and shitting yourself on a cold steel table doesn’t sound like a miracle, at least not to me).
In my mind, almost any circumstance could be made worse by children: a 12 hour plane ride, a tumultuous marriage, a stressful financial situation. Imagine coming home from the worst day at work only to hear the word “Mommy”? I don’t think I have the strength to survive hands sticky with syrup or shrieking babies.
To be a mother is to embody sacrifice and selflessness. In many ways, the word represents an impossible ideal. Mothers must unconditionally love their children; they must be impossibly gracious and forgiving and patient. They must cut the crusts off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and gush “it’s wonderful!” whenever their child draws a picture with crayola colored pencils. Mothers must reassure their children there are no sinister monsters beneath the bed; they have to wipe away tears and runny noses; they have to endure interminable piano recitals and parent teacher conferences.
Mothers have to constantly think of “them,” “them,” “them.” What do they need? How can I best love/support/nurture my children?
Motherhood requires you always be of service. As Tillie Olsen once wrote, “More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.” Child crying? You must comfort it. Daughters fighting over whose turn it is to play with Barbie? You must resolve the conflict. Motherhood is a full time job without the two week vacations.
Worse, it’s all too easy to be condemned as a “bad mother.” Mothers must never lose their temper, never utter a harsh reprimand or a vulgar expletive even when their bratty child is throwing a very public tantrum in the middle of Target. Mothers must lead the PTA and organize girl scouts and sew Halloween costumes from scratch.
Meanwhile, men are praised as “good fathers” for doing the bare minimum; i.e. taking their son to a doctor’s appointment, actually going to see their daughter in the school play, helping their child with adding fractions instead of watching the Monday night football game.
I’ve never envied my married, mother friends: I couldn’t imagine my life consisting of sandboxes and playdates, apple juice and peanut butter and jelly. While they work full time and scrub the showers and cook dinner and organize their family’s schedules and read their children bedtime stories, their husbands most often sit on their asses playing video games (studies show that in most marriages, even when both partners work, women continue to shoulder most of the domestic labor).
That’s not to say I pity or despite married women or women with children. In fact, I can’t imagine anything more difficult than so selflessly devoting yourself to another human. If anything, I’m in awe of the mothers I know. How do they do it? Help their children with their long division, attend their violin recitals, drive them to soccer practice, schedule their dentist appointments and work 8 hours?
I admire mothers, but—as the kids say—it couldn’t be me.
In her profound, poetically-phrased memoir Arrangements in Blue, Amy Key maps her maternal ambivalence and meditates on the many meanings of motherhood.
For the majority of her young adulthood, Key “overrun the settings of [her biology]” and never felt a desperate desire to have children. But when she turned 37, she suddenly felt a “full-bodied desire and urgent need to have a child.” In the following years, she struggled being single. Why didn’t she have the life/family/children she desired? Was something wrong with her? Would she ever be a mother?
But what, exactly, does it mean to be a mother?
We usually think “mother” is a noun: a woman who has children. Being a “mother” is an elite status reserved for those who’ve carried another human being in their womb.
But “mother” is also a verb: to mother is to bring up with care and affection; to give birth to. Key realizes you can give birth to many things: an invention, an idea, a mathematical theorem, a poem, a play, a painting, a carefully curated Meg Ryan fall playlist, strawberry tarts and brown sugar cinnamon rolls. Your “children” don’t have to biologically belong to you: they might be the other children in your life, your nieces and nephews; the students you uplift; the millions of people who listen to your music or read your books. Even if you’re not a mother in the conventional sense, you can still care for, comfort and console:
“I want to believe that I can experience mothering and create a family of my own without taking on the status of being a parent, be emboldened by what queer people have done for centuries—find a chosen family. Mothering could be my being important in the life of the children I know. Or I could be someone’s ‘mother of the heart,’ the phrase Maggie Nelson borrowed from poet Dana Ward, mothering in ways I did not name as such, but that made another person feel mothered. I might even be mothering now, through practical acts like regularly convening the friendship group to spend time around my dining table or sending a broke friend some money to get them through pay day. Or in the subtler ways I’ve contributed to how someone in my life lives, the ways in which we adopt one another’s political, social and cultural interests and integrate those in our own. Perhaps I’ve given them a song that has become a part of their canon, cooked for them a dish they recreate time and again, passing on my tastes to others like a gift.”
What’s a valid reason to have children? To leave a “legacy”? To pass on your genetic inheritance?
Since Adam and Eve, procreating was considered a social good: God himself proclaimed humans should “be fruitful and multiply” after giving us dominion over the Earth. But in the modern age where the cost of living crisis and climate catastrophe are very real, the choice to have a child becomes a moral dilemma.
Is it ethical to bring life into this world when that life will most likely be defined by ecological collapse and economic struggle?
Is it ethical to have a child when the planet is burning, sea levels are rising and humanity has just endured the most sweltering summer on record?
The childless are often called “selfish” for refusing to fulfill their Biblical duty to go forth and multiply the planet, but isn’t it actually more selfish to mindlessly reproduce without considering the world you’re bringing a child into? Isn’t it selfish to have children just to satisfy your own egotistical drive to create a miniature version of you?
Key ponders the many reasons—biological, cultural, egotistical— why she might reproduce:
“But I don’t know how to quieten the scared voice in me that asks if that will be enough, if I will grieve the strange permanence in the world I imagine having a child can give you, one that seems hard to replicate in other ways. I’ve tried to identify the impulse that drove my desire to have a baby, and I know I briefly felt the biological desire. I felt the cultural desire to a certain extent—conformity. But overall, I think my desire had vanity at its heart. I wanted through motherhood to give myself another try at existing. I thought it might ease my fear of my own disappearance from the world, of my being an endling. If a child shouldn’t be born for that reason, what reason is acceptable?”
Parenthood feels like a requisite stop on the route to adulthood.
The logical premise/conclusion is “If you have children, you’re an adult.”
For many, the inverse is also true: “If you don’t have children, you’re not an adult.”
There’s a sense that if you’re single/childless after the age of 30, you’re consigned to an “infernal adolescence.” Your life isn’t as significant as the lives of your friends with children. Your married friends might not say this out loud but you feel their condescension regardless. When you see them after months of virtually not speaking (they, after all, are so busy), the majority of your wine date is spent listening to them vent about their sleepless nights with their screaming baby. “Oh and how are you?” they’ll only ask as an afterthought between bites of brie and chardonnay.
Marriage and motherhood give people an inflated sense of their own import. In the past, many of my married/mother friends (and I’ll emphasize many, not all) didn’t seem to think my single life of disastrous Tinder dates and apartment hunts and career goals were as worthy of discussion as their baby showers and wedding bells.
With gorgeous, gutting vulnerability, Key confesses that when she talks to mothers/fathers, she—too—feels tormented by a terrible sense of insecurity, a sense that her less-than-conventional single life doesn’t matter:
“When I’m with parents—my friends or colleagues, or perhaps a stranger who is talking about their children as a way of making conversation—I find myself scanning my life for parallels that allow me to join in, to somehow present myself as having parental-type attributes and concerns. This feels important, a way of saying I too am an adult, my life is as serious as yours.”
Though some might dismiss her as a crazy cat lady for making the comparison, Key recognizes she is already a mother to her two cats, Minnie and Bambam:
“If I were to be myself, the more honest parallel to raising kids is caring for my cats, but who would want to invite the ridicule or pity that can conjure? The cats’ presence in my life, their routines—Bambam nudging me awake at 5 a.m. because she wants to be fed, Minnie staring me down at 4 p.m. because that’s treat time, Bambam jumping down from her perch when I lie down on my bed, whatever time of day it is, Minnie saying hello each morning with a full body roll—has given me a structure, placed an expectation on me that I welcome. I keep them alive, and they help me live. Perhaps we are mothering each other, perhaps this is the sustained intimacy I wanted and all it takes is my recognition of this to affirm my self-worth.”
“I think they are companions in a way that people aren’t. They’ll lie next to you when you’re sad. And they remind us that we’re animals too,” poet and avid dog lover Mary Oliver once wrote about our four-legged friends. Though society might categorize her as “lonely,” Key is never truly alone: she always has the uncomplicated, unconditional love of her two cats. Their companionship offers some of the affection she aches for. In a lovely passage, Key speaks to the unshakable bonds between people and their pets:
“The integration of care for [my cats] into my daily life felt like a rescue. I could still experience loneliness, I could enjoy and guard the pleasure of solitude, but I was never utterly alone. The presence of the cats, the ability to communicate through touch, through body language, brought a new texture to my life, an emotional and physical richness that would not be there without them.”
Reading Arrangements in Blue, I’m reminded on another generous book: Natasha Lunn’s Conversations on Love. Like Key, the almost always single Lunn comes to realize there are many different types of love. Her so-called “lonely” life already overflows with many of the things she wants: connection, companionship, passion, tenderness, intimacy, physical touch. As Lunn writes, “[I was so] focused…on receiving love instead of giving it; on waiting for it, instead of building it. Many of the things I was looking for a relationship to provide—physical company; connection; the opportunity to be a mother—were actually available to me without one.”
Ultimately, both women recognize life can be rich and rewarding and romantic—even without romantic love.
In some circles, it can feel anti-feminist/a betrayal of sisterhood to admit you want a man and marriage. To say you long for a relationship is often seen as needy/sad/shamefully anti-progressive.
What I admire most about Key–beside her aptitude for arranging stunning sentences–is her courage. Arrangements in Blue isn’t a rousing renouncement of romantic love, a you-go-girl proud proclamation of single womanhood–it’s a candid confession of one woman’s single life, both an acknowledgement that she already has an abundance of love and an admission that she still wants the love of a signifiant other. Though Key rejoices in her unfettered freedom to be/do/have whatever she wants, she’s still occasionally haunted by unfulfilled desire, jealousy and loss. She might have a profusion of love–platonic, familial–but she admits the garden of her life still feels wilted without a partner:
“Plenitude of one love doesn’t reduce the pain or longing for a type of love you want but don’t have. Though I sometimes try to sell myself the idea that it does. Tell myself that the platonic love I have never lacked makes up for, or transcends, the lack of romantic love. I don’t buy it.
I still hope there is romantic love to come–I cannot give up hoping for it, but I don’t want to become unravelled by jealousy for everything that is not. I don’t want to pay attention to the epiphanic declarations of people with different experiences to me and use them as evidence that my life’s experience can never be equal to theirs. When I have thrown coins into fountains and wells, it has been with a private wish for love.
When I’ve blown the candles out on my birthday cakes. When I have drawn a card from the tarot, it has been in the hope for guidance about how to find love. When on one summer solstice I wrote something I wanted to manifest on a piece of paper and added it to the communal fire, that thing was romantic love. If I catch a shooting star, scatter the seeds of a dandelion clock with my breath, see a double fucking rainbow. None have yet been granted. I still wish.”
For more moving musings from Amy Key, read a salute to the single, how to take a solitary sojourn and the struggles of being single in a world of compulsory coupledom.
[…] her stirring memoir, Arrangements in Blue, poet Amy Key, who’s written stunningly about maternal ambivalence and the struggle of being single in a world of compulsory coupledom, explores the embarrassment and […]