Parenting isn’t for everyone. There’s no denying that being a parent is one of the most rewarding jobs in life, but for some it means making sacrifices on finances and social lives.
However, choosing a childless life also comes with its fair share of regrets, says Bev Wright.
“I was never ready to have a child, but I always loitered along the razor’s edge of wanting one,” the 61-year-old wrote in an opinion piece for Next Avenue.
“I let each year pass figuring that by the following year, I’d make the decision,” Wright added. “By the time I hit my mid-forties I began to feel like that blond [sic] woman on the T-shirt, her eyebrows in a fright toward the talk bubble that read, ‘I forgot to have kids’.”
The former public heath worker finally made peace with her decision, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that she realised she may have made a grave mistake.
Wright explained that after she was made redundant from her long-term job in public health, she felt “aimless and lost”. At about the same time, her goddaughter had her second baby.
“I had time and they needed child care, so I helped to care for their newborn son. I felt short stabs of pain when I had to leave him and surges of longing upon returning him to his own parents or grandparents.”
She said over the next four years, she continued to help care for him, adding: “I had become something between a nanny and a grandmother, yet neither would ever truly define my role.”
“I could not account for my restlessness. I thought I had already made peace with this part of me, yet loving this baby was triggering an unnerving disequilibrium. I loved being a “nanny” to this baby and all else in my life was stable. Why was I feeling so unmoored?”
Wright isn’t the first woman to feel a twinge of regret over not having any kids. A 2015 study claimed that one in four women who choose not to have children live to regret their decision.
Edith Cowan University families researcher Bronwyn Harman interviewed 330 women who hadn’t had children. The majority of the deliberately child-free women were pleased they never had kids, because of the freedom it gave them.
Harman told The Sydney Morning Herald that society isn’t as judgemental of childless women as it once was.
“They can do whatever they want, they can come and go as they please, they can please themselves as they want to,” Harman said.
“Women can get satisfaction from other things, particularly women who work outside the home. Success is no longer tied up in how well you mother a child.”
However, a quarter of child-free women came to regret their decision once they were past child-bearing age. And according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics around 24 per cent of Australian woman will never have children.