I want you to know that sometimes I really did want to have children. And sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes my skin sighed to hold my non-existent babies. And sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I went to clinics to try and find out why I wasn’t having children and I took pills to help me have children. And sometimes I went to clinics to stop me having children and I took pills to prevent me having children.
Sometimes I wished for grown-up children, like those of my friends; helpers and doers and achievers and I wondered what kind of creature I could have co-created if the circumstances had been different. And sometimes I just enjoyed their company anyway. I learned how to do that. I learned to enjoy the company of other people’s children. To enjoy other human beings as simply human beings.
I want you to know that my childless existence is not childfree. Neither is it carefree. I too sleep badly. Sometimes.
I want you to know that when you ask me ‘did you not want kids?’ the answer is a poem. The answer is as nuanced and emotional and as complicated as life. The answer is as nuanced and emotional and as complicated as death.
“With this piece I wanted to capture the difficulty (and absurdity) of answering the question ‘did you not want children?’ It’s a question too often asked and asked glibly, without considering the complexity of the likely answer. I wanted to express that over the 35 years where, perhaps, I was physically capable of having children of my own, sometimes I wanted that very much and sometimes I didn’t. I find that childless-childfree women are often categorised according to a simplistic binary of ‘wanted them but couldn’t physically have them’ vs ‘didn’t want them’ when the reality is almost always more complicated than that; involving a series of choices and circumstances.”
Helen Rice is a writer and performer based in Sheffield. Helen has been published in numerous online and print anthologies and her debut poetry pamphlet, exploring blended family life, ‘I’m Not Your Mother’ was published by Written Off Publishing in 2024. Helen’s creative output spans the worlds of poetry, comedy, music and theatre. Click here to visit her website.