Interview With a Mother of Three (who says you shouldn't have kids)

On fantasy, regret, loneliness and loss

I have this friend, I’ll call her Marianne, who keeps finding herself at parties telling younger women not to have kids. Marianne is in her forties and has three children herself, including one stepdaughter, but as time has passed she has come to the conclusion that doing so may have ruined her life. There are the usual caveats (the main one being she loves her kids deeply) but on the whole she believes that for many of us, having children is probably a mistake.

It’s a subject that fascinates me, one that I’ve dipped into a few times in my Observer columns since I had my first child and wanted to talk about the many feelings it’s possible to hold at one time, including ambivalence, love and regret, without shame, and I got shit for it. One unexpected piece of shit was from some Nazi-adjacent accounts on Twitter who had long conversations outing me as Jewish, as an explanation of why I was trying so hard to end the human race. I quite liked reading this stuff, I found, more than I did the comments from Guardian readers who told me they pitied my kids anyway.

Still, I remain boggled by what seems to me to be a terrible incuriousness around anything related to motherhood. I wrote in 2024, ‘the idea that it’s the discussions of the problems with parenting that need to be policed or changed, rather than the lack of economic and emotional support that create these problems, is regressive and infuriating. The way we are encouraged to think about motherhood, to me, feels incredibly… babyish.’

I called Marianne while she was trailing down the high street with a buggy, and here, lightly edited, is our conversation: