Prologue
Editor’s Letter
Published 18 January 2020,
from issue #24 of .dot magazine
‘The Mother of all Choices’
by Olive Stone
I am the same age as my mother when she had me. Thirty-three. If I turn my face a certain way in the mirror, I can see her looking back at me – we have the same chin, thick dark hair, and a mole more or less in the same place above our lip. But I am miles away from who she was then. We might look the same, but in all other ways we are not. I was told when I was little by my grandmother, Pearl, that when you turn thirty, you are suddenly gifted a new kind of respect for yourself. ‘You will care less, as if by magic, my dear,’ she would say. ‘Being young is terribly confusing. Quite awful really.’
It’s true that as you grow older, you know yourself better. You leave bad parties slightly earlier. But then, the downsides: your bones are slowly beginning to disintegrate, a natural decline in bone mass, though consuming vegetables, protein and collagen might help. You start to realize exercise is no longer about vanity, but necessity. Your metabolism changes too, sadly starting to slow down. You start to realize you ‘should’ go easier on the cheese boards, but you won’t because brie is everything. Then there are the hangovers! Drinking two bottles of Prosecco doesn’t feel like having a beaker of lemonade any more – it fizzes and pops and aches in your head the next day; but fortunately you have more willpower now to ‘get on with it’. Rumour has it your libido changes too; it ebbs and flows and tends to dry up a bit, and of course you’ll start noticing a few more lines on your forehead and around your mouth that seem to be slightly more prominent than before, but you also think it looks cool. A sign that you know more stuff. You might feel the need to chuck out your entire wardrobe and start again, to reflect a new chapter in your life, a new confidence, a new relationship with your body. You slip into your new skin like a snake who’s finally come home. On the whole things start to seem easier and plus, you have a bit more cash now. This is everything grandmother Pearl foreshadowed.
And then bam – even though I should have seen it coming – babies are suddenly on the brain. There is an abrupt tap on the shoulder from friends, family, society and suddenly it’s the number one topic of conversation. Babies. Babies. Babies. When. When. When.
When I was twelve, in 1999, I remember being obsessed with snipping cut-outs from my mum’s old Argos catalogues and sticking them into the blank pages of my notepads. Notepads were the only present people bought me or put in my stocking, because I was always doodling as a tiny kid. I would have stacks of them: beaded ones, velvet ones, bright pink ones, furry ones, holographic ones, and secret diary ones with a lock and key. But I had stopped writing and started making collages instead. I would neatly cut around pictures of products I found interesting from the flimsy thin pages of Argos, and Pritt-stick them inside the blank pages. Navy-blue patterned plates. A big wooden rolling pin. Hand-painted tea cups. A garden slide. A stylish armchair. A woollen throw for the sofa. A picture frame designed for four landscape-shaped photos. I would trim carefully around each one with big kitchen scissors, in circular motions, around the plates, bowls, crockery. I would stick them into the blank pages, designing my life in detail from an early age. I believed I would have these perfect little things in my home when I was older. I would have a garden. I would live in a big house, bigger than my mum’s. I would have a husband. I would have a baby too, probably. Or two. Or three! Because that’s what you do. My friends would come round with their babies. They would all play together. We would go to the beach and tell them not to eat the sand, while we drank tea in flasks and reminisced about the good old days. That’s what grown-ups did. When I am an adult, I would think, everything will be good. I will finally be free. Adulthood = Freedom.
I painted a picture of my Big Bright Future through the lens of an old Argos catalogue, and today I am inside that distant future; in the painting, living and breathing it. But I don’t have the hand-painted tea cups, or the navy-blue patterned plates. I don’t have a garden slide. And I don’t have the baby either.
Looking back, perhaps the baby thing was always more of a blurry idea; one that I could never totally zoom in on. I could only really imagine it hypothetically. The idea of becoming a mother was something passed down to me – from my mother, and her mother’s mother, over centuries and centuries of social conditioning. It seemed like a no-brainer. Like all the other milestones in the how-to-be-a-person manual.
Turns out that you can’t Pritt-stick a life together as a child and then hop inside it when the time is right like Bert from Mary Poppins.
And so now, sitting here in 2020, typing this, I realize that I imagined a different thirty-three-year-old to the one I have actually become. This woman who has no sign of ‘twitching ovaries’, or fertility flutters, or random broodiness. I hold babies and, sure, they’re cute, but I give them back and don’t feel any biological shifts or urges. I see pregnancy announcements online and press the heart button but feel zero jealousy. I picture myself twenty, thirty years into the future, with silver in my hair, walking on a beach with a partner, writing in the evenings with a glass of wine, and multiple nephews and nieces visiting me in my cosy home. There might be no children of my own in my future, but why should this cause me any worry?
So why am I telling you all of this? Last month’s issue was all about exploring different variations on adulthood and motherhood. This whole issue of .dot is dedicated to exploring what it means to be child-free, by choice, and all the other myriad ways we might decide to live our lives. We hope you love this issue as much as we do, but we realize this is the tip of the iceberg: we aren’t done talking about these issues! The decision to have kids might be one of the biggest choices we ever face, and we should be talking about this in all its complicated, nuanced depth.
Thanks as always for choosing to read .dot, and we look forward to reading your letters and tweets.
See you next month,
Editor-In-Chief, .dot
Olive x
Part One
‘You know what gets to me? The knowing, smug smirk that so often accompanies the words: “You’ll change your mind.”’
Kym, 35
1
2008
‘WAKE UP OLIVE.’ Bea jostled me awake gently, and I drifted from my dream into the vibrations of her deep, velvety voice. She had plonked herself down on the bed next to me, her curvaceous body cushioned softly on the mattress. Through half-opened eyes, I could make out the outline of her head of huge, tightly curled hair. I had an unused face wipe stuck to my forehead and a pounding headache. I peeled it off and the sunlight streamed into my eyes. Bea had waltzed on in and opened my blinds again. There was no such thing as privacy in this house, and to be honest, that’s the way we liked it. The real world was a maze offering too many choices, too many narrow alleyways, too many wrong turns. Everything in this old and painted-over Victorian semi-detached house felt safe. We paid bills together, we ate together, we ran errands together, we were partial to a group nap. This was our much-loved university student house, and we would be leaving here forever in a few short hours.
‘Ugh?’ I said, moaning. I picked up my phone with one crusty eye open and saw my ghastly reflection looking back at me on the screen. My skin was still clear and smooth but my face looked puffier than usual and my green eyes were blackened, like a panda’s, with eyeliner smudged all down my face. My long black hair was knotted on one side, and there were sticky drink stains along my pale arms. I sniffed. Yes, it smelt like Sambuca. I had obviously attempted to clean my face with the wipe and failed miserably. I looked at the packet on the floor and realized it wasn’t even a face wipe, it was one of those kitchen wipes that you clean surfaces with.