A child is not a kitchen extension

On fertility privilege, trigger warnings, and the 'truth' about Mother's Day

Two things caught my eye this week that made me want to write about ‘fertility privilege’. Having it. Not having it. And the nuances in between.

The phrase jumped out at me in a dazzling piece by Elizabeth Day, published at the weekend - an excerpt from her forthcoming book Friendaholic, about the complications that arise in friendships when you find yourselves on either side of a fertility divide. Here’s what she wrote:  

‘We rightly talk about privilege in this era of social change — an era marked by Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — but hardly anyone acknowledges fertility privilege. Those of us who have had complicated journeys to parenthood are only too aware of its existence.’

It’s a brilliant coinage, I think. Those of us who have walked a similar path to Day, whether through loss, infertility - or both - know instantly what she means here. Most people are wildly unaware of their own fertility privilege.

It’s there in Mother’s Day cards that say things like: ‘Well done mum for keeping me alive!’. Or first birthday posts on social media that are captioned to the effect: ‘Kept them alive for a whole year!’

It’s there in the way people will casually say: ‘We’re going to keep going until we get a girl/boy’. Or: ‘We want one of each’. (In a chapter of Life, Almost I write about the way we’ve normalised discussions about family size ‘as though it were always a straightforward choice – like ordering from a menu: two girls and a boy, with a side of twins, please’.)

When I asked on social media for other examples, the response was overwhelming, from ‘being able to joke about a partner needing a vasectomy’ to ‘taking family members along to scans for fun’. Other commonly given examples were conversations about ‘ideal’ age gaps or timing pregnancies around seasons, the start of the school year, or work contracts. (Or worse, joking to someone who is pregnant and due over a holiday or other significant date: ‘Well that wasn’t very well-timed, was it?’ or ‘I wouldn’t want a Christmas baby, personally’.)  

It’s not that saying these things makes you a bad person. Or that you’re not allowed to think or feel them (or even say them, if you’re confident you’ve got the right audience). It’s simply that they’re brimming with unacknowledged privilege.

Which brings me to the second thing. On Mother’s Day this year, Clover Stroud – a fearless writer whose books I recommend and gift often – asked on Instagram: ‘Why has Mother’s Day morphed into an occasion of apologies and trigger warnings?’

She continued:

‘I am at my least visible, least relevant to society in my role as a mother. Conversely, as someone with a career I am celebrated, rewarded, paid, given a voice, status. No one with a successful career posts a trigger warning about their latest success.’

It caused quite the reaction. I don’t really have an issue with the original post, which I read as being more about how the labour of mothers is undervalued (true) and in which Clover also talks about the death of her own mother and sister.

But as for the comments underneath it….

Oh the comments.

I’ll admit, I was surprised by the sheer number of people who are so quick to reduce this to: ‘no one gets everything they want in life’. Wanting a baby but not having one was variously compared to envying other people’s holidays, cars, kitchen extensions, gym-honed bodies….

‘Where do we stop?’ asked one commenter. ‘“I’m in the Maldives, sorry if you haven’t had a holiday in five years.”’

‘Whilst wanting to be a mum is sad – you haven’t done the mothering yet to have the day either,’ said another. (What privilege not to see how brutal that remark is).

It’s true that there’s a lot in life – and on social media in particular – that has the potential to make us aware of our own lack, our difference, our unlived alternative lives.

But - sorry to have to point out the obvious - a baby isn’t the same as a kitchen extension. Or a holiday. It just isn’t. And to assume that they are comparable, is, I’m afraid, your immense privilege talking.

It’s naïve, at best, to assume that the fleeting pang you might get on seeing someone’s poolside post is the same thing that childless women – or bereaved mothers – experience in the face of constant and overwhelming evidence of other people’s fecundity; their ability to pop out babies ‘like Pez dispensers’, as Day put it.  

That’s why the language of ‘privilege’ is a useful one in this context, I think. Because if people talking about their grief, their loss, their lack makes you feel uncomfortable and defensive: well, that’s privilege.

It’s also a useful distinction over and above talking about ‘choice’. I didn’t choose my miscarriages. Whether I have another child or another pregnancy loss is not within my power to control or change. I cannot work harder at my fertility status. It can’t be achieved with just a bit more grit or ingenuity. I cannot put aside a little bit of extra money each month in the vain hope of saving up for it, one day. I cannot polish my CV or re-train for it. I cannot buy a cheaper version of the effortless fertility I covet. There is no Pinterest hack for this.

Like other kinds of privilege, whether we have it or not is the water we swim in. The air that we breathe. The lens everything is filtered through. The way we move through the world.

And, crucially, just as with other conversations around privilege, I don’t think anyone is asking for other people to withdraw – but instead only to make sure everyone has a seat at the table.

The idea that anyone expects or is demanding trigger warnings is, I think, a bit of a false flag. I didn’t see any apologies, just gentle acknowledgments of how others might be feeling.

And I don’t know anyone who expects a trigger warning on anyone else’s Mother’s Day post. They just don’t want to have to put trigger warnings on their own posts about their babies who died. They don’t want to have to make themselves invisible just so others feel comfortable.

You’re entitled to your happiness. Just as we are entitled not to censor our sadness. (Or, perhaps, to talk about how we experience a bittersweet combination of both on occasions like Mother’s Day).

It’s really interesting to me that – in some comments – this issue is seen as an example of Millennial snowflakery. Because, actually, who’s been triggered here?

Besides, it’s such a failure of imagination to make it your position that Mother’s Day should only be about the work of mothering living children: a day to recognise the chin wiping and scrubbing of Weetabix off of highchairs. Sure, that is a very real, very present part of motherhood. But it’s not its entirety. If you’re adamant that it is, I have two questions for you: When does our relationship with our children begin? When does our relationship with our own mothers end?

Here in the UK, Mother’s Day is a commercial appropriation of what used to be called Mothering Sunday – a date in the Christian calendar, falling on the fourth Sunday of Lent. Traditionally, it was when people would return to their ‘mother’ church (the church where they were baptised). Servants - including children in service – were given the day off to do this and to spend time with their families. The revival of Mother’s Day in the 20^th century, however, is credited to Constance Adelaide Smith – a childless (or possibly child-free) woman. In her 1926 book, A Short History of Mothering Sunday, she describes it as a multifarious, deep-rooted celebration of mothers, but also of family, home, the earth, Mother Nature, the church as a ‘spiritual mother’, and the Virgin Mary. It is, the book states, a festival ‘linking the transitory with the eternal’.

And perhaps it would help if we held a little more of this backstory in mind. It’s not – and never was – a day for mothers. It’s a day about mothering – in all its glory, toil, complexity, abstraction, and, yes, its absence.   

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash