I am a women and I don’t have kids.

I have a uterus and I don’t have kids.

I have had sex multiple times and I don’t have kids.

I have been in love multiple times with amazing men and I don’t have kids.

For some women this is hard to deal with. I don’t have kids.

I’m not less of a person ‘cause I don’t have kids.

I live, I love, and I contribute to my community even though I don’t have kids.

I have amazing beautiful friends in my life some with kids and some, don’t have kids.

I am an equalist, a feminist, fag hag, writer and a runner. I don’t have kids.

I am a cancer survivor, now I’ll never have kids.

Don’t be sad for me, I ‘m not and I can love your kids.

I am strong, I am happy, I am creating. I don’t have kids.

I am grateful. I am alive. I don’t have kids.

Bless all the women in this world who have kids.

And bless all the women in this world who don’t.

My heart withers to think of your little body, your little brain, your wet eyes and a claggy rivulet of snot running to your top lip. The way you were when he left, so small and scared. I want to turn back time and hold you in my arms and whisper into your hair.

Your tall, gentle mother had a red Holden station wagon that broke down a lot, she used to have to keep a large bottle of water in the foot well on the passengers side because the coolant was always leaking. One day, your father threw rocks at her, collected from the dirt road out the front of your house and you crouched behind that red Holden with your brother, listening to your parents scream at each other and hearing the rocks thud against the steel.

When I was six I had my first sleep over at your house. All I can remember is lying awake on a blow up mattress and listening to your brother snore. I remember walking down the stairs, whimpering, and finding your mother and father reading in the orange lamp light in the lounge room. Your dad drove me home, I missed my parents and I couldn’t sleep. I remember him being angry with me, but maybe I made that part up. Who could be angry with someone else’s six year old kid in flannel PJs that her Nanna made for her? Probably your dad.

Growing up I was often jealous of you. You were so pretty, so good at sport, so noble and quiet and everyone seemed to fall in love with you. My usually distracted, unimpressed father adored you. He had my sister and I, but you were something different and special, he rescued you. I remember for your 13^thbirthday he bought a pink hooded jumper from the surf shop, picked it out and got it wrapped and everything. And I felt sick with envy because he’d never picked anything out for me before.

Our relationship has stretched on, thinning and thickening like a wonkily drawn line from our childhood, through our adolescence and now it has brought us here. Two young women, twenty four years old, completely different people with worlds-apart stories. And I know you are about to break so all I have to say is this:

I love you. I will always love you, for better or for worse and with out logic, I will love you. If you killed someone, I reckon I would still love you.

You are beautiful, from your soul out. You are open and genuine and real and people like being around you. If you wanted you could have all the mentors and running buddies and coffee dates a girl could ask for, you’d never have to be alone on a Saturday night drinking red wine in bed like I am now. You are special.

You are also smart and really fucking beautiful to look at. You have opinions, you question things, you are kind and you are very, very strong.

Remember when you were a little kid and you used to disappear into the night sometimes when you came to stay over? The sky would be that dusky navy, the magpies would be cooing and warbling in the trees and scratch throated cockatoos would be flying through the sky. My dad would thunder along the dirt roads in his ute, my sister and I piled in the back with the dogs on our laps, yelling your name into the cold air. I can picture you, your little tracksuit clad body standing behind a thick gumtree, tormented and thrilled. I can see your foggy breath as you watch the yellow columns from the headlights slice through the tree trunks and I can imagine something blooming in your chest as you hear your name, shouted by a desperate chorus of voices. You were wanted, you were loved.

You still are.

We are having the wrong conversations about birth!

In the last ten years, I’ve given birth to three babies, so the debate around what makes a good birth has been very personal to me. What does make a good birth? The birthing method, our birth experience or both? Is “healthy baby, healthy mother” the measure of success? Or should we be expecting more?

Birth has been part of my world for many years now and I’ve thought about it a lot. I read stuff about birth. I have conversations about birth with pregnant women, other mothers, fathers, health professionals and randoms. What I’ve discovered is that my experience isn’t the norm; unlike many other people I’ve spoken to, I love birth. Not in a hippy chanting, candle burning kind of way, but in a “bloody hell, this is hard work but oh my goodness I got to feel a baby come out of my body and how amazing is that” kind of way. Birth has been the most extraordinary experience of my life.

Here is my problem. In all my discussions and reading and listening to people talking (and arguing) about birth I’ve come to the conclusion that we are having the wrong conversations about birth, personally, and culturally. Discussions around birth are all framed in opposition. We talk about natural versus medically assisted, vaginal versus caesarian. We talk about judgment of people’s choices and how we shouldn’t do it, all the while talking about home versus hospital. We talk about those people who have birth plans versus those who are leaving it up to the experts as “they know best”. We talk and we argue and we definitely disagree. And more than that we judge, even while saying we are not. Even articles that profess to be non judgemental tend to be full of generalisations, extreme examples, and even more judgement.

The conversation around birth has been reduced to having the argument, laying the blame and rolling around in the judgement.

What gets lost in this dialogue? We lose sight of the underlying reason for why we are having the conversation. Why are we talking about birth? Why does it matter? If “healthy mother, healthy baby” is the only outcome that is important then why oh why can we not let the discussion go? I would contend that it is because we are human, and so experiences matter to all of us. And because birth is one of the most extraordinary experiences we get to have as humans, then it matters more than most.

Birth can be an extraordinarily tricky thing to navigate. The stakes are high and often it is an extremely emotional situation. For the parents of course, but also for the health professionals, who are acting as professionally as human nature allows. For example, if as a medical professional you had a baby die because of XYZ yesterday then today your feelings of risk would be raised when faced with those same symptoms. Everyone’s experiences affect their judgement. That’s human. Throw into the mix that everyone involved (parents and medical staff) have different life experiences, cultures, philosophies, education, and often don’t know one another well, things get even more complicated. In some cases you get magic, and in others the situation can be fraught. Often times rhetoric and policy and practice differ, leaving all involved confused at best and feeling incredibly let down at worst. Nearly everyone involved, nearly every time will be doing their absolute best.

Here is my contention. I contend that your parenting experience – which lasts for about 20 years per child – really begins with the birth. A good birth experience (no matter what the birthing method was) where you felt heard, understood, acknowledged and supported, can equal a good jumping off point for the overwhelm that is early parenting. A not-so-good experience, where you feel incapable, scared, fearful, alone, confused, …..well I’m sure you get my gist. Early parenting is full-on enough without starting out feeling crappy.

I’m going to give you a simple and short example from one of my children’s births to illustrate my point.

My first baby was ten days post dates and so we went to the hospital to have the standard checks done. Cord flow looked good, baby’s heart rate was terrific, baby’s size looked great, but the amniotic fluid was low. We were sent to see the registrar. And here is where things got tricky. She said “So we are going to take you upstairs now to induce you”. I asked “Why?” and she answered “Because if we don’t your baby might die.”

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment.

I felt like I’d been punched in the chest and lost my ability to speak coherently. Lucky for me, my partner is not easily spooked and so he said “Well, we’re not going to do that right now. Instead we will go and talk to our midwife about the results, and if we need the induction we will come back”. The two of them talked for a minute about why we would do that, and while they were having this discussion the registrar was on the phone waiting for a response. She hung up before stating, “Well it doesn’t matter anyway as they don’t have a bed for you upstairs, so you would have to come back tomorrow.”

And again, I’ll let you sit with that.

This was nine years ago and I still feel frustrated. Frustrated that I then birthed my first baby in total fear that there was something wrong (there wasn’t!). Frustrated as I’m sure she has spoken to others in that coercive emotive way since, to speed things up, to follow hospital policy? Frustrated that I wasn’t treated as an intelligent, sentient being capable of being given information about the real health of my baby, the risks and the options. In that moment the registrar broke my trust in her ability to care for me in a respectful and evidence-based way. My experience of that first birth was totally altered because of this interaction

Before you think this incident is unfortunate and anecdotal I urge you to think back to the conversations you have had around birth with others, think about your own births, and think about whether the women in those conversations were coming out of their birthing feeling good about their experiences. Feeling heard, feeling supported, feeling capable, because to me that is the key to this whole debate. That feeling is where you start your early parenting from. It is the one you take with you into the first few weeks of your babies life. And from my personal experience, with three very different births – feeling supported can be the difference between enjoying early parenting with all its overwhelm, or sinking beneath the waves. Your post-natal emotional health and well-being begins with the birth of your baby.

I’m sure you know of some good experiences. There are many. But there are also too many negative birth stories floating around for it not to be clear that we have a systemic problem around how we birth our babies as a culture. A culture where if we ask for more than a live, healthy baby then we are being greedy, or privileged, or selfish.

If you travel this birthing journey with people who you can feel are on your side you come out the other side feeling like a champion. If you feel you are supported, heard and cared for, regardless of the type of birth, the place of birth and whether you followed your birth plan or not, you take this feeling into the emotional exhilarating scary time of new babyhood.

We need to have a different conversation about birth. One that isn’t full of judgement and isn’t using the discussion of birth choices as a distraction from the issue. One that acknowledges that everyone doing their best isn’t enough for the birthing women of the future. That women deserve more than the lottery that is possible with birth in Australia today. That we need to come to some kind of consensus on what a good birth is.

I think we all agree that “healthy mother, healthy baby” is the key outcome of birth but I want to pose a strong second outcome that I believe is critical to a woman’s journey into motherhood. That the experience of birth is respectful, inclusive, non-coercive and kind. That we are included in decision-making without being faced with scornfulness about our belief that our experience is important.

The conversation we should be having about birth is “How do we best support women through the birth of their babies in order to ensure they transition into early parenthood feeling capable, connected to their baby and supported?” Please let’s have that conversation!

When we built in Warrandyte, I had already given up architecture and segued into my new career in feminist health promotion. The three of us – Jem, Buzz and I – holed up cosily in the little mudbrick while Jem designed and oversaw the construction of the family home on the bush block. By the time the new house was done and the cottage renovated for use as Jem’s studio, I was pregnant again. Life for me was the office, and family.

In Jem’s design there was no dedicated space just for me. I should be fair to him; it was not as if he overlooked me completely. In the flowing open plan there was a nook with an inset desk and bookshelf, and a view to the garden. It was white and bright and beautiful. But there were no doors to close, and it flowed on to the kitchen. The boys used it as their playroom. I suppose Jem thought it would be ideal, allowing me to do a bit of my paid work at the desk while the boys entertained themselves and each other. I quickly cluttered the desk. As soon as Remy was six months and mobile, he would make a commando-crawl beeline to the bookshelf and dismantle all my beautiful books, pulling them off and ripping out pages. So my art and design books got packed away in boxes.

At the time I did not ask Jem to give me my own studio in the design. I didn’t think that I deserved one. What was I doing that needed a creative space? Nothing. If I was to use a creative space for something, would it make any money, like Jem’s? No. Did I have time anyway? I had a challenging senior position, and a long commute, and small children, and typically unfulfilled promises to self of daily exercise. And Mum. Lonely Bernie. There just didn’t seem to be anything much left over.

When Bernie announced that she was installing a shed in her backyard for use as her own creative space, within which she was not yet sure what would happen, something seethed in me. I was surprised and ashamed of my reaction. After all, wasn’t I the one who encouraged Mum in the gradual reclaiming of her life after Dad’s death? And finally, at seventy-five years of age, Bernie was telling us that she wanted something for herself, that she had wanted it for thirty years, and that she was finally in the position to make it happen. And I resented her for it. How dare she have this thing, this space and time for beauty and creation and play and stillness and fucking self and solitude? Was it not going to be spoiled on a woman of her age, and anyway, didn’t she knew how fucking lucky she was to be alone, in her own house, in command of her own time? Why did she need more?

This was the woman who was liberated from an abusive relationship by the early demise of her partner, and by the introduction of policies to support single mothers. 

I told Ryvre about my ungenerous reaction and my continued sense of pain when I went for my next secret fortnightly session.

He looked at me in that unnerving way he had of holding my gaze well beyond my period of comfort. While not sexual, it always felt far more intimate than I was prepared for. He took a deep breath and then exhaled audibly to signal a release or a realisation: ‘haahhhh’.

‘Beautiful. Great.’

He jumped up and shook out his body, furry orange pants and a 70s khaki knitted jumper, bare feet.

‘I want you to stand up,’ he said. ‘Shake out your body; get loose. Close your eyes if you’d like.’

This was my least favourite part of any of this—the enactment through the body. Ryvre fucking loved that shit; I knew he regularly attended hippy dance meets and I had seen him completely lose himself in strange New Age rituals involving a lot of touching and sudden wild cries and ecstatic shaking. I thought it was weird and icky and I always had trouble taking Ryvre seriously in those moments. I would always think, what a loud of shit.

‘Now go into that feeling. Breeaaathe into it. Try to picture the creature who feels those things. How does it behave? What does it say?’

I stood there breathing through suppressed giggles of embarrassment and then frantic searching for something to feel the awkward silence. I stole a look at Ryvre; his eyes were closed and he seemed to be deep in reverie. He was committed, I gave him that much.

‘Where is that feeling of anger and resentment in the body?’

I kept breathing. And then I saw it; a little black and red cloud over a fuming girl. She was stamping her feet and then flinging herself around on the ground.

‘IWANTIWANTIWANTIWANT!!!’ I yelled. My eyes snapped open in surprise.

Ryvre was grinning. ‘And what is it that you want?’

‘Space for creativity,’ I whispered.

He whooped and then yodelled. I smiled sheepishly. And then I felt shit scared.

After the session was done, I sat with Molly by the river, at our special place. I loved it here; the Yarra was so dark in places that it was almost black, and it looked like a smooth, mosaicked quilt, flat and glossy and soft in patches. It was cut through with these neat ridged rectangles of rock that looked like worn-down blackened molars. Molly looked longing at the ducks. I thought about how our youngest son Remy had loved this place from a young age, how his first word at ten months was ‘duck’, or more precisely, ‘DU!’ A joyous, clipped syllable with no close at the end. He was now eight, and what did he or his eleven-year-old brother know of me? They could sit in the cottage with Jem, and watch his process, see something being imagined and created. They witnessed how Jem pulled the creative elements to him from life beyond. They could visit the construction sites, the finished buildings, hear others talk about them, even read what others had written.

What of me and my world? I went off to an office four days a week and spent the fifth working at the kitchen table, tapping away at a laptop. I was a commuting office worker, that mysterious yet dull adult world that sucked the life-force from us all. While beyond the house I did work that I thought was important, and tried to find ways to talk to the boys about it, I felt dulled and inhibited by my own bureaucratic speak, deterred by their lack of responsiveness. I was a drone and I was Mum.

I had spent so long resenting that Jem and the boys did not see more in me, and yet how could I expect them to see what I did not value in myself? Men do not feel the need to justify time and space for creativity, play and exploration, for their own projects; they feel entitled to it and just claim it. I had been waiting for validation, and it sickened me. I had a mother who was married far too young to a cruel man. I had a grandmother who wrote three novel manuscripts and stuck them in a drawer to be found after her death.

Molly nuzzled me. I played absentmindedly with some eucalypt leaves that had fallen on to the rocks around me, turning them over and over in my hands, feeling the oily exterior, smelling the fragrance released when I folded them. What did Ryvre say? Imagine putting your worries, your negative emotions on a leaf, one by one, and sending the leaves down the river.

I selected a leaf, one speckled with pink and distinctly heart-shaped. I leaned down and placed it in the water, imagined it carrying a whole weight of something slimy and alive and angry. It sailed away surprisingly fast and over a ridge and round the bend, quickly too small for me to follow its path any longer.

I stood up and led Molly away, turning my back on the river.

It was not until that night, lying beside a infuriatingly unconscious Jem, dreaming the blissed-out dreams of one living their fucking authentic successful creative life, that that little leaf speeding down the river toward the city came back to me.

I had my project. Tomorrow I would need some good paper, pencils and pens.

Once upon a time, awoken early by an enthusiastic dog, I pulled on my big red rubber boots and decided, unusually, to go for a morning walk. The sun was shining. The day beckoned. There’s a hopefulness in an early start on a sunny morning that even the most miserable circumstances can’t shift.

There was an older couple on the opposite side of the road as I emerged from my front gate. We smiled at each other in a slightly self righteous and conspirational we’re-up-early-on-this-hopefully-glorious-day kind of way.  I decided to not follow my regular dog walking route and chose a different direction.

It was at the first corner that I noticed it; an everyday artefact.   There were two deflating balloons, flapping above a raggedy home-made sign, Garage Sale – odds and sods, trash and treasure. It was dated yesterday.

I had a happy greedy thought, ever the bower bird, and was instantly motivated by the prospect of discovering a treasure. That warm glow of recognition and excitement thrilling through you. Something deeply valued by me, that by some miracle of connection, the hapless garage seller was clearing out.

But having spent too long decluttering over the last summer holidays, I resisted. Because of that I didn’t note the address.

However, round the corner I saw that I was about to walk past it. My heart gladdened a little at the excuse to rummage without altering course; actually I had to cross the road, but I didn’t include that in my mental gymnastics to assuage my clutter guilt and because of that I happily embraced the first box of junk.

Some 70’s brightly patterned glasses – too small to slake a serious thirst – caught my eye. Then the inevitable box of books.

I saw a small World of Warcraft book and my thoughts turned to my youngest. How to parent? A regular quandary for me. Buy it for him as a random, thought you might like this, kind of gift. A book of a computer game he plays – always searching for the excuse to join reading into his repertoire of things with which he occupies his time. Leverage up the game into a more acceptable literacy space; clever marketing by the games companies no doubt targeting the low hanging fruit of guilty parents.

Or is it crap? Probably badly written. Encourages the stupid (in my view) game.

My thoughts went to and fro with my convoluted decision making until finally I thought it was worth the 50 cent investment. (Or was that divestment? My mind constantly preoccupied with these stupid questions. Fuck parenting; it’s exhausting and consumes your thoughts and time and you’re not likely to get it right anyway.)

But I headed home with a happy and not too cluttered heart. Prudent clutter. It must have been the red boots.