Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
The new book Otherhood - fantastic title - is a collection of essays from New Zealand writers about not having children, about not attaining and not wanting to attain that holy fecund state of existenceknown as motherhood.
It’s a very good book. The editors, Alie Benge, Lil O’Brien and Kathryn Van Beek, have rounded up over 30 contributors; one of the best-written, as I would expect from the author of a very stylish and powerful memoir published two years ago, is by Golriz Ghahraman.
She writes, “The question isn’t just ‘Do I want to have a kid?’, but also, ‘Should I actually have a whole lot more therapy and sit this one out?’”
Lil O'Brien, Kathryn van Beek and Alie Benge, editors of Otherhood, a collection of essays about being childless, child-free and "child-adjacent".
The new book Otherhood covers the waterfront of childlessness. Subjects include IVF, fostering, adoption, abortion, widowhood, feminism, indigeneity, queer lives, blended families and tokophobia (a pathological fear of getting pregnant).
Two women write about losing their only children to suicide. The introduction remarks of co-editor Kathryn Van Beek, “In 2021, Kathryn’s work with MPs Ginny Andersen and Clare Curran led to a change in the law to ensure that people who experience pregnancy loss can take bereavement leave”.
“I have no children and I don’t own a house or a flat,” writes Paula Morris. “My niece told me once that when she inherits her parents’ house, she will turn it into a dog sanctuary and I can live there as well, in the garage. That’s my best-offer retirement plan right now.”
The new book Otherhood is about women’s choices, women’s bodies, women’s lives. Even so, and even as an old male middle-class patriarchal white he/him father of a teenage daughter, I read much of it with some kind of recognition - actually with some kind of ache, or fear, wide-eyed and sometimes almost breathless, which is to say I colonised the book and quite often thought about myself, about the 47 years I spent childless and the terrible idea of returning to childlessness in the 17 years since.
The new book Otherhood is concerned with absence and how to deal with it, and sometimes whether it’s even a thing you notice is missing but is more like a thing that gives you joy, fulfilment, relief.
“A dictionary definition of the word barren is: ‘empty of meaning or value’. But this is not true for me,” writes Raina Ng.
“My fullness does not depend on what I do not or cannot have.”
But it was true for me in those 47 barren years. The book reminded me how much I hated not having a kid. I felt meaningless, an empty vessel afloat on a sea of sex and alcohol - it wasn’t all bad. CK Stead wrote very fine lines in a poem after he became a father: “I do not want my life back.“
The new book Otherhood makes the occasional reference to fathers.
“I worried he hadn’t been a very good father to the two children he already had.” And: “I did not wish to have a child whose father did not wish to be a father.” Also, more positively: “I’d listed all the reasons he would make a good father”.
But the author’s list of all the reasons he would not make a good father is much longer ... Being a bad dad is the thing I fear most in life, and what I mean about the idea of returning to childlessness is the fear of losing her in the way that Warwick Roger lost his daughter.
He writes in his memoir Places in the Heart he was at the traffic lights on the North Shore one afternoon when a gang of students from Westlake Girls’ High walked over the pedestrian crossing. He realised with a shock that one of them might be his daughter: she was the same age, but he had disappeared when she was little. She might have been walking right in front of his car but he simply wouldn’t recognise her. He was denied fatherhood. He sat in his car experiencing otherhood.
The new book Otherhood deals with a painful subject. It’s a very personal book, very intimate. It’s by and for women, but anyone can relate to it, whatever gender or sexual identity - everyone belongs to a family. My kid is my family. Her presence is my happiness. Her whole life has been spent in the best hood there is, and her mum and dad have had the good fortune to experience it with love every second of every day for 17 years: childhood.
