What Does It Mean To Be A Woman without Children?
Reflections on identity, culture and the stories we inherit about a woman’s life.
Not long ago, I went to a friend's baby shower, and it wasn't like any I'd been to before.
There was no long round of gift-opening, no passing tiny socks and onesies around the room for everyone to admire. Instead, each of us had been asked to bring an object or image to wish her peace and safety through labor.
Later, we went around the room offering her words of wisdom as she prepared to become a mother for the first time. Most of the guests were mothers themselves. One by one, they spoke from experience: what pregnancy, birth, raising a child had taught them. As my turn got closer, my thoughts began to tangle: What in the world will I say? What wisdom can I possibly offer a soon-to-be mother?
No one in the room had suggested that I had nothing to contribute. The invitation had been extended to all of us.
And, yet, I had instinctively begun measuring the value of what I might offer against an experience I had never had: motherhood.
Why did the knowledge I’ve gained through my countless transitions — navigating uncertainty in new roles in my career, stepping into a care-taking role for my elderly parents, my work as a therapist helping people grief parts of their lives that shift and shape as they welcome new chapters, suddenly become less available to me as a form of my own wisdom?
In the days since, I’ve come to think the answer has something to do with the we inherit.
THE STORIES WE INHERIT
Before we know who we will become, most of us inherit a story about what a woman’s life is supposed to be.
We absorb these stories from our families, faith traditions, communities, the media we consume, and the milestones our culture chooses to celebrate. Long before we are old enough to question these ideas, they can become a kind of psychological measuring stick we hold our own lives against.
Across much of Western culture, a woman’s life has traditionally been understood through a series of recognized passages: puberty — coming of age, becoming a mother, and eventually becoming a grandmother.
We celebrate weddings. We gather for baby showers and new births. We honor mothers and celebrate when they become grandmothers for the first time. While these moments are, of course joyful, they do something more than commemorate an event.
They help us recognize that a woman’s identity has changed.
Anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep introduced the term “rites of passage” to describe experiences that help people move from one stage of life into another. Whether marked by an elaborate ceremony, such as a wedding, or a familiar tradition these rituals serve an essential human purpose. In the presence of community, they communicate:
Your life has changed.
We see it.
We reflect back it back to you.
MATRESCENCE: THE SINGULAR STORY?
For women, one adult transition has received extraordinary cultural attention: motherhood.
Consider how many rituals surround becoming a parent, from pregnancy announcements, baby showers, and birth celebrations to Mother’s Day and the smaller family traditions passed from one generation to the next as mothers become grandmothers.
We even have language for the internal transformation involved. The term matrescence was first introduced in 1970s by Anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the process of becoming a mother. The concept recognizes motherhood not simply as a biological event, but as a developmental passage that can reshape a woman’s identity, relationships, body, emotional life, and sense of self.
Once I began looking at motherhood through that lens, I found myself noticing something I had not fully seen before and asking a question I have been sitting with ever since.
WHEN THE CULTURAL MAP ENDS
What happens when motherhood – whether by choice or circumstance – isn’t a part of a woman’s arc?
What stories help her understand the person she is becoming?
What rituals or celebrations acknowledge the new versions of herself that emerge throughout adulthood?
Think about women you know, or even just you.
The woman who left a marriage and rebuilt her life again. The one who made a bold career change, returned to school later in life or became a primary caregiver for an aging parent. The one who built a new business from the ground up, moved abroad a lone for an adventure.
These aren’t small changes. They are the kind that remake a person.
Yet, there’s seldom a moment when the people around her gather to acknowledge what has changed, what she has released, or who she has become.
Perhaps that was part of what I experienced at the baby shower?
I didn’t recognize my own female wisdom as wisdom. Because, without even realizing it, I’d been measuring it as less than what a woman who becomes a mother holds.
THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM
For women whose lives do not include motherhood, there is no widely shared cultural framework that recognizes our adult arc as a full and wholly complete expression of womanhood.
Instead, we have inherited stories that define us according to how our lives have deviated from an “unexpected” path.
Think about the common tropes.
The Old Maid. The Spinster. The Crazy Cat Lady.
Even terms like childless, childfree, women without children, non-mothers words chosen to distinguish between very different experiences or offer solidarity, describe a woman in relationship to motherhood, or the children she doesn’t have.
These distinctions may seem subtle, but I think they matter.
Language doesn’t just describe identity, it shapes the stories which are available to us.
When nearly every word for your life begins with what's absent, it teaches you to see yourself through that absence, too.
Over time, that becomes a kind of low-grade shame: a felt sense of being less than, even when you know, consciously, that your life is whole.
What language do we have for a woman’s growing self-knowledge, the relationships she has nurtured, the care she has offered, the things she has created, or the wisdom she has earned? How do we recognize the ways she has changed, not in relation to a role she did not occupy, but in relation to the life she has actually lived?
Maybe the absence was never in the woman.
Maybe it was always in the story we inherited.
So here's the question I keep coming back to: What would it mean to finally tell a different one?
Interested in exploring more questions like these?
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