We tend tiny, empty graves hidden in our hearts. We endure the daily tortures – the careless questions and judgement, the thoughtless commentary, the barrage of propaganda. In our fundamentally conservative country, even in the third decade of the 21st century, to be a woman without children who wanted children is to be in an invidious position.
We all have different stories – infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, circumstance – but are united by our raw understanding of how it is to live in a society that glorifies the fairytale virtues of motherhood, a society in which governments prioritise ‘working families’ in both rhetoric and policy, and politicians urge the nation’s women to breed (and, if they don’t, label them as ‘deliberately barren’).
For a long time, I kept my story of…
