Helen Taylor, a 70-year-old retired academic, has spent most of her life grateful to have avoided the trials of motherhood. But she admits there is one thing she now misses: having young people in her life after leaving the workplace.
Taylor, from a boomer generation that expected women to marry and have children, credits her mother’s regret and the women’s movement for her choice. Her mother, forced to leave school early to work in a tannery, had three children when she wanted none, and advised Taylor to get an education and never have children. Taylor says she absorbed her mother’s bitterness, which coloured her decision.
In her twenties, Taylor had relationships with men who had young children, and found the role of stepmother “trapping” and “boring”. She felt excluded from the family story but relieved not to be part of it. However, in her fifties, she discovered her husband had a son from a 1968 fling, making her a step-grandmother to four young children in Denmark.
A disastrous holiday in Wales with the family, stuck indoors in rain with a broken dishwasher, confirmed her relief at not having her own children. Taylor says she has no regrets, but wishes she had more young people around her now.
