Picture this. Last Sunday I’m sat at Mum’s kitchen table in Basildon, plate piled high with roast potatoes that are basically a religious experience, and she hits me with the look. You know the one. That soft, slightly disappointed tilt of the head while she’s buttering another Yorkie. “Em, love… you’re twenty-nine now. When are we getting some grandkids, eh?”
I nearly choked on my gravy.
I love my mum more than life itself. She raised me and my sister on a council estate with zero help and a lot of attitude. But that question? It lands like a brick every single time. Because I’ve known since I was about twenty-three that I don’t want kids. Not “maybe one day.” Not “we’ll see.” Full stop. No.
And the judgment? Christ on a bike, it never ends.
So pull up a seat, grab a flat white (oat milk, obviously), and let’s talk about it properly. Not the polished Instagram version where everyone’s “living their best childfree life ✨”. The messy, sweary, actually-real one. The one where you’re a loud lefty feminist journalist who still gets called selfish by aunties on Facebook and gets ghosted by blokes who suddenly remember they “always pictured themselves as a dad.”
This is Emma’s Coven, after all. We do zero filter here.
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide “kids are for losers.” It crept up on me slowly, like the way your back starts aching after too many hours cross-legged on the floor filming TikToks.
First there was the career thing. Look, I’m not pretending being an internet journalist is glamorous. Half my life is spent in a grey hoodie with blue nail polish chipped to hell, Red Bull in one hand, phone in the other, live-tweeting some Tory meltdown at 2 a.m. while vaping cherry flavour with the camera muted. I thrive on chaos. Deadlines make me feel alive. The idea of trading that for nappies and sleep regression sounds like actual hell. Not because I hate babies, I don’t. I rescue spiders, remember? but because I know myself. I’d be the mum having a breakdown in the soft-play centre because the patriarchy won’t let me finish a bloody sentence.
Then there’s the money. Babes, I’m working class through and through. Mum still talks about the week we ate beans on toast for dinner because the gas meter ran out. Kids cost an absolute fortune in London. And yeah, I know people say “you make it work,” but I’ve seen too many mates from uni drowning in childcare costs while their partners “helped” by playing FIFA after work. No thanks.
But the real kicker? The body thing.
I look at pregnancy and I feel this deep, visceral “nah.” Not fear exactly. More like… ownership. This body carried me through council-estate scrapes, through moving to Hackney with two suitcases and a dream, through years of marching and protesting and building something that’s mine. Why would I hand it over for nine months of being treated like a vessel? The way society talks about pregnant women still makes my skin crawl. “Glowing!” they coo, while the actual woman is throwing up, swollen, exhausted, and suddenly invisible unless it’s to comment on her bump. No. My uterus is not a public resource. It’s mine.
And don’t even get me started on the climate angle. I’m not one of those preachy extinction-rebellion types who lectures everyone, but I read the IPCC reports same as the next person. Bringing a kid into this burning world feels… reckless? Selfish? Pick your word. The planet’s on fire, wages are stagnant, rents are mental, and politicians are still acting like 1950s housewives are the answer. Nah. I’ll stick to my rescue spiders and my Substack, ta.
The judgment started small.
Auntie Karen at Christmas, wine glass in hand: “You’ll change your mind when you meet the right one, love.”
Mate from school who’s already got three under five: “But who’s going to look after you when you’re old?”
Random bloke on a dating app who unmatched the second I said I was childfree.
It builds, though. It becomes this constant low-level static in the background of your life. Every family gathering turns into the Emma Interrogation Hour. Every new relationship feels like an audition for a role I never applied for.
Mum’s the worst because she means well. She’s proper old-school. Had me at twenty-two, worked two jobs, still found time to do the school run in full face of makeup. To her, not having kids means I’m missing the best part of life. I get it. I really do. But every time she says “you’ll regret it,” something in me tightens. Because what if I don’t? What if the regret is the other way round, forcing myself into a life I never wanted just to tick a box?
I’ve had the rows. Proper ones. The kind where I end up storming out to the garden for a vape and she shouts after me that I’m “just like your dad, selfish.” Oof. That one still stings.
Then there’s the online bit. Christ.
Post one mildly spicy TikTok about childfree life and suddenly my comments are full of strangers calling me a “selfish barren cow.” Or worse, the faux-concerned ones. “You’ll feel different when your biological clock starts ticking, hun.” Mate, my biological clock can fuck off. I’ve got a Substack deadline and a group chat called The Coven that needs gossiping about.
The tradwife crowd are the funniest. These twenty-two-year-olds in gingham aprons posting about “the sacred role of motherhood” while I’m over here thinking, babes, you’ve never even paid a council tax bill. Come back when you’ve done a night shift in a care home and tell me how sacred it all feels.
But the ones that really get me are the other feminists sometimes. Yeah, I said it. There’s this weird undercurrent where choosing not to have kids gets painted as “internalised misogyny” or “giving in to the patriarchy.” Like the only valid feminist choice is to have babies *and* smash the system. Sorry, but no. My feminism includes the right to say no to the one thing women have been told we’re here for since forever.
Dating as a childfree woman in your late twenties is its own special circle of hell.
I’ll match with someone cute. Nice chat. Bit of banter. Then the kid question drops like a grenade.
Some of them go quiet. Others get weirdly aggressive. One bloke, proper posh voice, worked in finance, actually said, “I don’t date women who hate children.” I don’t *hate* children, you melt. I just don’t want any coming out of my body. There’s a difference.
The ones who say they’re “fine either way” are usually lying. Six months in they start with the “maybe we could foster” or “adoption’s an option” and suddenly I’m the villain for sticking to my guns.
I’ve started putting it in my bio now. “Childfree by choice. If that’s a dealbreaker, swipe left, babes.” Saves time.
But here’s the thing that really messes with my head. Sometimes, late at night when I’m doom-scrolling instead of sleeping, I wonder if they’re right. If I’m going to wake up at forty-five and feel this massive gaping hole where a family should be. The thought keeps me up more than I’d like to admit.
Then I remember the panic attacks I used to get just thinking about being trapped in domesticity. The way my chest would tighten at the idea of school runs and packed lunches and losing myself completely. And the fear fades. A bit.
Class makes it worse, I think.
Working-class women aren’t really supposed to opt out. We’re the ones expected to keep the family line going, to give our parents the grandkids they “deserve” after all the sacrifices. Middle-class women get to frame it as “self-actualisation.” We get called selfish. Or worse, unnatural.
I’ve got mates from the estate who had kids young because that’s just what you did. Some of them are happy. Some are exhausted and quietly furious. None of them ever got to choose quite like I have. That privilege isn’t lost on me.
But choice is the point. My nan never had one. My mum had half a one. I’m grabbing mine with both hands, chipped blue nails and all.
Look, I’m not saying everyone should be childfree. Some of my best friends are incredible mums and I love their kids like they’re my own (well, almost). I’ll babysit, I’ll buy the ridiculous presents, I’ll even do the school pick-up if I’m not on deadline.
What I’m saying is that the pressure to have them is still this massive, invisible hand pushing women into a life script written centuries ago. And when you step off it? The judgment hits different.
It’s not just family. It’s doctors who don’t want to give you a sterilisation referral at twenty-nine because “you might change your mind.” It’s employers who assume you’ll eventually “settle down.” It’s the entire bloody culture that still measures a woman’s worth by her womb.
And yeah, sometimes it’s lonely. The coven group chat is full of brilliant, chaotic women, but most of them either have kids or want them eventually. I’m the outlier. The one who shows up to the pub with stories about live-tweeting protests instead of teething nightmares.
But I wouldn’t swap it.
So how do I deal with the judgment?
I’ve got a system now.
When Mum brings it up, I breathe. I tell her I love her. I remind her I’m happy. I ask about her garden or the neighbour’s dodgy dog. Deflect, but kindly.
Online, I block and move on. Life’s too short for strangers in my mentions.
With dates, I’m upfront from the jump. If they can’t handle it, next.
And with myself? I sit with the fear sometimes. I let it sit there in the quiet moments between rage-threads and oat-milk flat whites. I write about it. I talk about it here. Because maybe some of you are feeling the same push-pull. Maybe you’re twenty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-seven and the questions are getting louder.
You’re not broken. You’re not selfish. You’re not “missing out.”
You’re just choosing a different path in a world that still loses its mind when women do that.
The other day I was filming a Reel in my flat, oversized hoodie, hair up in a messy bun, bare feet with that bright blue polish catching the light. I was talking about something else entirely when I just… paused. Looked straight into the camera and said, “And yeah, I’m never having kids. Deal with it.”
The comments went mental. Half supportive, half feral.
But one stuck with me. A woman in her forties who wrote: “Thank you. I’ve been carrying this quietly for years. Felt less alone today.”
That’s why I do this. Not to win arguments or own the tradwives or whatever. Just to say the quiet part out loud so someone else doesn’t feel so alone in the noise.
So if you’re reading this and you’ve had the same Sunday lunch interrogation, same dating app unmatch, same quiet fear in the middle of the night — I see you, babes.
We’re not the villains in this story.
We’re just women who looked at the script and said, nah. I’m writing my own ending.
And it’s going to be loud, messy, and gloriously ours.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a thread to write, a spider to rescue from the bath, and a Sunday roast to avoid for at least another fortnight.
Welcome to the coven, hun.
We don’t do perfect here. We just do honest.
— Emma x
