are women allowed to become Adults without motherhood?

on being child-free at work

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I have been pondering this subject for years, and lately have been wondering how to write about it without sounding more unhinged than usual. But I want to discuss women in the workplace—more specifically, what it means and how it feels to be a child-free woman in the workplace, from my perspective as one. 

To preview, none of this is intended, in the least, as a criticism of working mothers, and never am I arguing that they have it easier, in any way, than I do. It is simply meant as an exploration of my experience, and that of hundreds of women I've spoken to and heard from, being a woman in the workplace who happens not to have children, whether yet or at all. It is a conversation I've been having with my friends—both mothers and not—for a long time, and based on the responses I received when I broached the subject on Instagram over the weekend, there are a lot of women—with and without children—who have been having similar conversations.

By way of background: I have been working in the corporate world in one way or another for about a decade. I also turned thirty a few months ago—a little turning point of sorts that has made me, unfortunately, even more prone to rumination. 

Over the last few years, many of my female peers in the workplace have started having children, and I have also been very lucky to see many of my friends become mothers by choice. Some have left the workplace, because of course many aspects of professional life remain hostile to parents and to mothers in particular, but many have remained. For the latter, there is sometimes a permission for balance, or at least for the justified seeking thereof (the all-elusive work-life one, the one that does not exist) that is usually not extended to women in the workforce who, for one reason or another, do not have children. There is a respect (even when it is reluctantly given, as it often is) for a working mom's time away from work that is less freely offered to child-free women. 

We—rightfully!—praise working moms for the extra load they carry, while neglecting the notion that child-free women at work also have personal lives they need to juggle alongisde their jobs. It is regularly impressed upon us that mothering is the only worthy occupation away from work that women are allowed to undertake as an overriding priority over their jobs.

If a woman’s time away from work will presumably not be spent taking care of her children—our duty, nay, our destiny, as Eve’s descendants—, this time is viewed as more expendable. Less valuable. To even try to legitimize having a life outside of work, men can have hobbies. Women, on the other hand, can only have children.