DIALOGUE BOOKS

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Dialogue Books

Copyright © Ruby Russell 2024

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-34970-215-5

Dialogue Books
An imprint of Dialogue
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

www.dialoguebooks.co.uk

Dialogue, part of Little, Brown Book Group Limited, an Hachette UK company.

Dedicated to all the vagabond mamas in my life.

This book is full of anecdotes about things that happened to me or to women I know. I’ve changed names, and some biographical details of women who were generous enough to share their stories but do not want to be identified. Some events (and some men) have been simplified or amalgamated for narrative ease. I have endeavoured to remain true to the essence of these experiences – as I remember them or as they were recounted to me – and to faithfully represent the power dynamics they illustrate.

Contents

1. Conception

2. I Love Men; I Just Don’t Want One of My Own

3. Half-lives of the Nuclear Family

4. Capitalism Hates Mums

5. Choice and Circumstance

6. Whores and Welfare Queens

7. Activists and Othermothers

8. Matrixes of Love

9. The Post-Capitalist Family

10. Mother Ungendered

Bibliography

Chapter 1

Conception

When I was younger, I used to feel a sudden, sharp grief after sex. A sadness in the wake of orgasm that was accompanied by an equally abrupt thirst. Or rather, they didn’t just coincide, they were the same distinct feeling: a melancholy so deep it wants flooding, a pang of pathos to be quenched.

Private, entirely unconnected from whoever I happened to be with, it passed as quickly as it came on. And I felt it less as I got older. Until one day it hit me again – inverted somehow, profoundly amplified, yet distinctly familiar – when my baby latched onto my breast for the first time.

Oxytocin.

All those times I’d heaved my head from some sweaty chest to reach for the glass of water by the bed: a chemical rush carrying a scrambled message about bonding and hydration.

Motherhood was something I wanted very much. But it’s hard to say why exactly. It can be impossible to know how desires central to who we are have taken root. How can we know if our hormones are driving us to do what’s expected of women – or if what we’ve been led to expect of ourselves defines how we understand our bodily drives?

And how might we interpret them differently, if we had different ideas about what it means to be a woman? Or a mother?

I remember thinking, from not long after puberty, how extraordinary it was to have a body that could grow a whole new person inside it. It seemed so unlikely, so extreme, I should really try it.

One day.

When that day came, I hadn’t made a conscious decision to conceive – not then, there, with that particular man. And yet, it happened right on time. I was thirty-two, the perfect age for a middle-class, northern European woman to make the transition from person to mother.

In just about every other sense, the circumstances of my motherhood weren’t what society, or I myself, might have demanded. There was certainly no white wedding. But tracing back how I came to be where I am now, I have my own conception fairytale.

When I was in my mid-twenties, a doctor put me on the Pill to suppress my body’s androgens and enforce the monthly cycle it had given up on. On a sonogram, my ovaries appeared as clusters of black grapes and she told me I was unlikely ever to become pregnant without medical help.

I recoiled at the thought of fertility treatment. Making the huge decision to have a child – to open up so much space in my life, to commit to motherhood and to go through such interventions with no guarantee of success – wasn’t something I could imagine ever being ready for. So I worked on being happy not to have children. I took the daily Pills, observed the monthly break to bleed. I used contraception.

But not diligently.

A few years later, I logged onto the Aeroflot website, not thinking about family but work. And, at the same time, arguing with my boyfriend. ‘It’s a work trip,’ I said again. But he won. I booked two tickets to Bishkek. And, as expected, we kept arguing when we got there. The work was stressful and consuming, and he had nothing to do but sample the local vodka and simmer at me being too busy to join him.

And then I had a few days’ break.

We hitched a dramatic twelve-hour ride from Kyrgyzstan’s capital in the north to Arslanbob, a Garden of Eden near the Uzbek border. It was well after dark when we tumbled out into the cold mountain air. But the guy in charge of the community-based tourism scheme had waited up for us, all welcoming smiles as he led us up stony tracks, past low wooden cottages and plots of pasture picked out in sharp monochrome by a full moon.

We reached a family compound with a shuttered shop at the front and entered through a courtyard where animals skittered in the darkness. Behind the shop was a storeroom crammed with plastic-packed clothes imported from China, blankets and household goods. Along one wall, four narrow wooden beds stood end-to-end.

A woman bundled in woollens and a bright headscarf showed us through to a parlour with steaming bowls of manti and soup. But before I could eat, she took me aside. I don’t remember how she posed her woman-to-woman question. We had no language in common, but perhaps she did know the English word husband or perhaps she didn’t need it. I answered that he was, because, in the context, this seemed more true than not.

After our meal, our host summoned us back into the storeroom and beamed. She’d cleared a space in the middle of the floor big enough to lay all four mattresses side-by-side and arranged a deep nest of blankets on top. Left alone, we burrowed into our marital bed and opened layers of clothing to share each other’s warmth.

In the morning, the courtyard was brilliantly alive. Snot-smeared children ran with goats and chickens, women who might be mothers or sisters or aunties busily attending to their needs. Above us, the green-gold slopes of the Tian Shan mountains rose to snow-capped peaks that were too bright to look at against a violently blue October sky. We were in the midst of hundreds of square miles of walnut forest interspersed with pistachios, plums and ancient varieties of wild apple.

Blinking it all in, I felt a warm trickle in my crotch and cursed my period – absent since I’d run out of the Pill months earlier – choosing this moment to return. Closing myself into the wooden latrine clutching a wad of tissues, my immediate concern was the availability of tampons. So it was with relief that I found not blood in my knickers but a milky trail of semen.

The following days were among the best the boyfriend and I ever spent together. We hiked to waterfalls, snacking from the trees. We spent afternoons on the wooden veranda of a teahouse over a rushing mountain stream, playing chess and making plans for the future. Not domestic plans, but shared adventures and creative projects.

I never saw another woman in that teahouse, but the men nodded at us in what seemed friendly approval.

Two months later, Arslanbob was a faintly luminous memory. The boyfriend and I were fighting again and no amount of sleep banished my exhaustion. I installed carbon monoxide sensors in the office where I worked. I suspected clinical depression.

But I had reasons to be down.

An old friend was in cancer’s final chokehold. So I dragged myself to London to sit by his bed. And while I was there, stalking hospital corridors and streets mysteriously untouched by my friend’s horrific, impending absence, I took the chance to pick up free contraceptives on the NHS.

Waiting at the pharmacist’s counter, idly scanning racks of condoms and supplements for expectant mothers and thinking about death, it occurred to me: I’d better check there wasn’t anything already in there first. I picked up a pregnancy test, slid its smooth box into my bag alongside those containing the Pill, and then quickly forgot it as I hurried to meet my friend Emily at a gastropub in King’s Cross.

Emily was immersed in the final months of her PhD. I was busy with a labyrinth of distracting little story arcs centred around my unstable career and this latest of my unsuitable relationships. But as we picked at our over-order of patatas bravas and crispy squid, conversation honed in on a topic that had begun to displace all others.

Not the magazine the two of us had started, or Berlin, where we’d moved together but which she’d left by then. Because these things, being the kind of people who moved to Berlin at the close of our twenties and started dubious creative projects, were not, precisely, the cause of the predicament we both found ourselves in. Of a group of women who’d been friends since school, only Emily and I were yet to achieve, if not actual children, then at least the relationships that should bear them.

The others were starting to imply Emily only had herself to blame. I felt defensive of my brilliant, steady, focused friend. Of her high standards in work and men. But also, perhaps, guiltily, that maybe they were right. And sad too, that maybe Emily might feel the same. That at our age even the most brilliant of us – especially the most brilliant of us – had to compromise.

We’d hit our thirties doing what liberal society loudly demanded of us – making work, exploring our sexualities, forging individual identities – only to find we’d neglected the whispered imperative that we complete these projects in our twenties, and at the same time line up suitable fathers for our children.

It’s almost unseemly to talk about settling and starting a family before you’re thirty, and close to failure if you’re not cradling an infant by the time you’re thirty-five.

In a few months, Emily’s PhD would be done and she would join the legions of women of similar age and ambition attempting to seduce men into cooperating with our reproductive schedules.

Men we had once walked with side-by-side.

Our generation, on the cusp between X and millennials, didn’t notice ourselves at much disadvantage in our youth. In student bars, a girl who chose a different guy to go home with each night had better do it with style, but she could drink hard with the boys, she could get better grades than them and imagine her future to look much like theirs.

But by thirty-two, a fissure that had been quietly running between us and them was beginning to yawn open. The question of children had become unavoidable, and if we did want them we needed men. We needed to build partnerships across the divide between an identity central to notions of what it means to be woman, and the logistics of careers designed for men. To ask them to fall into step with the rhythms of our wombs.

Quietly though. Because modern love isn’t supposed to be a pragmatic contract for raising children.

We were into our second bottle of red when Emily suggested another way. Maybe we didn’t need men to become mothers. Or just one between us, and only briefly. From there, we could manage things together, the two of us. I suggested Luis, a geneticist I’d been seeing briefly when Emily was still in Berlin, but who’d always seemed more interested in her than me.

Returning thoughtfully from a cigarette – Emily noted approvingly that I was managing on far fewer than usual – I questioned whether actually, Luis, pretty as he was, was really good-looking enough to father Emily’s baby? But she liked Luis, she liked the Luis idea, and I felt pleased as a congratulated child.

Last to leave the pub, we hugged tight and went our ways, leaving big questions unbroached. What would raising a child with another woman be like? How might platonic coparenting work? And who could possibly have made a better partner in something so important, than this brilliant, sane, kind woman I’d loved for two decades?

There was a forerunner to the pregnancies I conjured with Emily that night. When I was nineteen, before my ovaries went polycystic, I had an abortion. I knew I didn’t want a baby then so it didn’t feel like a much of decision. But afterwards, hormones, or perhaps the ghostly idea of a child, left me feeling vaguely bereft.

And it was then that I consciously decided to have children. One day. But that day was innumerable years, experiences and life-changes away.

Now, I’m not so sure this biological switch was as decisive as it felt. My own mother took to the role with some reluctance, under pressure from my father who’s ten years older than her. She was just beginning to be rewarded for doing creative work she loved and aborted her first planned pregnancy. But she got pregnant again quickly, carried me into the world and conceived my sister as soon as I was weaned.

In her telling, motherhood was such a joy she’d have happily stayed home expanding the family indefinitely if my father hadn’t insisted two was plenty. Instead, guiltily, she went back to work when my sister was six months old. Freelancing at Soho animation studios, she rarely let slip to colleagues that she had two young children at home, and garnered a reputation as aloof and asocial because she sped home every evening instead of heading to the pub with the boys.

Dinner was on the table when she got back. My dad cooked and did the school runs, packed lunch boxes and was up first to bring my mum coffee in bed before he walked the dog. Coffee cups were chipped and the milk sometimes curdled. The house was never very clean. But she earned the bread and he stepped up to the other side of the bargain. My mother couldn’t have told you when bills were due, how her taxes were calculated or when parents’ evening was coming up.

Balanced (if not perfectly), loving (if not always harmonious) and self-sufficient (at least from my childhood perspective), the family model to which I was raised didn’t nurture a strong desire for me to become a wife, exactly. But finding my partner in life seemed, if not inevitable, then perhaps the greatest imperative.

Motherhood wasn’t just contingent on the right man; I imagined it only as a development, or expression, of this core relationship.

There was a soulmate, Jack, who fathered the pregnancy I aborted.

Moving out of home at eighteen, I discovered I didn’t have to be the shy little person I’d been at school anymore. Nor was I one of the girls who could hold her own at the bar and take a succession of lovers. But to my surprise, I paired up with the tall, funny guy at the centre of my exciting new group of friends.

We were inseparable for nearly five years, discovering the world together, our expanding perspectives focusing into shared visions. He was gregarious and charming, compensating for my social awkwardness. But we kept such good company together we hardly needed anyone else.

Later, I sometimes wondered if I was too young and stupid to realise how lucky I was with Jack. But our relationship was never very sexual. We broke up as firm friends, and I needed what came next.

With Lyam it was heat and scents and the delicious tackiness of skin on skin. We were both busy. He was making art and I was trying to manage the chaotic office of a tiny independent publisher. But when we weren’t doing these things, we were usually in bed. And then we took a few weeks off to drive around the French countryside. If I was quiet – sleepy or pensive – he got irritated at doing all the driving alone. I dozed off and woke with his hand between my thighs on the hot car seat. He made me come as we sped along the motorway. When we pitched out tent in the evening, silence swelled: an emptiness between us that we could only fill with sex.

When we got back to London, I broke up with him.

So it went on. I loved men, whatever that meant, but none offered the perfect combination of lust and companionship, intellectual and erotic connection. And always, guiltily, I moved on.

On some level, I think I believed the perfect union would magically overcome my infertility. In hindsight, this might explain the chaos of rage and despair I remember as the only time I had my heart broken – by a consultant obstetrician who dumped me after we’d been together a few months. Later, Emily said she’d never seen me like that, losing my mind over a man who was unlike any of my other boyfriends, who’d all been so nice. This one, it’s true, wasn’t kind like Jack or Lyam. But he did know a lot about bringing babies into the world.

Looking back, what stands out about that brief relationship are the things I wasn’t part of and the friends I let down while holed up, claustrophobic and insecure, in the doctor’s expensive little Shoreditch flat.

But I didn’t need true love, or a man with a dozen years’ medical training, to make a baby. With a sore head from the red wine (we should at least have finished the tapas) I found the pregnancy test in my bag. Over the following days, I stared incredulously at two more before binning them.

Eventually, a GP told me that the only explanation for three tests indicating I was pregnant, was that I was pregnant. But I’d need a scan to tell me how far along I was. And on the NHS, that meant a few weeks’ wait. Unless, he suggested, there was a problem – bleeding, for example – and I went to A & E.

So my sister drove me to the Whittington Hospital where I sobbed real tears for a pretend miscarriage, when a ten-week foetus, a little white bean with shoots for limbs, appeared on the screen.

There is an old idea that female orgasm is essential to conception.

In the thirteenth century, this constituted a legal defence against accusations of rape. If the law conceded that a woman wasn’t necessarily to blame for being violated, pregnancy was always her own fault. Her body wanted it.

Apart from a few extreme pro-lifers who still cling to archaic notions of ‘legitimate rape’, we know better now. Science confirms that it is quite possible for human life to begin in violent violation of the woman’s will. And yet science doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with this fact – given its odd obsession with pinning down an evolutionary explanation for female orgasm.

Male orgasm, they imagine, is a perfectly uncomplicated example of anatomy driving behaviour that follows evolutionary function – compelling men to procreate regardless of whether they have any conscious desire to be fathers.

You could argue female orgasm and reproduction are just more complexly linked. More social, contextual – more intellectual, even. But biologists prefer neatly physical explanations. Some imagine the clitoris as an evolutionary remnant like male nipples: an aborted attempt at a penis, diminished and half-formed. Others describe the vagina actively imbibing semen, pumping it up towards the uterus – a fairly dubious theory, but one that at least resonates with how orgasm feels: a vigorous, muscular action that becomes more complex and more powerful with practice and maturity.

And this image has merit in itself. Because mostly, male-dominated culture – from religious iconography to romantic fiction to porn – pictures both female ecstatic climax and conception as moments of swooning, disintegrating surrender.

It may be a woman’s ruin or it may be divine, but it is always a moment of vanquish.

It is also, ostensibly, a private moment.

For a long time, when a woman married – the first step to becoming a mother, if she did things right – she didn’t just surrender physically, she also surrendered her legal personhood. The man who took her as his wife, took her as his property and took her property as his: in the eyes of the law, she was no longer an individual in her own right.

But the union was only consummated later, when her husband took her beneath the sheets. Her public surrender sanctified her private surrender, and her private surrender confirmed what had already played out publicly, before the congregation or the law. And if her conquest happened within this stronghold, the moment when a woman was shattered and remade a mother was secluded, her modesty preserved.

These days, society doesn’t demand we get married before we become mothers. But there are other standards the relationships that bear children must meet. A good eighteen months, say, of monogamy, love, companionship and intellectual connection. Sex that is consistent and exciting. Consistently exciting, in fact. Someone who you can have wild fun with – and depend on as a sturdy partner through the drudgery and joys of work that carries round the clock, week after week, year after year.

And whatever the prevailing convention, when women become mothers outside its stronghold, conception ceases to be a private matter. The mothers of children without fathers, with the wrong fathers, have always had questions to answer. Moral and legal questions and, still, questions to satisfy society’s demand we be made an example of.

Did she surrender willingly, or was she taken by force? Was it an act of wile on her part? Of slovenly irresponsibility? What right has she to bring a child into the world all by herself?

To whom does her child belong?

And to whom does she herself belong?

*

These were not, exactly, the questions going through my mind as I left the Whittington, my life at a crossroads. Mainly, I was turning over signs of a transformation that I had ignored or misinterpreted. But already what it meant to call my body my own was getting complicated.

One Saturday a few weeks earlier, I’d arranged to meet a friend at a gallery at three in the afternoon. At one, I was still in bed, utterly, wretchedly mortified at the prospect of getting up. If I’d known I was pregnant, I might have understood my despair as a consequence of physical exhaustion: my body prioritising the new person it was growing over me. Instead, I’d assumed the exhaustion was a symptom of depression.

Until pregnancy, my body had a self-perpetuating integrity. I’ve been lucky with my physical health, and so the biggest threats to my body had come from me. My mind – anxiety, depression – or my self: overwork, unprotected sex, smoking, cycling home drunk.

But this dragging misery wasn’t just me. I wasn’t just me. And once I realised this, my body was both more alien and mechanical – following a bizarre programme beyond my control – and a more powerful aspect of my self than I’d known. Physical processes were changing my mind, reshaping my thoughts and identity more profoundly than my conscious will could ever remake my body.

And yet, the one autonomous, thinking person in this conjoined metabolic system still had the final say. My metabolism was committed to keeping this foetus alive – even fighting its own addiction to nicotine with feelings of disgust – but was I?

I was pregnant in a society that recognises a woman’s reproductive rights. I just had to decide whether to exercise them. And maybe this is another reason I drifted through the first weeks of pregnancy so out of touch with what was happening inside me. Maybe I didn’t want to confront this choice.

Legally, I still had time. But knowing it had quietly hung on in there through most of the precarious first trimester made me feel we were, this would-be person and I, already in some way committed to one another. And if I was going to veto its becoming, I didn’t want us getting any more attached.

So I booked in for an abortion, which in the UK means counselling first.

When I terminated my first pregnancy, counselling was a brisk, friendly formality in an office next door to the room where I would undergo the suction aspiration procedure immediately afterwards. Not a moment for soul-searching, but professional reassurance that I was absolutely doing the right thing.

This time though, I actually wanted to talk through my dilemma with someone who didn’t have skin in the game.

In the back room of a women’s centre, a kindly woman in her fifties swivelled an office chair around for me to face her and pushed a stack of paperwork aside to place a box of tissues within my reach. Blades of fluorescent lighting reflected in the winter-black windows. Her colleagues had all left for the evening. But she listened as if she had all the time in world, while I weighed the sensible path of abortion against my aching desire for motherhood.

When I stopped talking, she asked me a question I hadn’t been ready for: ‘It sounds like you want this baby, but you don’t want to be with the father. Do you think you could manage alone?’

Her question made no sense to me.

Had anyone asked before I conceived, the responsibility of raising a whole human alone would have been too daunting to contemplate. But now, it wasn’t fear of loneliness, inadequacy or unmanageable logistics that made single motherhood impossible, so much as the unavoidable fact of the father’s existence.

The boyfriend wasn’t the first person I told I was pregnant, but once I’d managed to get him on the phone he had rushed to London – to support me in whatever decision I made, but also to make it clear he wanted me to have this child.

His child.

He saw it as his child, and so, equally, did I. As much his as mine. As long as it was only a potential child, whom only my body could realise, the choice was clearly mine and mine alone. But I saw it as a choice between abortion and the whole package, father included. Motherhood meant the boyfriend. For life. Or the next eighteen years.

The question was not do I want this baby? (I did), or could I raise it alone? (unthinkable) so much as can this man be an adequate partner and a good father?

Faced with perhaps the biggest decision of my life, I made the decisive factor something beyond my control: the potential of fatherhood to change a man. Any man. Even this one.

Now, I imagine the counsellor thinking, this child will change you, in ways you can’t yet imagine. But him? Don’t count on it . . .

I wonder, if it hadn’t been so late in the day, if I wasn’t as obstinate as I am, might she have tried to explain – a bit of realism now might save a lot of future hassle and heartbreak. But she probably knew: some people have some notions ingrained so deep they won’t see the obvious until they’re living it.

I brought my indecision all the way to the abortion clinic and away with me again when I left, still pregnant. If a woman’s transition to motherhood is supposed to be passive, I was making it as passive as possible.

Told I was functionally infertile, I didn’t have the nerve for assisted reproduction’s deliberate, overwrought steps to motherhood. But now, I think it wasn’t just disappointment I feared. I think unplanned was the only kind of pregnancy I could imagine. Even just saying, yes, consciously seizing the power to bring a whole human life into being, seemed outrageous.

Who was I to do something so bold and reckless?

How could anyone carry a responsibility so big?

And I’d seen the narrative played out so often in fiction. The faint blue line, shock, tears and the irrational decision met with joy and approval.

Conception had to be something I surrendered to. And so, happily, I surrendered to my failure to go through with termination. My failure to not be a mother. I let my body keep doing what I was compelled to.

Week after week, I googled unexpected symptoms – Braxton Hicks contractions, jumpy legs that kept me up at night, bright yellow colostrum that stained the sheets in the morning – and was assured that everything was progressing as it should. But these were all just quirky side-effects to the main event: the growth of a creature that was no longer quiet but pushing for space, treading on my bladder, tossing and turning at night.

In the final weeks, I lolled on the sofa, huge and hot and immobile, watching Cronenberg movies. The boyfriend had always been a fan, but the body horror never did much for me until now: I enjoyed a kind of superiority over men who fantasise the gruesome contortions and inversions we mothers take in our stride.

But while my child’s becoming was viscerally real, intellectually, I couldn’t fathom the idea of an actual, distinct person nestled within me. In fact, as my due date loomed, the reality of my baby – of my motherhood – didn’t feel more definite but ever-more elusive.

It took three pregnancy tests and a sonogram before I could say, I’m pregnant. And then, after all that agonising, it felt strange and exciting to say, I’m going to be a mum.

But, in six weeks I will be holding my baby in my arms?

This was impossible to picture.

The closer the miracle of birth came – the more it had anything to do with me, the me I was now, not some future self, transformed into an actual mother – the further it retreated into realms of the miraculous.

And the foetus didn’t seem any more convinced by the big day marked in my antenatal notes than I did. With a few weeks to go, it should have turned, its head pointed at my cervix like bullet. Instead, I winced at the terrible grating of a human skull against my ribs.

In a softly lit birthing centre, a wispy midwife who insisted on referring to my not-yet baby by a name we hadn’t settled on, laid me on a patchwork quilt and gently skimmed my distended abdomen with the light on her iPhone.

To my great surprise, the creature responded. Several times, it made a quarter-turn, but always righted itself again. I left with the foetus still resolutely upright. But I was lifted in wonder at this quiet demonstration of consciousness and curiosity, at contact made between my own world and the dark, mysterious one inside me.

I don’t know if there’s a technical term for the torch trick, but the next method we tried was called external cephalic version (ECV). This time I lay under fluorescent lamps surrounded by medical professionals. A doctor with big hands grasped the foetus through my flesh and tried to shove it into a flip. It wasn’t painful, exactly – or not for me. But the pulsing monitor, and the professionals reading it, said the foetus was in distress. Its heart rate plummeted with each attempt, recovering briefly only to come under assault again.

Finally, the doctor shrugged that ECV had a low success rate. Then he saw my face, screwed up against tears. The professionals frowned in over me and asked what was wrong. But I couldn’t articulate why this encounter between worlds was distressing for me, the bodily connection between them.

At our next appointment, one of those big hands balled into a fist, pressed against my vulva and wiggled to feel out the space between the bones either side. The owner of the fist checked notes on the foetus’s estimated weight and said there should be enough room for a vaginal breech birth.

There were no breaking waters, no midnight scrambles to the labour ward. I was booked in for an induction ten days after my due date. And when the contractions started, the foetus reacted much as it had to ECV.

There was an atmosphere of controlled emergency and forms to be signed, quickly. And then the monitor went silent. I was nothing but raw, yowling terror. Two women handled me onto the bed, one injecting a drug to halt the contractions, the other waving Rescue Remedy under my nose.

With my body shut down and the professionals in charge, the foetal heartbeat returned. Calm was restored. The last thing I saw before I lay back on the operating table was a junior doctor giving me a big, smiling thumbs up through a glass panel in the door opposite.

Birth happened elsewhere. Behind a green curtain. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even allowed to see it. All I felt was the strange sensation of someone else in there – the surgeon’s hands rummaging around the private space that belonged to my baby – and the awkwardness of lying with my head too low, the alien bulk of my paralysed body splayed above, as if it might slide and crush me.

But then, there she was.

A sudden, shocking human.

Held aloft in latex-gloved hands: a whole, new, complete, tiny, astounding – person. Blinking at her unexpected world.

We called her F, after a feminist hero who had died weeks before. A name spoken in creative resistance, reverberating on the air, waiting to announce the start of a new story.

I don’t know why her heart stopped, or even if that is exactly what happened. Once she was here, alive – so very, brilliantly alive – I didn’t think to ask.

F had arrived. Nothing else mattered.

Two years later, in another King’s Cross pub, I gave a terrible speech, infant on my breast and one eye on whether the boyfriend, rolling drunk, was about to become more embarrassing than my public declarations of love – for the woman who (I did not say) might have been my co-mother, on the occasion of her marriage to the extraordinary man she’d found right after her PhD.

The wedding was a low-key gathering of friends and family. And my speech didn’t much matter, because right after it came Emily’s announcement that she was pregnant.

Emily didn’t have to compromise after all. She didn’t need a platonic co-mother and she didn’t have to bet on fatherhood changing some Tinder guy into the perfect spouse. Weeks after she finished her PhD, she met Ben on a post-doc library fellowship in the States.

What are the chances? Had the Fates destined this extraordinary woman to be matched to an extraordinary man? Who knows? Who even asks?

Emily’s motherhood didn’t raise questions. But Mariam’s did.

Mariam was humbly excited. Almost bashful, like someone awarded an unexpected prize. We met at a cafe with our friend Cara, hugging warmly, toasting her news over alcohol-free beers while F bounced on my lap. We put aside questions about how and whether and are you sure. All three of knew this wasn’t going to be easy but Mariam knew this best.

And she was so pleased.

Mariam is the same age as me and Emily. But in Syria, where most women marry in their mid-twenties, she’d been consigned to the shelf. For me, children had been secondary to the soulmate. But Mariam was coming at motherhood from the opposite direction. She’d always known she wanted kids but never met a man she wanted to spend her life with – and had never been convinced any such man might exist. Now, in Berlin, where she’d arrived a few months earlier, she was preparing to become something unthinkable back home: a single mum.

But as the baby grew, so did her anxiety.

During my own pregnancy, I had worked for a journalism start-up and followed the early stages of the Syrian war closely, talking to activists in Homs and Idlib over Skype, matching their information against wire reports, tracking fronts on the ground and shifting internal and geopolitical alliances. But it was all abstract.

Until F arrived.

And then, I shut out all news from Syria. I closed any lines of communication that might confront me with the image of a broken little body, or the total anguish of a mother unable to protect her children. I leaped up to switch off the radio, banishing the incomprehensible knowledge that there were children there.

Mariam, watching reports of airstrikes and chemical weapons, didn’t have this luxury. Her home town of Damascus was still relatively safe and her family were sitting tight, for now. But she couldn’t be alone in her flat. Friends slept on her sofa to ward off the terror that seeped up at night. She was diagnosed with OCD.

Once her first trimester was through, she told her family she was pregnant and they began making arrangements for her mother to come to Germany for the birth. But by the time Mariam was heaving full-term weight, it was clear no return air ticket or family ties would convince immigration officials that Mariam’s mother wouldn’t claim asylum the minute she touched down on German soil.

And nor were they sanguine about Mariam’s baby: an Ausländer she would be bringing into Germany whether they liked it or not.

Mariam’s parents held to a respectful silence over the question of paternity, which her mother broke only once: she just needed to know nothing awful had happened. When Mariam assured her mother that conception had been consensual, the matter was closed. The immigration authorities had no such tact. They didn’t care about Mariam’s wellbeing. They wanted to know to whom the child belonged.

It belonged to the person in whose body it was coming into being: a single Syrian woman living in Germany on a limited work visa. But for the officials who repeatedly brought her in for questioning, this wasn’t a complete answer.

But Mariam dug her heels in: there was no father.

And this left the German state with a duty it has never acknowledged. Because a child can only inherit Syrian citizenship from a father. And under international law, a child who would otherwise be stateless must be granted citizenship of the country where they are born.

Syria is one of twenty-four countries where mothers don’t have the same rights as fathers to pass nationality on to their child. These laws of national belonging are patriarchal in the most literal sense: not just the dominance of men over women, but the rule of the father over a rigid family hierarchy.

Patriarchy, in this original sense, defines identities by paternity. A father gives you the name, the kinship, the genealogical line, the status, the wealth – or absence of it – to which you belong.

When European marriages were defined by coverture – the laws that prepared a woman for motherhood by subsuming her independent identity under that of her husband – taking a wife was how a man claimed ownership of his children. The whole family were his property. And a child who belonged to no man – whose mother belonged to no man – was illegitimate.

Laws of coverture were gradually phased out from the late nineteenth century, beginning a process by which women have become full citizens in our own right. We have gained rights to own property, to work, to vote, to participate in political life. And having the same autonomous social standing as men, we’ve come to expect marriage to be a partnership of equals.

Yet for many of us, realising our fertility is still a moment of surrender. Because if rights to public life are no longer defined by gender, the responsibilities of private life still are. We take time out from our careers just when they might be getting interesting. Men who lagged behind us gallop ahead. The wage gap opens up. The more time we spend home with the kids, the more the domestic life becomes our domain and the weaker our claim on lives beyond it.

We fought for space for careers and independent identities loudly, collectively, publicly. We relinquish these gains privately: in rows over bills, or quiet resignation that what’s best for family is more important than who we were before we became mothers.

And the fundamental patriarchal principle that mother is a channel through which a man’s progeny is brought into the world and nurtured into an heir, still hangs over even the most ‘gender-progressive’ societies.

One of the most important fundamental demands of Western feminism is the reproductive right not to be a mother. But if we have the right not to bear children, then saying yes is itself a choice. And what happens then?

What becomes of our rights and responsibilities when we choose against abortion? When we leave the family planning clinic still pregnant? Do we still get to be individuals in our own right? Have we chosen to surrender our autonomous selves?

And if so, to whom?

What does it mean when – in the absence of a father – some other patriarchal authority defines the identity and belonging of a child from whom you are inseparable?

Past and present, women who have had children with the wrong man, or at the wrong time, have been punished by families, communities, state institutions – whoever stands in for a husband that isn’t. My own predicament pales in comparison. I just had a crappy relationship.

When I kept my pregnancy, I didn’t think I was surrendering my identity or my autonomous self. What I sacrificed for motherhood was the soulmate. I gave up on the dream of a relationship that would complete me for one that, even before our child arrived, was fatally imbalanced.

Fatherhood did change the boyfriend – in a careful-what-you-wish-for way.

When, in the first days and weeks, he criticised how I held F or how I fed her, I was too loved-up to mind – in fact, I welcomed him taking an assertive interest. Before we became parents, he’d been more committed to me than I was to him. Now, each committed to F in a way that exceeded our feelings for each other, I hoped our shared focus would bring new balance.

But when she was a few weeks old and we took her to visit his home city, he strutted and showed off his new family in a way that didn’t suggest a partnership at all. He was even quicker to scold me in front of his old friends and rolled his eyes ostentatiously when he told them he had to take the missus out for dinner but would meet them later for a proper night out.

While I was on maternity leave, he worked in gallery bar and was usually gone all day. But he quit when I went back to work and grew resentful of any time I was away from him and F. I rarely saw friends because his anger would simmer on for days afterwards. Going out to work to pay our bills was unavoidable, but still treated with suspicion.

And over time, his aggression became intolerable.

Before F arrived – and particularly while I was pregnant – our rows had usually begun with my exasperation at something he’d done or hadn’t done. But by the time F was eighteen months old – and we wed at a London registry office to cut a sorely needed couple of hundred euros off our monthly health-insurance bill – I’d got used to doing something I’d never done in a relationship, with this man or any other: quietly working around the things he’d done or hadn’t done, just to keep the peace.

Holding the family together meant trying not to ignite his fuse. But I couldn’t hold on for ever. F was three when I finally blew up his life.

He raged and begged and pleaded. How could I do this to him?

But really, my transition to single motherhood was as passive as my transition to motherhood. I’d weathered the cycles of his rages and apologies until the fights were so frequent and his drinking so disruptive, it wasn’t much of a decision at all.

He pushed until I broke – or until breaking our nuclear family was the only way to hold myself together. The only way I could protect the family I was utterly committed to: F and me, in a safe and harmonious home.

In Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel The Millstone, a young academic conceives by a one-night stand. She drifts through pregnancy, falling short of decisive action either to abort or to notify the father. As a new mother, she fantasises about running into him by chance, admitting that the baby is his and reuniting as family.

Yet when the moment eventually comes, she senses the gulf that has opened between the brute certainty of her motherly love and the unwitting father’s world of ‘half-knowledge’ and ‘indifference’ and realises it is too late:

It was no longer in me to feel for anyone what I felt for my child . . . A bad investment, I knew, this affection, and one that would leave me in the dark and cold in years to come; but then what warmer passion ever lasted longer than six months?

I felt a pang of recognition reading this passage, written half a century ago. Like Drabble’s protagonist, I let the transition to motherhood happen to me. For her, as for me, the realisation that motherhood could be so consuming as to stand entirely independent of romantic love, came late.

But now, for the first time, I was ready to be enough without an other half.

I had to be.

This wasn’t what family life was supposed to look like: this three-year-old and me, two people amid shared chaos, picking together through the fridge for something to eat or the mess on the bedroom floor for clean clothes.

Intimately bound, but each with much to do in her own life.

Early childhood is a strenuous time, with its constant learning; desires and perspectives reinventing month to month. And my perspectives were changing too. No longer anyone’s girlfriend or wife, no longer responsible for an irresponsible man, I was my own person again. And if the logistics could be exhausting, the relief was euphoric.

Knowing that F, this perfectly innocent and wonderful person, had only me to depend on could be terrifying. But by the time her father left, becoming a single mother didn’t mean stepping up to overwhelming responsibilities – these responsibilities were already all mine.

And I couldn’t wallow in self-doubt, because to believe I was not enough would be to consign her to a wanting childhood – and whatever consequences such deprivation might have for her future. My child needed me to be the steady centre of her expanding world, and so I became more assuredly myself.

Growing into this new sufficiency, I sought new reliances. As isolated as I’d become in our family of three, this often meant turning not to old friends whose support might have been based on years of solidarity, but making new ones with whom solidarity sprang from leaps of generosity. And the most generous were often women like me.

Women who live lightly or heavily with our poor choices or misfortune – and women for whom single motherhood is not an unexpected current they’ve been swept into after a wreck, but a deliberately navigated course.

When we meet, we ask each other questions always asked of single mothers – about how we got here, how we keep going. But between ourselves, these questions quickly move on, to: why didn’t we think of this sooner? What were we thinking? Why should mothering without a man be so hard?

And how might we all do family better?