Child Adjacent

by Bridget Vincent

Ifeel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.

On one of the smokiest days of the Victorian bushfires, Jack and I make a run for it on the V-Line train to Ballarat. The air-quality index is in the maroon zone: the particle numbers are so far into the hundreds that you can’t compute them any more. People are staying home, and we are in an almost empty carriage: today there are no other prams, no teenagers sitting on the luggage rack. I angle the stroller so that he can spot diggers. It is almost completely white outside: the only observation you can make is digger or no digger. All the other things you would normally look for are invisible – there is no look Jack tree, look Jack birdy. That he doesn’t know to ask where the birds and trees are is either the best or the worst thing.

‘Nulliparous’: a description for a galaxy, or maybe a snake. I reflect one 3 am that ‘childless’ doesn’t feel like the right word when you’re finding the lost dummy for the fourth time that night. I once came up with the half-joking ‘child adjacent’ as the best term for my situation. ‘Childless’ suggests involuntariness; ‘childless by choice’ feels like there is a silent ‘goddammit’. If ‘childless’ is too negative about my situation, ‘childfree’ is too negative about children themselves: they are not a disease, or gluten. But perhaps to be child adjacent is also to risk being, well, child adjacent: the one that never grew up.

At my first pickup at Elliot’s childcare, I tell them my name is on the list as though I am talking to a bouncer at a wholesome club, feeling self-conscious as I park the stroller and bump it. I feel like people can tell I’m not the real thing, that I’m the novice substitute who can’t quite manoeuvre a pram. Then it occurs to me that maybe this is not an aunt thing but a parent thing: proximity to a child makes you available for assessment in new ways. I am used to individual self-consciousness: it feels strange to have it become a bubble that stretches around me and my little associate. When one of the staff members gives me a debrief, she lightly mentions that he was licking other kids today. I nod as though this is a piece of incidental information, like the shipping news for an unknown city. Only afterwards does it occur to me that she might have been waiting for some kind of apology or assurance from the person collecting him. This moment throws the strange non-responsible responsibility of aunthood into relief. As a caregiver, but one who is very much part-time and auxiliary, am I management or messenger, or somehow both? What are my responsibilities to him, and what are my responsibilities for him? There are clear obligations for parents in the sense that you have to try to do right by your children, even when it’s hard to define what ‘doing right’ means. What, then, if you don’t give yourself these responsibilities in the first place? How do you know if you are a moral person if all your daily trees fall in mostly empty woods?

It’s quite the ambush, encountering The Lorax for the first time when you sit down to read it to an Anthropocene kindergartener. I pick it out, not realising that it’s an ecological fable: I thought it would just be a normal Dr Seuss book of buoyant rhymes and zany syncopation. It tells the story of how the creatures made their natural home unliveable by killing all the trees, so that a small group can make a profit selling things nobody needs, to the point that the little bears and the birds have to leave or they will starve. At the end a single seed is found, which leads to the possibility of starting again and getting it right this time. The story doesn’t close with a reassuring epilogue, telling us all will be well once the new seed is planted, that the trees will be tended, the water will flow and the bears will come back. It just ends with the big ‘unless’, framed in a gut-punch rhyme: ‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’ When I was a child Mum would comfort me by reminding me that the book or television show was just a story. What about when it’s not?

There was still space for that ‘unless’ when the book was written in the late 1970s: still time for the creatures to re-sow the seeds and save their home. What is it, then, to read this story to a child now? I can’t help but make up an epilogue, pretending to keep reading and hoping he won’t notice that I’m saying more words than there are on the page. In the end, Elliot, the world was saved because the people knew they had to care for the trees and look after each other. It was saved, it was okay, the people fixed it while they were sitting on the very top of the tipping point. Elliot nods and says ‘Have you seen my raincoat?’

I wonder what it was like reading The Lorax in the 1970s and 1980s, when things were post-Rachel Carson but not yet quite so acute. A family friend who was a teacher tells me that she tended to use it in her environmental education classroom and it worked the kids like a Swiss watch; another family friend secretly hated it for the same reason, thinking it too clangingly didactic. You know a book is doing something politically efficacious when it gets banned, and The Lorax was banned in California in 1989 because of pressure from logging groups. I finish the book and for the first time wonder if there should be trigger warnings for the under-fives: in case of bushfire, do not open.

After reading, I don’t go into the story behind the story – it’s not my place to have this newly necessary Big Conversation, the one that’s right up there with ‘Where did I come from?’ and ‘Why is that animal not moving?’; the kind of conversation that expands your sense of the world by dropping out the floor. I had the first of these at about seven: I was in the passenger seat of our Mitsubishi Colt and had just seen a World Vision ad. Mum outlined things with characteristic moral delicateness, but I still cried most of the way to ballet.

If talking about childlessness at any time is fraught with discursive pitfalls and misunderstandings, talking about it during the climate crisis is all the more hazardous. To express worry about climate in the same breath as questioning the association of childlessness with selfishness is to risk being heard as someone who sees selfishness in having children. I wish we could have a different kind of conversation about having children: one that rejects both the racism of ‘foreign overpopulation’ and the racism of calls to replace Australians with lots more home-grown ones. Former treasurer Peter Costello notoriously called for ‘One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country’; and ex-prime minister Tony Abbott recently declared that ‘Middle-class women do not have enough kids.’

This comment manages to combine the worst of both these two kinds of rhetoric, being at once pronatal and selective about it. Tellingly, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo concluded in a 2017 study that ‘feelings of moral outrage – anger, disapproval and disgust – towards the voluntarily child-free’ are associated with the perception that the childfree are ‘significantly less fulfilled than men and women with children’. To be clear, this is moral outrage sparked by the sense that another person is unfulfilled, and not sparked by something the person has done. My stories of aunthood are not stories of unfulfillment and lack, but of patchworked abundance, of grace in the unofficial.

As an aunt of the Anthropocene, there is no self-as-product to act as a shell around your identity: no participation in existing structures that are at once a ballast and a constraint. This is part of the appeal: it is also part of the social risk. The popular association of chosen childlessness with selfishness is tenacious. You see it reflected in the forms of self-justification that echo across the childless by choice – in interviews we consistently stress the other forms of selflessness in our lives: the community work, the volunteering. One woman even donated her own eggs to a loved one. What you rarely see are people who say they just went ‘nah’.

I could put myself under the banner of the Birthstrikers, but the truth is that I’m not quite one of them. They are the people holding off for environmental reasons but who would otherwise have children; in some cases, they make a public statement to try to prompt climate action. For me, it was more the case that having children was crowded out by other imperatives, some latently ecological, some not. I never felt represented by the other dominant narratives of childlessness by choice, though. Many people have bright lines of justification that involve childhood difficulties that just don’t apply to my luck. My own childhood was camping, bikes, cartwheels, piano, climbing trees, Robin Klein. Actual warm cookies, autonomy and infinities. If anything, the idyllic cast of my upbringing was its own of kind of deterrent. I would want a child to have that, all of that, but I can’t see how I could create it here and now. Mostly, I just went ‘nah’.

Aunts of the Anthropocene sounds like something out of Monty Python or a niche cult with a 1990s webpage, all light blue and spinning icons. But really this aunthood involves something neither more selfish (‘Yay for shoe money’) nor more selfless (‘See Jane abstain for the planet’) than parenting, but rather, a human, enmeshed desire to be the village: to tend to what’s left. Like parenting itself, this is another mode of realism, another way to be the adult in the room.

T.S. Eliot wrote this about the richly undefined nature of family love:

There’s no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that’s lived in

But not looked at, love within the light of which

All else is seen, the love within which

All other love finds speech.

This love is silent.

Compared to the sonnets and the operas and the Bachelor seasons and the show tunes devoted to romantic love, Eliot is right. But compared to parenthood, aunthood is where love is most ‘lived in but not looked at’, in that the love here is something that defines itself as it unfolds. There is no sticker for aunt to put on the back of a car if you want to get one of those cartoon-figure decal families. Rather, and I guess that’s the irony, there is a grown-up woman sticker, but she reads as Mum, or maybe Grandma if she has a bun. We are then back with me at the checkout, pushing my false signifier in front of me. Family stickers also assume you are normal enough to have a car on which to advertise your normality in the back window. I could put them on my bike, but they wouldn’t really fit and would look more like some kind of skateboard decal, which, come to think of it, could be a rad adbust. Or I could put them on my backpack, but that might suggest I am indeed carrying a mini family inside: gerbils maybe, or weird dolls.

If you do want a legible exterior for your inner life, you can always get Aunt Merchandise. Aunt Merchandise occupies much of the same design Venn diagram as Bridesmaid Merchandise, which is convenient, because if you have got one, you have probably got the other. It is full of that same font, the one that looks like breezy but elevated calligraphy and goes with Instagram, millennial pink, and being a Girlboss. It is quietly but intensely insistent in its messaging: aunt T-shirts seem to be mostly about stressing that the wearer is one kind of aunt and not another: ‘not your basic auntie’, they read, or ‘cool aunt’. She is at once rakish (‘hot aunt’, ‘crazy aunt’, ‘bad influence’), but also full of the kind of performative gratitude that is itself a flex (‘blessed auntie’, ‘aunthood is a gift’). What if you are a ‘basic auntie’ and are not cool, not hot and pretty uncrazy? Just, you know, good with the swings and the band-aids and the Winnie the Pooh? Mom-ish?

Before the bushfires and the pandemic, I, like many people, would vacillate between a mental state where I would briefly register the full extent of the planetary threat we face and experience blinding existential despair and then, in order to get out of bed, switch back to a more underground, dampened level of recognition. There is less space for switching back now: our time is all aftermath but at the same time all prelude.

One smoky night, I am lying in my parents’ spare room with my own childhood books: I stick my feet over the end of the bed and wonder why the past still looks like it’s here when it’s so clearly gone. And there among the new world camped on the ground of the old is the next child: Elliot on his portable bed. There is a camp song he likes that lists the things you love in a row: I love the mountains, the flowers, the rolling hills. It has now became a kind of incantation as I try to sing him to sleep and to safety, not knowing what will be enough. g

Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, having previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham. Her research focuses on the civic dimensions of modern and contemporary literature. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

‘Child Adjacent’ was runner-up in the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.