'Otherhood' puts motherhood on back burner

 Women stay single longer, kids later

Melanie Notkin, author of Otherhood, explores the plight of modern women still seeking love, marriage and the baby carriage

She's successful, independent, and knows exactly what she wants. And yet: This single, 35+ woman would rather be having pizza with a husband and children of her own on a Friday night than go on a date with another man who probably doesn't want to settle down. This woman is a member of The Otherhood - a "tribe" of women who have built lives for themselves, but want to share them with the husbands and children that have so far escaped their grasps, writes Melanie Notkin, the Montreal-born, New York City-based author of Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness. They're at once invisible and under the microscope - chastised as too picky or selfish by a society obsessed with motherhood, she writes.
It's time they got some respect. "The rise of childless women may be one of the most overlooked and underappreciated social issues of our time," Notkin, 45, writes in the book's introduction. "Never before have so many women lived longer before having their first child, or remained childless toward the end of their fertility."
She spoke with Sarah Boesveld: Q: Our society reveres motherhood. But what is Otherhood? A: Otherhood is a cohort of women, mostly generation X - the women who were born expecting that they'd have the social, economic and political equality our mothers weren't born with, but that we'd have the husband and kids that they got. So many of us are among the most well-educated, the most financially independent - some of us are the most fabulous women - and remain single and childless as our fertile years wane. They're looked at as so other than mother, as if they have career aspirations that overtake their desire for love or whether they've somehow delayed this idea, that collectively we all held up our college degrees and said 'Let's co-conspire not to have children until the very last minute of our fertile years.' And of course, that's not true. Just because love didn't fit into that window that society expected of us, doesn't mean that a) it won't come, or that b) we're making the wrong choice in waiting for it.

Q: 'Choice' is such an operative word in all of this - people saying "You made your choice" as a kind of admonishment.
A: People want to somehow quantify the value of our choices and put them on a timeline as if there's this warranty on them - "You better go back and rethink those choices." Because choice is a positive word that comes out of the feminist movement, it means that we can choose to wait for the right man. But what it flips to is "Well, you've taken the choice too far - you've waited too long, clearly you're making the wrong choices, you're being picky, maybe you're not picky enough." And finally it's this idea that we've chosen this path on purpose - that we have chosen not to find love, or that we've chosen not to have children. But the majority of North American women and men want marriage.