‘I’m childless but not childfree’

I don’t have the financial burden of raising a child but without one of my own, I can help someone who does

My daughter would have been 10 this year, and although her short life is not something I really talk about anymore, this week’s essay comes partly because of her brief existence here on earth. So this is a kind of petition; to those who find themselves in a similar situation and even to those of you who don’t.

For me, one of the hardest things when being pregnant and then losing the baby so soon after birth is that all my ready-made mother-energy had nowhere to go. Having excelled at a self-explanatory subject called Child Development at school and decided with my then husband that we wanted to have children, I had a bag of skills and tricks for our planned offspring. Much like my breasts, which continued leaking milk long after Annie had died (attributed on her death certificate to collapsed lungs after premature and spontaneous labour at 24 weeks), my whole being felt stuck in a weird, abortive state.

I’ll admit, at the time, I wasn’t exactly living the most responsible life. Not long after our daughter died, the man that was her father and my husband, filed for divorce, and I was so distraught that I went into free fall for a few too many years. However, I still wanted to do something which felt intuitive for me and my long term love for children. I was one of the church creche leaders in my late teens and have spent a lot of time loving and looking after other people’s children. A year after Annie died, I visited an orphanage in Thailand and considered, for a fleeting moment, adoption as a (newly) single (after divorce) woman. But having watched my own mother bring us up single-handedly after she and my father divorced, while I think she did an incredible job, I realised that I personally would not want to enter into that arrangement on purpose. 

However, that common adage (and African proverb) that it takes a village to raise a child rang true even in the midst of my post-babyloss and post-divorce chaos. And one of the things I do now that gives me a clear sense of that, is child sponsorship. There is a woman my age, who lives thousands of miles away from me in a climate much more suited to my (and her) skin tone, who has had eight healthy children; while I have none. On one level, since I once longed for my own child, that seems unfair, but I’m learning to see there is so much richness in life when we step away from our often blinkered, introspective view of the world. And it is to this woman’s family that I pay £21 a month to put their little girl, Sharon, through a month of school. And when I say school, I don’t mean the kind of fancy, fee-paying private boarding school that I was privileged enough to go to when I was younger. I mean just a regular - “if not for this she would be getting zero education” - school. 

I’m not a millionaire but it feels good to be a little philanthropic in this way and it’s a little sickening to me to admit, that if I’m honest, I don’t really notice the loss of an amount that is shamefully equivalent to just one week of takeaway coffee. The Alifo family (pictured above) are farmers in Ghana and they’ve suffered from the kind of biblical droughts that we in the West might read about in the Bible and think ‘Oh how terrible!’ but with no real consciousness of the devastation it would inflict on people and their ability to do very basic things. Basic things like getting food to eat and a roof over their heads - things that having your child in school does a great deal to take care of.

Anyway! As my boyfriend often says to me when we disagree: I’m not trying to evangelise to you (which is in itself ironic because he’s not a Christian), but in this essay, I wanted to share the way in which I’m able to make a tiny difference in this family’s life. A way in which you, if you wanted to, could help one of Sharon’s seven siblings too*.

Weird one for this week - I know! - but children and their welfare is an issue really close to my heart so do reply to this if you feel similarly inclined and I can put you in touch with this family.

Doll x

*only seven of Beatrice’s children are in this pic. Sharon’s elder brother is not in this photo because when it was taken, he was off trying to make that cash money to support his family.

PS - Sharon [the child far LH that I am able to sponsor] looks pretty pissed because unlike, Western kids, she doesn’t like having her photo taken, and you know what? I kind of like that rebellious energy.