The agony of not being a mother: At 55 and childless, why I’m so sick of apparently ‘cool’, smug women boasting about their well-off, child-free lives and ignoring the grief of others, like me: SAMANTHA BRICK

Sitting in a posh hotel bedroom in Dublin, I am in tears. I shouldn’t be: I’ve been flown to Ireland especially for an appearance on The Late Late Show, a live studio programme and one of the biggest TV shows in the country.

The hotel suite redefines the meaning of gorgeousness and I’m being paid handsomely for my live interview. My husband, Pascal, is trying to console me.

I pull myself together because in 30 minutes I have to appear in front of a studio audience as the provocative writer (wearing a fiery orange dress) who dared to publish her thoughts on the parts of women’s psyches that some of us would rather leave unexplored.

What many people don’t know is that, when my (now famous) article about women hating me for being beautiful was published, I had just had my first IVF embryo transfer.

After the day of transfer, you have to wait two weeks for a scheduled blood test which will tell you whether it’s been successful or not. But sitting in that hotel room, I already knew – thanks to the cramping I was experiencing signalling the arrival of my period – that it hadn’t worked.

I wasn’t pregnant.

That was in April 2012, when I was 41. I’d had no idea my article would go viral, nor that I’d find myself defending it on the world stage. Perhaps it’s not surprising the treatment did not result in the child we desperately wanted.

The second attempt we made a year later also failed then that was that. No baby.

Today, I’m 55 and the pain is less raw, more bruise-like. But for a decade, my childlessness hurt like a bloody open wound.

News this month that almost 40 per cent of women are becoming mothers later than they want to, and having fewer babies than they’d like, came as no surprise to me. 

Women are delaying motherhood by an average of six years, according to the survey for the IVI Institute, a research collaboration between seven fertility clinic groups across nine countries.

Meanwhile, a new book about the catastrophically plummeting birth rate by crossbench peer Camilla Cavendish offers reasons for that delay.

Her analysis in Generation Maybe suggests the baby drought is down to an off-putting economic climate and women being unable to find men willing to commit to a long-term relationship and fatherhood.

I understand both of those but there is another factor which I find especially galling – the sudden popularity of the child-free midlife woman.

It feels to me that it’s ‘cool’ nowadays to talk about how happy you are as a child-free woman in your 40s and 50s.

How well-travelled, organised and well-off you are without kids. How you regard yourself as a pioneer and role model to younger women weighing up the pros and cons of motherhood as they reach those critical years.

But what gets left out of this narrative are the women like me – the ones living with grief.

Once, the childless by choice were invisible, even spurned; now it’s us who are invisible: the childless not by choice. The fact is, to many of us, not becoming a mother feels undeniably like a bereavement. Perhaps it is even worse for those who go through failed IVF, knowing how much they want it.

Each time a cycle ended with no baby, my heart was broken and my very core pulled apart. Each time, I would imagine my life with a child, then I’d lose that child.

Today there seems to be little sympathy for that very tough road. The endless, thoughtless social media comments blame us for ‘leaving it so late’. Why didn’t we try earlier? Why didn’t we think of it in our 20s?

Please. In my fertile years, the world I lived and worked in didn’t make it that simple – and if this new survey is to be believed, today’s young women are finding it just as hard.

I’ve always worked in the media industry. In the 1990s, my peers and I moved from one short TV contract to another: two months on a pilot, followed by four months on a documentary.

The longest contract I ever had in my 20s was for a year. Under those circumstances, how was I supposed to feel financially secure enough to start a family? Besides, I’d seen women become pregnant and either terminate or be eased out of the working environment. That was the world in which I was trying to build a career.

Options for starting a family were limited. Going it alone in some way was still stigmatised and discouraged.

And those happily married women who planned their pregnancies? Some would make the obligatory visit to the office with their newborn, then we would never see them at work again.

In the 1990s, women were starting to baulk at taking the career hit that so often came with parenthood but it was still very much the norm.

I was determined to have it all. When my then-husband and I got together, I was 29 and very clear about wanting to start a family but maintain my career.

A year later I was on a three-year contract with Sky television where – phew – I would have been able to take maternity leave with some financial security.

I believed my husband and I were on the same page. But no.

I don’t know what his thinking was but after we married he had no interest in having children with me. Sex once a week on a Sunday hardly felt like a shared commitment to trying for a baby.

And believe me, I was already spending money in pursuit of that dream. I saw a private gynaecologist who assured me there was no apparent reason I couldn’t become pregnant.

When my ex and I went our separate ways just two years after the wedding, I was almost glad. I wanted a baby but I did not want to pressure – or, even worse, trick – someone into it.

Now I was free to find a willing father to help me have children. Three years later, I met Pascal. I was 36; he was 46. I moved to France to live with him and we married a year later.

Pascal already had three children: two with his first wife and one with a subsequent partner.

Did he want to be a father again? Not really, no. But did he want to start a family with me? Yes, he did. And so we tried.

A bout of sepsis affected his sperm count and set us back six months. Eventually, we were referred to a fertility specialist at a university hospital in Toulouse. By then, I had been poked and prodded, undergone blood tests and had scans of my womb. As far as the experts were concerned, everything looked fine.

At the hospital, the fertility service felt thoughtless in its layout. If I could change one thing, it would be to move all fertility units away from the maternity wings.

Women like me, feeling we were in the last-chance saloon, had to walk past families with newborns or, in some instances, heavily pregnant women smoking outside the ward. That anguish is something I would spare other women if I could.

Getting accepted for treatment on the French version of the NHS was no easy task either.

I felt like a chicken in a factory farm: hours of waiting, only to be given a doom-laden talk about my age and all the other factors that might count against us. After appointments, Pascal and I would drive the two hours home, and I’d either be in tears or pick a fight.

Yet I did what I could. I tried acupuncture, listened to meditation CDs and had hypnotherapy. I read a small library’s worth of books on getting pregnant and took supplements, hoping something would help.

Finally, when I was 40, we were accepted for treatment. At home, I injected fertility drugs to stimulate my ovaries to produce eggs. Those eggs would then be collected and fertilised with Pascal’s sperm in the laboratory.

There was a wait to see how many would develop into embryos and, in my case, the clinic transferred two. The embryologist was – to my surprise – pleased with their quality.

Then at home I waited again to find out whether the treatment would work.

It was nobody’s fault that all hell broke loose once that ‘women hate me for being beautiful’ article was published, just as years of trying for a baby were reaching such a momentous point. There’s no point in ruminating over the ‘what ifs’ – and in any case it might always have happened that way. But it was devastating.

The hospital suggested we try again but I couldn’t face going through it in the same setting: the hours of waiting when appointments overran, the gloomy conversations, the scramble for parking spaces and, all the time, the emotional blow of walking through a maternity unit.

So we went to Spain. This time, it was like turning left on a plane: upper class all the way.

I’d done my research and chosen a clinic with good results, as well as somewhere nearby to stay during treatment.

Yes, at €7,000 (about £5,700 then), it was expensive but at least the surroundings and organisation felt kinder. The building was stunning, the doctors ran on time and the process felt smooth. I was treated like an intelligent human being.

Except, again, there was no baby. I found out while having a meal with Pascal and went numb. Everyone reacts differently to grief. This was my reaction.

That was February 2013 and I’d just turned 42. I couldn’t face another attempt immediately, so we agreed to wait six months.

We had decided that our next attempt would use donor eggs and Pascal had already provided a sperm sample.

I allowed myself to hope that I might finally hold my baby in my arms – but then my husband’s 27-year-old son was diagnosed with skin cancer. As we were preparing to try again, his cancer progressed despite treatment. 

He died less than a year after his diagnosis. My husband was utterly broken. He had supported me through years of trying for a baby; now it was my turn to support him through the anguish of losing a child.

He probably won’t remember the day I emailed the clinic, cancelling our appointment and putting everything on hold. Even at the time I already knew my last chance had gone. I was never going to be a mum.

It was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. I’m an optimist. I generally assume that things in life are ‘figure-outable’. This wasn’t.

Adoption wasn’t an option Pascal wanted to pursue: he felt too old. Grief shattered him. His hair even turned grey. How could I press on? So I didn’t.

When I reached the end of treatment without a baby, I felt there was very little support for what came next.

I suffered from reactive depression and, for much of my mid-40s, had to find ways to manage my own emotions. I’d had one 15-minute session of counselling during the first attempt and that was it.

In fact, it took until my late 40s to accept that this was my path. My way out of the grief fog was to focus on what I did have: rescue dogs, nieces, nephews, a stepdaughter and a step-granddaughter. I’ve leaned into my world and made it the best I can.

But it hasn’t been easy. All this happened while mummy bloggers were monetising motherhood and their children, for example. Watching from the outside was hard.

And now along come the smug child-free women to tell me I’m actually one of the lucky ones. It’s almost too much to bear. The latest ONS figures show that 15.7 per cent of women born in 1979 in England and Wales had not had a live-born child by the end of their childbearing years. Those figures cannot tell us how many wanted a baby and how many did not.

But the distinction really matters. Being childless not by choice (often abbreviated to CNBC) when you longed to become a mother is a painful road that never really ends. Many of my peers now have teenagers and are looking at universities, booking driving lessons, surrounded by promise and youth.

You can craft a fulfilling life as a couple, or alone, but it does not erase the grief.

Meanwhile, the fertility rate keeps falling. In England and Wales, the ONS provisionally puts it at 1.39 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.41 in 2024. There were 585,396 live births in 2025, a fall of 1.6 per cent on the previous year.

For me, that raises an uncomfortable question: how much are we doing to help women who want to become parents?

Company-funded egg freezing may offer some women another option but such a gesture offers no guarantee of a baby and also sends the signal that you can put off having a baby until later.

What we need is the right environment and sort of society that makes having – and more importantly, raising – happy, healthy children possible in the first place. We need to support women who want babies so that perhaps it becomes cool and fashionable not to spurn them. And when, for whatever reason, it doesn’t happen, we must try to understand their devastation.

Many midlife women do have lovely child-free lives but let’s not forget the ones who will forever regret letting the road run out.