When I conjure up an image of my mother at 28, she is penciling on her eyebrows before heading down to Kelly's, her local pub, with a man in high-waisted skinny jeans who will later become my father. It is 1994. She pays for her own health insurance. Has a Maltese terrier named Teddy. Enjoys a cigarette and a vino. Or three. Teaches water aerobics at a nearby gym. She is loved by the older ladies, each of whom wade around in the pool before her, joking with their peers about what it is to age: about the hot flushes, cellulite, regrowth of a different kind.
That same year, my mother gives birth to me. And then, somewhere between changing diapers and tending to unexplainable tantrums during the spring, her periods stop entirely. To this day, nobody knows why: just that her own mother’s reproductive organs refused to function by the time she turned 39, and her mother’s mother at 40. “My doctor was treating a 19-year-old who had the same condition,” my mother mulls over, describing a teenager seated in a kitsch nineties waiting room, damp with sweat as well as something akin to grief while her organs started to corrode in the heat of her lower abdomen.
All my mother knew then was that the child she had birthed was female, and given the prevalence of in our genes, being her daughter meant likely having to carry around a lifeless womb long before fifty. Forty, even. Thirty, if history repeats itself.
Margaret Renkl once described menopause as having no way to regulate the atmosphere that girds her——and I am reminded of every terrifying graph, article, image of earth as it heats. There is something uncanny, something synchronous, about inheriting a dying earth and uterus before thirty. While actioning a amongst dinosaur fossils and other natural artefacts in the Queensland Museum, Exctinction Rebellion protestor Alice Wicks said “scientists are telling us we only have within this next decade to act”, echoing the words of my general practitioner, the same one who shrugged when I asked her close to a ten years ago what my options were.
, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked in 2019, as she intimately considered the plight millennials face while looking down the barrel of parenthood. In many ways, my body will protest in ways I don’t have to. It will likely refuse to give something with a heartbeat the space to grow in a world that is rapidly becoming barren and uninhabitable. This makes an otherwise difficult decision easier: rather than having to tackle the ethics of childbirth myself, my dying uterus shrugs off any chance of life, of procreation.
Unlike the —a movement of women who have decided not to give birth due to climate breakdown, and understandably so—there is a birth strike occurring naturally somewhere above and behind my bladder.
Borrowing from Arundhati Roy, I believe . In order to tackle the climate emergency and strive for a better, more sustainable planet, we have to be able to envisage it first. Meat-free restaurants. Electric cars. Millions, if not billions, of tree plantations consciously bedded out. But what is it for a woman to imagine a childless future in 2019? To reject the maternal script?
Childless millennials are aplenty, and whilst envisioning a life devoid of children is still a contemporary gesture, it is hardly unheard of. Perhaps this has much to do with the tangled assumption that being a millennial is considered its very own display of childishness. It is presumed we are sneering, lazy, smug variations of Lena Dunham, according to the New Yorker, frolicking about brazenly and stubbornly and checking our astrology charts and our Tinder matches of a morning. We are unwilling to grow up and save our pennies, and yet—despite being long into our adulthood—we are happy to eat, bathe and f**k under the same roof as our parents. How silly it would be for children to have children, after all.
It’s not as if I am some kind of anomaly, despite being young. Many women will eventually face the seismic change: the dryness, the heat, the mourning of sorts. But, in much the same way we all once viewed climate change as a faraway but inevitable destination, a backhanded joke about moving to Mars in two hundred years because we forgot to recycle a coffee cup, the menopause I know is speedy and determined. It approaches faster each and every day. Like the inexorable, world-wide demise of climate emergency, the reefs of my inside are parched and empty. And, despite the obvious and unsettling facts about the state of the earth’s fertility, there are still staunch and vigorous deniers. An especially warm summer, a skinny polar bear, rising CO2 levels can all be abridged to coincidence. Women’s health is much the same.
As Jane Gilmore reported, as recently as 2014, . A fever is looming for many of us, but our symptoms are disavowed.
There will likely be no daughter of mine reflecting on where or how I was in the 2020s. The mascara I use, the venues I frequent, the person I link arms with. The heat is rising within me, in much the same way it rises around me. The life inside—and outside—of me ends here.
Madison Griffiths is a writer, artist and producer. She produces and hosts , a Broadwave podcast that explores what happens when women leave abusive relationships. You can follow Madison on Twitter at .
