Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb review – unflinching on loss, longing and choice

This moving study examines the reasons women do not have children and why they are so often assumed to be less valuable

Not long after she was told that she would never be able to have children, Lorna Gibb travelled to Doha, to begin teaching at Qatar University. She had spent time in the Middle East, researching a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope (she has also written a novel, and a biography of Rebecca West). Gibb had some idea, she thought, of what to expect. But she was not prepared for the degree to which a woman only made sense in that culture if she could give birth. Gibb describes the strategies she developed to explain, to deflect; finally she meets Halima, seemingly the mother of one of her students, but, in fact, only a first wife: when she was unable to conceive, her husband married again, and all four family members lived together. Halima points at the dusty ground. “I am like that,” she says with breath-stopping bluntness, “the barren place where nothing grows. Ayesha is like the palm trees … See how the green parakeets congregate and sing and nest in her branches.”

This is a book so much more powerful for Gibb having searched the world for childless voices. It tells the author’s own story, too, as one voice among many: her far from unusual history of undiagnosed endometriosis. “Some women just have bad periods,” as one doctor put it. These “periods” were in reality various organs bleeding in turn, causing so much internal damage that she occasionally collapsed from the pain. Gibb’s account is restrained, coloured with love and gratitude – for the husband who stands by her through her illness (she knows how many millions of men do not); for the fact that early menopause means “I have not had endometriosis for 10 years now and I know how fortunate that makes me”. But at the same time it takes years to come to terms with childlessness: “There is no sleep so deep I will not find you there,” she writes, drawing on Beckett’s Footfalls. “My unborn child, the one who will never be, finds me even in sleep.”

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BnNjZh