Childless

NOBODY'S MOTHER

Life Without Kids

Edited by Lynne Van Luven

TouchWood. 226 pp.

Paperback, $17.95

Look as long as you like in a dictionary, but you won't find a warm and fuzzy definition for "childless." As Canadian poet Lorna Crozier notes in Nobody's Mother, Roget's thesaurus lists 43 synonyms for her condition, including, "barren, arid, gaunt, dry, dried-up, exhausted, drained, leached, sucked dry, wasted, fruitless." But Crozier and her fellow contributors, who range in age from early 30s to mid-70s, depict lives that provide a stark contrast to this desolate description.

Edited by Canadian writer Lynne Van Luven, Nobody's Mother offers a contemplative and frank look at what it means never to bear children. At times painful, occasionally humorous, the book challenges society's traditional assumptions about the role of women as childbearers. The collection occasionally has the cozy, superior air of a feminist collective, where women from an array of ethnic backgrounds and sectors of society speak proudly of how they've spent their day challenging the status quo. Most of the time, though, the book reads like an intimate conversation among friends, in which someone close to you has decided to explain the choices she's made in life.

On the whole, the book's contributors -- which include professors as well as a scientist and a tribal advocate -- feel fine about not having children. They've managed to nurture an array of nephews, nieces and other youngsters while also taking advantage of the freedom that comes from forgoing offspring. Some of the women devoted part of their youth to raising their siblings and have no desire to repeat the process; others had no choice in the matter when they experienced infertility or married older men who were unwilling to have more children.

But these women are not entirely free from regret. Rita Moir, a freelance writer and community activist, reveals that she has begun to question her decision to remain childless only in her later years, as her friends have begun to rejoice in their grandchildren. Maggie De Vries, an author and editor in Vancouver, confesses that she occasionally thinks about how she would have a teenager by now if she hadn't had an abortion in her 20s. But most of these writers challenge the societal conventions that prompt strangers at dinner parties to ask whether they wish they had children. Crozier recalls one dinner companion's surprise when she retorted, "Do you wish you hadn't?"

In an era when couples and single people alike are resorting to increasingly complex and expensive ways to get pregnant, this anthology gives readers a nuanced understanding of what women gain -- and give up -- when they opt not to produce a biological legacy. It is a valuable read for those who have borne children, not just for those who haven't.

--Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post staff writer