Quiet luxury has a new face and it’s not on a watch. It has a button nose and chubby cheeks and cradle cap and it costs more than a Rolex. For millennial women the ultimate luxury purchase isn’t a shoe or a handbag or even a house: it’s a child.
Technically, having a baby is not a purchase, but lately it’s become clear that it is a financial decision above all else. Last month Eloise Hendy wrote about the phenomenon of being essentially priced out of motherhood. The image on her cover story was arresting: a baby’s cherubic face, a caption reading: “I want you, but I can’t afford you.”
Only a few of my friends have babies, despite the fact that most of us are already in our 30s. Of those that do, the majority don’t live in London, where the cost of living is eye-watering and the price of childcare worse. Alternatively, they do live in London, but have addresses that belong on a Monopoly board, surnames with their own Wikipedia pages, Montessori nurseries paid for on Coutts accounts, and children’s names taken from the pages of The Iliad.
What unifies us is that at our age our own mothers had children that were already at school. Mine had her first child at 29, which was considered old by ’90s standards. And we weren’t rich, so what’s my problem? What’re my friends’ problems? Shouldn’t we just hurry up?
The obvious riposte to that argument is that my mother’s children – there were three of us in the end – grew up in the age of ’90s New Labour. We were helped along by family tax credits, childcare benefits, free school meals, and later by EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) and grants at university. What would she have done if we were growing up now, in the age of Rishi’s two-child cap? Presumably we would have sacrificed my youngest sister and eaten her, as Jonathan Swift intended.
The other obvious riposte is that I now live in the middle of a housing crisis. When I was young we owned half of our house and the other half was owned by the council – a kind of proto-shared ownership scheme – which meant we grew up without the threat of having to vacate every twelve to 24 months because of a capricious landlord. We had stability, the freedom to record our height on the wall as we grew up, the space in which to be a proper family. Where would I put a baby in my current flat, which has four small box rooms and doesn’t belong to me? Where would my friends put their hypothetical babies, given they live in house-shares or cramped studios with their partners? Sure, our infant grandparents might have been put to bed in drawers instead of self-soothing, hi-tech bassinets, but my chest of drawers isn’t even mine, it’s my landlord’s.
Millennials are often being told we could own our own homes and flats if we simply learned how to save, cut back on needless expenses, and lived without luxuries. For years this viewpoint has encouraged middle-aged columnists to yell at us for buying iced coffees and avocados. But the cost-of-living crisis has spiralled so much, and wages have stagnated so long, that the every-day luxuries don’t factor anymore. It’s the big, life-choice luxuries that matter.
The elephant in the room is that it’s incredibly easy to blame capitalism for falling birth rates amongst women in their 20s and 30s or even their 40s. Yes, it’s true that having children is prohibitively expensive, but if we really wanted to do it, wouldn’t we find a way? Wouldn’t we move and sacrifice and scrimp and save and accept that love and care is really all children need in order to thrive? Perhaps. But why make that sacrifice? Like many women my age staring down the barrel of motherhood, I see a more daunting financial challenge than ever before. I’m struggling to see the appeal.
I like my income disposable. I like my flat quiet. I like my evenings full of overpriced cocktails bought on an AmEx, the balance of which I refuse to check. I like smoking in the queue for restaurants I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to if I had a tiny, screaming dependent to think of. I like not having the tiny screaming dependent. I like eating soft cheese, sushi, jumping on trampolines, alcohol, caffeine, recreational drug use, fake tan, hair dye and sleeping on my stomach. The fact is I can just about afford to support one needy baby on my income, and that needy baby is me. I’d rather have the iced coffee.
Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in Belfast and London
