"My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now"

A daughter hears a lifelong injunction from her mother: do not have children. The reversal of the usual cultural script is striking. Rather than pressing for grandchildren, the mother warns that motherhood would ruin a life. Behind that warning lies a complex mix of protection, projection, and biography. Perhaps the mother experienced motherhood as an erasure of self, economically, artistically, or emotionally, and wants to spare her child a similar fate. Perhaps she doubts the social structures that would support a mother’s flourishing. Either way, the counsel is born not of indifference but of a fierce, if austere, care.

“Even now” stretches the comment across time. It signals a judgment that has outlasted youth, fashion, and changing circumstances, the kind of parental verdict that becomes a drumbeat in the background of one’s choices. It also draws attention to how maternal authority can linger as an internal voice, shaping desire by warning against it. The daughter’s self-making occurs in relation to that voice, whether by obedience, resistance, or ambivalence.

For an artist, the phrase carries an added resonance. Creative life often demands total immersion: long, irregular hours, a radical openness to impulse, a tolerance for risk. Motherhood, by contrast, is frequently framed as a vocation of reliability and self-dispersion. “Destroying my life” becomes shorthand for sacrificing time, autonomy, and psychic space, the very resources that nourish art. The mother’s view thus aligns with a historical reality: women, more than men, have been made to choose between art and caregiving because institutions presume a caregiver’s availability.

Yet the statement also exposes a contradiction. A mother counsels against motherhood, interrupting a lineage to protect it. The advice is both caring and constraining, a hedge against future regret and a foreclosure of possible joy. What remains is a portrait of inheritance: not only genetics or tradition, but a handed-down calculus of risk and worth. The daughter carries that calculus forward, measuring her life against someone else’s hard-won lessons.