'I think about it all the time'

On "Brat," Charli XCX questions whether motherhood would be transformative or stultifying. Charli, welcome to the discourse!

Sometimes, now that my children are a little older and their bedtimes more consistent, I go out dancing like I used to. It turns out the club is more important to me than I’d realized before a pandemic and parenthood pushed me off the floor. Or maybe these nights out are more important to me now that the rhythm of my life is different. I don’t feel like I’ve changed, but I know I have, incrementally with time. At 30 with children, I feel very suddenly older-than-average in my old haunts. 

Questions of whether or when to stop dancing loom large over “Brat,” Charli XCX’s latest album which—against hard techno beats and aggressive synths—delivers an honest meditation on being in one’s early 30s, mulling motherhood, and interrogating whether one still belongs at the party. In the album’s penultimate track, “I think about it all the time,” Charli sings about visiting friends who have recently become parents “and now they both know thesе things that I don't.”

“Brat” (which I loved) strikes me as an album about identity-formation. Charli leans into her image as a “365 partygirl” and “cult classic,” but frequently questions her own myth-making, comparing herself to other pop stars and at times wondering whether motherhood might reveal some greater truth, at the possible expense of her career. “Would it give my life a new purpose?” she asks about having a baby.

Several political camps, as it happens, have strong opinions on this question. The right, in a bid to make motherhood the only option for women, has a patronizing tendency to pitch childbearing as a wholly transformative process that will align women with their “natural” roles. In response, some liberal circles have advanced an opposite position, overcorrecting to argue that having a child leaves a person fundamentally unchanged.

I get the latter impulse. Ours is a culture that valorizes independence, particularly the brand of it afforded to men. Acknowledging that parenthood, a relationship of interdependence, might change a person—that “having it all” can be grueling and at times unattainable—can feel like ceding a political battle. 

But like any other material condition you encounter, motherhood will act on you. Even a star like Charli can voice realistic concern that having a child will cost her some of her freedom and career. What I would tell Charli, if she were one of my early-30s friends debating on the dance floor whether to have kids, is that change will come—not as a revelation during childbirth or the acceptance of a natural role, but in the accumulation of your efforts. No essential spirit of womanhood will rise in you to make child-rearing mystically easy, but neither will some core selfhood remain fixed within you, resistant to time and circumstance. You are always making yourself through your actions, be they mothering well or mothering poorly, choosing to have children or abstaining or just “think[ing] about it all the time.”

Put another way, you will move and change with time, so we’d better give ourselves a realistic view of the dance floor in order to best advocate for our space on it.

In interviews ahead of the “Brat” launch, Charli sounded ambivalent about having children, and fully aware that women and girls are hounded into maternal roles.

“Am I less of a woman if I don’t have a kid?” she asked Rolling Stone. “Will I feel like I’ve missed out on my purpose in life? I know we’re not supposed to say that, but it’s this biological and social programming.”

Conservatives like to promote strict gendered hierarchies via essentialist language about motherhood being women’s highest purpose. That, of course, is bullshit and you can tell it’s bullshit by the severe policies by which the right hopes to enforce this supposedly natural role: abortion bans, divorce restrictions, and the curtailing of women’s careers.

This essentialist message also sells short the real work and triumphs of caregiving. If motherhood is a transformative process—a joy! not work at all!—then consistent, unburdened excellence becomes an expectation, and demands for better treatment of mothers become little more than complaints.

I’m also skeptical, however, of complete counterarguments, like a headline that ran in The Cut last month: “What If Motherhood Isn’t Transformative At All?” 

Its author, a mother, described a radical disentanglement from caregiving that reads to me (if indeed the author is describing it accurately and not exaggerating for argument’s sake) as unrealistic.

“[O]ften it seemed like it really didn’t have to be me at all,” she writes. “Nothing about me — my ideas, my personality, my judgment, my sense of humor — really mattered. She wants her mother to sit next to her while she’s on the potty, or in the bath, or in bed, or in the car, but I’m at best just okay at sitting. She wants her mother to follow her on the playground, but I have no unique talent for the seesaw or pushing a child on a swing. I’ve always considered myself to be rather whimsical, silly, playful, but I did not consider how much time small children spend struggling to process discomfort, frustration, and disappointment; how much time I would have nothing to do but stand there and absorb a baby’s vociferous expressions of displeasure. It needed to be me but a me not so much transformed as reduced to very basic functions. This is not what I think of when I think of freedom.”

That’s not how I consider freedom, either. But neither do I view freedom as resistance to change, or standing stubbornly on the outside of a child’s play, locked into rigid adult notions of professional merit. I worry that, taken to its conclusion, this denial of change is not just unrepresentative of most mothers’ experience, but actually its own form of personal negation. I don’t think there is “nothing to do but stand there” providing “basic functions.” You can (and probably do) choose to do more: to invest skill and selfhood into parenting, and come out a slightly different person for it. Mothering takes agency. It’s a skill. I’m like… fine at it. I’m learning and improving. That’s work, baby!

Of course I sympathize with the need to be understood as complex and unreduced. In an ideal world, being a mother would contribute to these public perceptions. But I suppose part of the problem is that we do not live in an ideal world, and that while we should be advocating en masse for better conditions, in the interim we appear stuck filtering much of our identity through our utility as employees. Our culture is built more around economic extraction than the cadences of human life, and acknowledging that one needs to take maternity leave or a sick day or a break from recording albums means risking one’s future security and/or falling into a right-wing rhetorical trap that falsely claims women were never good at working for money, anyway.

On “I think about it all the time,” Charli sings “Should I stop my birth control? 'Cause my career feels so small / In the existential scheme of it all.”

As a mother and a Charli fan who very much wants Charli’s career to continue, I want her to be able to choose everything. I also want her to know that she might experience career hiccups and that she’ll probably be fine but not entirely untouched by the experience; that having children is not necessarily a key to hidden knowledge, and that the version of her who chooses to continue her career unchanged is not lesser than the hypothetical version of Charli who chooses to have children. It’s just different.

But maybe she already knows this.

Singing of her friends who had children, she resists placing them in a binary of transformation or resistance to change. “They’re exactly the same but they’re different now,” she says. I think that captures it pretty well.