Saturn Returns with Caggie - 8.7 Cheers to Child-Free and Sober Living with Ruby Warrington

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

In today's episode, I have the privilege of sitting down with the incredible Ruby Warrington, a best-selling author whose journey is nothing short of inspiring. Ruby's books, 'Sober Curious' and her latest release 'Women Without Kids,' delve deep into the profound decisions that we often grapple with in our lives, particularly when it comes to the intricate path of motherhood. In this heartfelt conversation, Ruby generously shares her personal odyssey, taking us on a transformative journey that encompasses two of her most significant life questions. We explore her decision to embrace sobriety and her journey into mysticism, a path that led her to critically examine the role of children in her own life. Ruby opens up about those pivotal moments when she came to the realisation that her relationship with alcohol no longer served her spiritual growth. She candidly describes the shift from seeking solace in it to acknowledging that it conflicted with her true self, which is something I deeply relate to. Our discussion delves deep into Ruby's journey of self-discovery, where she courageously confronts her decision to remain child-free. She reflects on her upbringing and the complex dynamics within her family environment, shedding light on how they influenced her perspective. As we journey through her twenties, Ruby shares her thought-provoking experiences, marked by internalising societal pressures to become a mother. We ponder the rise of feminism in a predominantly masculine world and the influence it may have had on our own perceptions of motherhood and femininity. Questions arise: Can we maintain autonomy and pursue a career while being devoted mothers? Are we enough if we choose not to have children? Should we attempt to make ourselves want children to fit societal norms? Ruby takes us through her emotional yet liberating quest to answer these profound questions, ultimately leading her to write 'Women Without Kids.' This remarkable book provides much-needed balance and insight into the multifaceted aspects of this pivotal life choice. Throughout our conversation, Ruby offers sage advice to those wrestling with the complex and deeply personal decision of motherhood. She emphasises the importance of embracing a more balanced perspective and underscores that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. This episode is a testament to Ruby's journey and her unwavering commitment to empowering women to make choices that authentically align with their true selves. You can find Ruby on Instagram or at her website. Books: https://www.rubywarrington.com/books/ --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. The thing that I am probably most proud of in terms of creating Saturn Returns is the community that we have built and I love hearing from you guys where you're listening to the podcast, how it's impacted your day, what episodes resonate with you. So I thought it would be nice to check in with someone from the community. So we're going to be hearing a little something from Katie. Hello set and return friends. My name's Katie. I'm a gardener from Sheffield. I'm just about to tune in to the latest episode of the podcast whilst I'm at work. I think a gardener from Sheffield. I'm just about to tune in to the latest episode of the

podcast whilst I'm at work. I think I'll be doing some weeding in one of the flower beds because that's when I enjoy listening most and I can reflect on life and keep my mind busy while my hands do the same. Enjoy! I'd always really felt like the odd one out, like i was the only one who didn't want to have kids but then reaching my early 40s i began to notice in my peer group there are actually lots of other women without kids and then zooming out even further looking at this global shift in the birth rate well this is women everywhere which is completely and radically reshaping our societies around the world today i am thrilled to be reunited with one of the first guests we've

ever had on the show and that is the wonderful ruby warrington ruby is an author a speaker she is a thought leader in the wellness space and she came on season one of the podcast to discuss sobriety. She was one of the biggest influences in my life on my own sober curious journey. She is the person that coined the term so we discussed this in this episode and conversation but we also get into a very big subject and that is around motherhood. Ruby has just released her latest book called Women Without Kids and it discusses her journey and reason for opting out of motherhood and I feel that many of you guys listening are kind of at that stage where you're debating whether that's something that's

right for you so I thought that this was a really important conversation to have as a 35 year old woman I am definitely feeling that societal pressure the sort of you know biological clock chat and it's tough it's really tough to manage all the things that we are expected to so this conversation really opens up what that path looks like perhaps the path less traveled and the joy and the purpose that can also come with it but also of course the challenges that Ruby has gone through and especially the process of writing this book. So I hope you enjoy this very thought-provoking conversation because I loved having it. Ruby! Hi, Kagi. Welcome back. Indeed. I think you were either the first or the second guest

ever of Saturn Returns. Yes. So that was back pre-pandemic when you came over to my flat. It must have been 2018 or 2019. 2019. End of 2019. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, I guess, after... So both of my previous books have been out by that point.

Yes. Because they came out in 2017 and 2018. Yeah, because I think when I discovered you it was really around the sober curious stuff and I actually didn't realize how into astrology you were and I was I was speaking because just to add a bit of context for the listeners or our audience we did a panel discussion last night for your new book and afterwards I was talking with Africa about it and the sort of stuff that you were talking about when you were talking about it was so ahead of its time with the astrology with the sober curious and now you're on this whole new venture and topic which is women without kids so would you be able to tell

us a little bit about this book that journey from the outside they can seem like three quite different areas or quite different subjects i suppose yeah material girl mystical world introducing sort of mysticism and mystical practices in a modern context through sober curious which is all about reframing your relationship to alcohol through women without kids but they for me represent this sort of journey that i've been on. And chapters of your life. And chapters of my life since age about 35, which is what comes after the first Saturn return. It's the first Saturn square.

Saturn maturation, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was around the time that I started getting really interested in things like astrology. I just felt such a pull to know myself better and to understand some of the more subconscious or unconscious motivations that had led to me making certain decisions and I was just very aware that there was more to my life than met the eye and so that was what led me into that sort of investigation it was through getting really involved in those practices and doing starting all of this kind of inner work that I realized that the way I'd been using alcohol was not only unhealthy for me but that was actually blocking me from getting a

really clear and full awareness of who I am and like honestly the root causes of some of the things that had been challenging and problematic for me so that was where sober curious came in so which came first so material girl mystical world was first and it was through that sort of healing journey that a light was really shone on the way i was using alcohol and this was actually post your saturn return yes so you weren't aware at that time no about any so what was the thing that kind of introduced you to that world the mysticism piece yeah well I'd always been I'd always been curious about astrology ever since I was a kid I mean honestly I was working at the Sunday Times Style magazine at the time and um I was really

dissatisfied this was my dream job it was kind of like what I've been working towards since going to journalism school it was like my dream job and I just found myself really dissatisfied and I was very upset with myself I felt so ungrateful this is like everything I've wanted and yet I'm just not happy something's missing and that was the pull I decided like astrology just kept coming up for me and I just knew there was something there for me and I actually approached the astro the resident astrologer at the Sunday Times Shelley von Strunkle at the time about mentoring me and teaching me astrology so that was what really opened the doorway into that world and I was I guess it was around that same time I started questioning my drinking and I first got what I would go on to call these sober curious right I was questioning

the role that alcohol played in my life whether I was drinking too much what was too much what was I using it for what was I getting out of it were the highs really worth the lows all of that sort of stuff that then led to yeah me coining this term sober curious yeah I mean for everyone that listens to this show they'll know that I use that term a lot right you were the one that came up with it and it's amazing what a movement it's created you know globally yes and it's you know when was that actually released that whole project so that book sober curious came out December 31st 2018 and I always specify the date because I can't I was at a 2018 book or a 2019 book depending what time zone you're in like um but the Material Girl Mystical World had come out in the middle of 2017 so they were kind of those they were sort of happening

concurrently in a way I'd started hosting Sober Curious events in New York in 2016 as part of this kind of yeah personal development self-awareness journey that I'd that I'd embarked on with my astrological studies yeah because we can't we can't have you back and not talk about the sober curious thing what was your relationship like to alcohol now well what was it like then and what is it like now so then i was what i would always describe myself as an enthusiastic social drinker meaning i drank to socialize i didn't ever drink on my own i didn't ever drink to drown my sorrows in fact if i was stressed or anxious i would stay away from alcohol i drank to have to dial up the fun and to relax and to have a release and to socialize

and the London media scene is very boozy I mean you must have experienced it too pretty much if I wanted every night of the week I could go out and drink for free which when you're not paying for alcohol it's very easy to develop quite a high tolerance quite quickly because you just keep topping it up and you know I could really hold my drink I was one of those people who then the morning after everyone would seem be like but you didn't even seem like you were drunk because I didn't like nothing I'd ever felt I towards the end of my drinking career I had a couple of nasty falls actually kind of messing around with friends right that actually scared me a little bit were you aware when you were drinking yes I didn't work out you

didn't have blackouts or anything very occasionally I could probably even looking back now count on one hand the number of times I had like a actual what I would classify as a blackout blackout or a brownouts which is kind of like where you remember flashes but no and I would never I never got in trouble from my drinking you know never missed a day of work never got into bad arguments with people like all the typical things we think associate with problem drinking I hadn't experienced those things so it was very hard for me to think of my drinking as problematic even though in this kind of mini existential crisis that hit around age 35 um i was able to draw connections between the after less less the drinking itself but the after effects of my drinking and the sort of

existential dis-ease that i was feeling like just this general dissatisfaction either very high anxiety or quite low depression and a kind kind of disconnect. Yeah exactly and just a dissatisfaction with my life just a sense that like there was more to life than this and I started to recognize that I was relying on alcohol to feel good. My only release or experiences of joy came through drinking and that the level of drinking I was doing by that point would leave me feeling really terrible like two three day hangovers when I wouldn't drink so because I never drank every day never wanted to drink in the morning again didn't see it as a problem and eventually I did go to a couple of AA meetings just because I'd been really questioning.

I found myself being more and more preoccupied with it. My drinking was taking up more kind of headspace than I wanted it to be. But then when I got to AA, I heard all of the classic kind of extreme stories. And I thought, well, this isn't me. I don't think I'm an alcoholic. So what am I? And that's when I started to question I suppose could there be more of a spectrum when it comes to alcohol use alcohol misuse and what could I

turn this thing that I'm doing which is questioning that and wanting to know more and wanting to investigate what's happening and does anyone else feel this way and honestly as soon as I started talking vocalizing what had been a really private journey for it was about four or five years that I'd been really internally wrestling with it and maybe had spoken to a couple of close friends but um once I started speaking to more people in my social circle about it or just bringing it up in conversation it turned out that a lot of normal drinkers had similar questions to me about their drinking and were experiencing a lot of the cognitive dissonance honestly around their drinking it doesn't look like a problem but it

feels like a problem that kind of thing I know and it's such a powerful thing because it it felt very much at that time it was this binary thing of your aa or you're a normal drinker and there wasn't really anything no language for anyone in between and that's why when i discovered your work and your podcast i mean no pun intended but i binged the whole thing when i went to on my way to a party i just thought this is the language i've been looking for and these are the people that I can relate to because similar to you I went to I ended up in one AA meeting in LA and I just I was very humbled by the whole experience and it was a very sobering experience to actually see and hear these experiences but I definitely was like this is not this is not where I'm at

yeah I think it's been just transformational in my life. And I applaud you for creating something and having the courage to start having those conversations in a time where people weren't so much. Yeah. I feel like people were really ready for it, though. And that's what I realized quickly when, like I said, I decided to host a public facing event on it. Like 80 people turned up to the first event. And I had thought it was so out there and so weird. And like I was the only normal drinker who was thinking this way.

But it became immediately obvious that people were really ready to just have a more nuanced conversation about addiction. you know did you feel that your sort of spiritual path and that whole aspect of your self was in conflict with your drinking yes and that's sort of part i i recognized that um i really wanted to get more clarity on why i felt the way i did about certain things why certain things were difficult for me on my family history on my relationship history and I recognized that in the aftermath of drinking I just felt so disconnected it was like all of the good work or all of the progress I've made in the area just felt like it had been completely rolled back I completely and I was back to square one again I was just like I kept coming back to this phrase we use getting out of it and I was like no this is a time in my life when I want to

get deeper into it I don't want to get out of it and I recognized that getting out of it even a couple of glasses of wine even in a minor way prevented me from staying in it and going deeper it's like there was only so deep I could go whilst I was still using alcohol to kind of take the edge off my uncomfortable experiences and I think what I'd realized was that actually those uncomfortable edgy challenging places that we're sometimes invited into by life are where we get to grow ultimately and that when we take the edge off and we constantly shy away from that with alcohol it's such a common reason that people drink is just when anything gets a bit uncomfortable just have a drink I was preventing myself from really going there so this leads into the women without kids thing because a big part of what came up when I removed the alcohol and I was just like at the cold face of all the feelings

all the time was just a lot of really uncomfortable feelings around family um this big unanswered question that had kind of been in the background my whole life why did I never want to be a mother I'd always felt quite comfortable in this knowing and it was sort of an unconscious knowing in a way that motherhood just wasn't something that I felt was in my path I just didn't see myself as a mother and yet there had always been this question but why not because this is what women are supposedly built for this is why we're here why do I not want that and a lot of other people had asked me why do you not want this and I'd always just I just don't but I think I got

to a point with this sort of newfound clarity about myself who I am why I am the way I am that I was really ready to actually try to answer that for myself first and foremost so yeah and this I think this is common actually for people who remove alcohol like there's a reason why when you go into therapy all they want to talk about is like your relationship with your mom and dad and like your family and stuff like this you know and I think that for a lot of people when they get sober for whatever reason there's a lot of there's often a lot of stuff there around family and our lineage and you know the the forces i suppose that have shaped us as individuals beginning in the home and so I think it's really common there's actually um a branch of AA that I am interested in um investigating further I started looking into

it while I when I started researching this new book but I quickly realized that I wouldn't really have the time to properly do the work but it's called ACA which is adult children of alcoholics I mean my mum's not really a drinker at all my dad does drink i wouldn't necessarily say he's in the alcoholic category but alcohol's always been very much a part of his life but actually aca extends to any kind of family dysfunction and it just feels to me it almost feels like oh this is the the real work of the 12-step programs like once you remove the substance or the behavior with these other programs what you get to is a lot of dysfunctional family stuff and with these things connected for you you mean um my family upbringing and my addictive tendencies yeah or alcohol in the family the way you observed that and then your

view on having kids or not having kids in a roundabout way yes i think so um like i kind of touched on before i think alcohol is just a very common substance that people use not to feel their feelings and not to feel the uncomfortable stuff to shy away from the difficult challenging stuff and I think that what I've identified is that my family are very good at glossing over some of the more painful things and just kind of like making nice you know when actually if I really look in a very kind of clear sort of clear-eyed way at the relationships in my family particularly particularly actually like my parents relationships with their parents

there's just a lot of dysfunction you know and not nothing overtly abusive um or violent or anything like that but just it's really it's quite hard to define because it's not stuff that we ever speak about it's more just a feeling tone which is discomfort and I think that um growing up in a family like that I never really experienced family as this warm cozy place where I could be completely myself and feel held and nurtured and supported and loved unconditionally not that my parents my parents are extremely loving and have been very supportive but the feeling tone of the family in general is just quite uncomfortable and I find that now

when I visit with my family without any alcohol present the feeling is like tense something is tense something's held in and i don't even don't even really know what it is because it feels almost so ancient like it probably i think it probably goes back generations and it's just colored how we are with each other but having conscious awareness of it which i've been able to do through not drinking through really looking at it through the research i did for women without kids because part of what i one argument of many that i kind of make in the book or one avenue i suppose of exploration is the extent to which not wanting to repeat certain family patterns can play into

people's decisions about their own the families they want to make for themselves i think it's actually a really big unspoken unexplored area well i think like you say it takes so much conscious awareness to actually not just repeat and echo the mistakes or the patterns of our parents. Especially because so much of it has been wired into us before we're verbal, before we have true consciousness. So it's almost like these are our factory settings. So the level of clarity that you need to be able to see it happening in yourself and in those people who literally made you who you are, it's really challenging. And I don't think I could have done it

without quitting drinking. And I'm so glad I'm able to see it now because only when we're able to actually see it can we start to do what's the really hard work of changing the pattern. Choosing a different action going against this the way we do things disrupting it because that can be really uncomfortable for us and for the other people involved ultimately I think it's really important I've already been able to see

the changes in the relationships I have with my closest family members and that is so it's just huge you know and I know it's going to have a huge ripple effect like throughout the family throughout all of our lives actually was that a big contributing factor to you deciding not to have kids well like I said I kind of always had a sense that there were just other things I was going to do with my life and I think for me first and foremost I just have a very curious very highly analytical mind that is very suited to like my personality is just very suited to the vocation I've been able to pursue which is journalism and writing so I think on a basic like basic personality level and that's just I'm much more suited to

that than I am to the vocation of parenthood and when I think about what would I like family to look like I feel a real sense of kinship with my adult friends you know with my husband I mean the interesting thing is because womanhood is so synonymous with motherhood and we really are raised as girls particularly to believe that this is our ultimate purpose and that if we don't do this thing we have not only missed out but we're in somehow incomplete exactly I tried so hard throughout my 30s to make myself want to be a mum really and to talk myself into it how did that look I mean it was very internal yeah I suppose but what was the kind of internal narrative that was happening I suppose I internalized a lot of comments like nobody

ever feels ready you won't know how wonderful it is until you do it there's never the right time you've just got to go for it these are the kinds of things that people will say i'm sure people listening who've been in this situation whether or not they you know feel they want to have children but who are questioning is it the right time these are the kind of things that people say and so i internalized a lot of that and would tell myself that often it's not that you don't want children of course you do because everybody does you just you just don't think it's the right time but it's never the right time or um so I really really did try to make myself want to be a parent and I think um my husband had never wanted to either and I do wonder if he had

really been on that like really wanted it quite possibly we would have had a child there was one time I think I just turned 38 and we went to Australia to visit my friend on holiday and we were in Sydney we'd had a few drinks in the time when i was still sober curious not sober not fully sober yet and i just kind of like oh god and i think as well there's that biological clock thing there's the added pressure of like well the time's never right but like the time's kind of got to be now because like time's running out so oh my god you just don't do it and we was I really managed to be like okay this is what we're gonna do like when we get back to the UK we're gonna start trying and

like oh fuck it this is like fuck it what else are we gonna do with our lives like once in a lifetime just gotta do this thing but by the time we got back to the UK I was just like no there was just always you know when like something's something's 100 yes it just feels irresistible almost and when something's not quite a yes it just feels like a and it's that feeling no and that meant it was a no and i was like this is such a huge decision this is gonna irreversibly alter the trajectory of my life and if it's anything less than a hundred percent hell yes yes then it's a no and so for me that must mean that actually this is a no because if you don't mind me asking when you came back from Australia and you were in this headspace of right

I guess now's the time you've got to go for it all of that stuff around you of people saying you're never going to be completely ready. And then you've got the sort of real aspect of time and age and all of these contributing factors. When you then said you got to a point where you're like, actually, it doesn't feel like a yes. What was that like? What did that look like?

I think it was the prospect of having unprotected sex. Interesting. And I was just like, uh-uh, no-uh yeah so instinctively you were like yeah no i don't even want to try and take the risk just no and he was the same he was the same yeah i think he was probably quite relieved that i had decided no actually no because he never brought it up again or not not never but we've definitely thought talked about it again since then like it's something this is the other thing we got married when we were when i was 27 which was quite young in our my friendship group at the time i was one of the first people to actually get married people immediately were like so when are you starting a family and i was just like we're not and it was like oh oh but um

yeah he's like you are a family but because other people were always asking us that question and because we were married and that's like what married people do it was like we did talk we talked about it constantly because people were always asking yeah and because i think we were just like do we want to do that? If we did do that, what would it look like? You know, we just, it's not like we didn't think about it or talk about it. Like it wasn't on our radar. I think sometimes there can be this idea that if you are choosing not to have children, you just haven't really thought about it enough or given enough consideration.

When most people I know who were consciously making that decision, it's one of the things they talk about the most and think about the most because it is such a huge decision so yeah we'd spoken about it a ton and then got to this space where it was an almost and then it was just a like almost a physical crossing of the legs no um yeah and I think he was quite relieved I think I was probably quite relieved and just kind of went on with our lives we'd moved to New York by that point I was building the numinous I probably had just got my first book deal actually so it's almost it's interesting like I was approached by a publisher and it was something I'd always wanted

but never I sort of didn't think I was smart enough or had the right connections or I just didn't really think that it would happen for me I was happy to do my journalism and blogging and writing that way but it's interesting about literally six months after I had finally pulled up the drawbridge and been like that's a no let's just forget about it um this book deal kind of showed up and I do believe i was talking to someone about that this morning i think sometimes when you're on the fence about something definitely when you're actually able to finally go a yes or a no either way particularly with a no it does open another door yeah for something else to come in well it's like one door closes exactly how have you found it sort

of navigating the world because when we talked about it last night at the panel it was really the first time that i've engaged in that kind of conversation that topic just solidly and there are so many layers to it and so much emotion for people and i i understand that this is a a tricky subject to navigate because you because there are some people that desperately want children and can't. And so to even say, I choose not to, feels like a revolutionary thing. I can imagine that there are some people

that want to sort of shame that. So what has been your kind of internal journey of kind of reconciling that and finding peace in it well I suppose on the one hand I'm really I'm so grateful to have been able to pursue a career that feels more like a vocation like it's a I have a career but really honestly it's just an expression of who I am as an expression of who i am and i feel what i am what you do what i do is an expression of who i am right and i'm so grateful that i get to do that you know and had parents who really actively and who never pressurized me to do anything that they wanted me to they never they

never said we want you to be this or we want you to do that or it would be a good idea if you tried this and the same goes with having kids. They never pressured me or asked me when the grandchildren were coming along. They both seemed a little sad when I kind of informed them that it wasn't going to be happening or wasn't something that I was actively planning for. But more, they seemed a bit sad for me, which I'll take as a good sign because it means they obviously did enjoy having

me as a child you know they enjoyed being parents aspects of it anyway um but yeah i feel really grateful to have been raised in a family where i was given the freedom to actively a family and a culture at a time and in a country where these things were available to me as somebody born with female reproductive organs organs this is not the case for many women in cultures in the uk but also around the world you know we don't women don't have these kinds of choices the kind of freedom to self to enact self-authorship when it comes to how we want to live our lives how we want to express ourselves and these sorts of things so i'm really incredibly grateful for all of that but in terms of other people's criticism of it I suppose one of the reasons there is any well there hasn't been a huge amount actually and it makes me think that I think depending on the kind of culture that you're living in there are degrees like I touched

on it last night you know I've lived in London and New York, which are very progressive cities. And I've moved in very kind of open minded liberal circles. People have been largely, there's been very kind of live and let live attitude about it. Yeah. So yeah, I haven't had a huge amount of pushback. But I know that plenty of other women, even starting with their family of origin, and then the culture that they're part of um the place of work like there can be a lot of misunderstanding and so yeah i'm i'm hopeful one of the reasons i wanted to write this book was to create some language and to really point out that there are actually so many valid reasons not to be a mother. So Africa Brooke was on the panel last night and she was sort of saying, but why do I need a valid reason?

Why can't I just not want to be a mother? And you can, absolutely you can. That is a valid reason. Just not wanting to is a valid reason. But I have found, and I found it with quitting drinking, the more secure I can get in my own understanding of why this is right for me the less threatened i feel or the less likely i am to cave in to peer pressure or to be swayed by other people's opinions so i wanted to write this book to join a lot of dots actually between why so many there are so many more women without kids whether it's by

choice whether it's due to infertility or whether it's by circumstance like childless by circumstance is probably the biggest cohort of people who don't have children and what does that mean so it's describes um a situation where you possibly thought you would have kids or you might like to perhaps you're not fully sure yet but circumstances whether due to not finances not finding a suitable co-parent leaving it too late or leaving it too late not being in a work situation where you could feasibly sort of like take the time out to do it not being able to not being able to reconcile how to do the work you want to do and also have a family like these kinds of circumstances are the reason most people are either choosing not to have children or are just

unable to kind of make it work and find them in themselves in a position where it just hasn't happened but again the better an understanding I have of why I'm in the situation I'm in and why the choices I'm making are the right choices for me even though some of them might be really hard choices the better able I am to withstand or not be swayed by yeah other people's opinions or to yeah the less lost I feel in it you know yeah and what was the process of actually writing this book like because I know you've spoken to me about it and you said that it was a very emotional one what was the kind of internal journey like because obviously you're reliving a lot of those things you're having to really go to the depths of some of the things you must have felt and experienced over that time

I actually had just been really pulled from a creative perspective to write something that felt a bit more memoirish I'd read some really great memoirs that had just been really enjoyable to read as much as they had been informative, like sort of more teaching memoirs. And I was drawn to write a book that had more of that kind of a feeling. So I knew I wanted to use my personal story as a kind of an entry point into all of the different social and cultural, political, economic, environmental factors that had influenced my feelings about being a mother and that are influencing, well, honestly, this drop-off, massive drop-off in the birth rate globally. The birth rate's been declining really steadily and quite steeply for about the past

100 years, with every new census that comes out in the US showing sort of steeper drop-offs. But the birth rate's dropping all around the world like I think South Korea has the lowest birth rate places like Japan and China have a very low birth rate lots of western European countries but even in places like Africa where the population is still growing individual women having fewer children so the replacement rate is like roughly two children per woman. As one example, if a country in Africa, maybe women used to have like seven or eight children. Now they're having like four or five. So the population is still growing, but it's slowing down. And individual women are having fewer children.

And so this is a global trend, even in countries where the population is still increasing. And from your research, why is that happening? Well, that's that's what the journalist in me was interested in diving into with this book because i knew that i was ready on a personal level to really dig into my very personal whys and present it in this memoirish way where i chart my development from as i describe it in the book from girl to woman to non-mother but then I sort of I'd always really felt like the odd one out like I was the only one who didn't want to have

kids but then reaching my early 40s I began to notice in my peer group there are actually lots of other women without kids and we might have all different reasons and stories but here we are without kids and then zooming out even further looking at this global shift in the birth rate well this is women everywhere women everywhere are either having far fewer children or having no children at all and that's what's driving this drop off in the birth rate which is completely and radically reshaping our societies around the world so it's huge scope actually but of course all of the factors that are influencing our personal decisions about whether to have children how many children to have under what circumstances and who to have

children with they're the same factors that are influencing this global drop-off in the birth rate because that global drop-off is actually reflective of millions and millions of incredibly personal very nuanced and often very conflicted decisions about this subject on the behalf of individual women so the personal and the universal are very intimately connected here and that's what i do in the book i use my memoir to open up a discussion about these bigger forces yeah that are actually shaping all of our lives we're all a product of our environment to an extent you know it's that question of nature over nurture right i think it's really hard to kind of pick those two apart but um we are absolutely influenced by our environment and what are some of those factors then we touched on a few already like economic factors it's just become harder

and harder for people to square living a comfortable life where they feel like they have enough with having children that's just become available to a smaller and smaller segment of society then you look at what why is that well wages have stagnated like since the 1970s while profits for industry have actually soared but it's only a very few people at the top of the food chain who are benefiting so widening income inequality is one reason and we also touched on this last night you know women in the workplace and gender equality and how actually for as much as we progressed in many areas when it comes to having a child that's when everything kind of regresses back to the 1950s basically and that's something that i personally really connect with that particular point where

it does feel that sadly having a child feels synonymous with a losing some aspect of your life I've come to frame it and I don't I don't think I got to it quite this clearly in the book but it's been having conversations about the book since it's come out that I've been able to really kind of hone in on this but so much of the feminist movement has been about making women equal to men which has meant enabling women to live more like men yes and as soon as you become a mother which is the ultimate feminine gender role that means a lot of privilege ultimately it just shows the extent to which we privilege masculinity in our society whether it's masculinity embodied by biological men or biological women masculine traits of independence competitiveness self-sufficiency are rewarded

femininity has been left behind by feminism and motherhood within that and i think that's what we're seeing the fallout from now with so many women feeling so disenfranchised and so enraged actually by the fact that for all of the autonomy and freedom that the feminist movement has given them as soon as they become mothers that's swept away unless unless they're incredibly well resourced. And then also from a different sort of angle, this is a slightly dangerous subject, but you can see how women are kind of, have been occupying the masculine

and leaning too heavily into that side perhaps. And the consequences of that, I think, has led to quite a confused society in many ways and also a lot of men who feel displaced and angry you only have to look at the sort of andrew tates of the world and think absolutely i think that's a reaction in many ways absolutely but like you said it's about not valuing the feminine yeah like collectively yeah and that's where we're really out of balance and i think if we don't and that really does tie into the way we approach mother earth

absolutely environment everything you know if we have this very strange disconnect from the world that we live in it's like this place that we own or that you know well that we extract from exactly we own or that you know well that we extract from exactly that could be said for women's uteruses and as much as it can be said for the natural resources of the earth there's a fantastic book called caliban and the witch and for anyone who is a bit more into the sort of mystical metaphysical sort of side of these kinds of conversations it's a really fascinating book it shows how in the transition to capitalism following or in the lead up to the industrial revolution women's reproductive services shall we say were kind of lumped in with all of the other earth's natural resources something to be extracted from

to be utilized to build industry and build profits like ultimately capitalism and the industrial revolution requires a constant influx of fresh human labor power you know and so that's when a lot of the ideology i think that says womanhood is synonymous with motherhood came to be indoctrinated with this sort of ideology i suppose yeah and also it's hard to even imagine but this isn't always the way society function i think because just in our lifetimes we don't know any different but actually this has been something that's happened over a period of time hundreds of years and many many generations too many generations for us to really be able to like know the roots of it particularly as it pertains to us as individuals but the reason

the book is called Caliban and the Witch is that Federici who's a you know a feminist scholar and it's a very scholarly very well researched documented book she talks about how the witch trials of the sort of 15th 16th and into 17th century were a genocide of women who refused to kind of get with this newly minted sort of reproductive program you know women who refused to marry knew how to work with the cycles of the moon and how to work with herbs to control their reproduction women who knew how to enact safe abortions for example were deemed witches and removed from society persecuted murdered and deemed deviant and that creates a the feminine wound as well absolutely yeah this is i, these were our ancestors, ultimately, particularly as like European women.

This is our history and the book lays it out so clearly. And I think it's one reason why women without kids are still seen as so taboo because the legacy of that history is still alive in us. It's in our history. If you think about it in a sort of more modern lens today it's a personal feeling that I have anyway of for the first time I feel like I have quite a lot of autonomy I can create my own life and luckily like you it is an extension of who I am

my career is very much so so I'm very grateful for that but then the idea of having kids suddenly feels like it puts me that I lose some of my power you lose privilege because being more like a man gives you the privilege that men have that's what feminism fought for for women to have the same privilege as men and so yes becoming a mother entails a loss of privilege which is why I think we have these kind of like really sentimentalized things like Mother's Day. Let's celebrate mothers to kind of make up for the fact that you no longer have any freedom or say over how your life plays out. And you're not going to get paid for your labor anymore. You're just going to be expected to perform your child rearing as a labor of love.

Because guess what? The economy requires that too. your child rearing as a labor of love because guess what the economy requires that too if companies had to pay women to raise children so that they would have employers to pay taxes no one would be making nearly as many profits yeah and this is i'm not the thing is i'm not i get a bit uncomfortable talking about this because i'm not an economist i'm not a political scientist this is just you know my journalistic research has helped me to join these dots well i think it's also an accurate observation i mean you know to actually change systems that have been in place for such a long time that really are about you know profit and it's interesting that i even just

made that comment it's almost like i don't feel like it's my place yeah because i haven't studied these things in depth in college like i haven't like got a degree in kind of political science or economic science or whatever but actually this is like power to the people this is like us just as individuals use it like joining the dots looking at what's going on and saying wait a minute is this happening is this supposed to be happening what if we did this like we should be able to discuss these things whether or not we've got them quote unquote right just for the sake of discussing it and picking it apart and saying is this working doesn't feel like it's working why isn't it working and if we don't question it it's never going to change but in a sort of dystopian world because i feel in many ways we're living in one so why not think this way what could be

a solution what would need to shift basic things i i live in the us free health care would help a lot paid paternal leave paid maternity leave paid paternity leave um those companies are not obligated to give people any kind of paid leave um when they the us is much worse yeah much worse and it's interesting you say things like that but then even in countries where those policies are in place people are still having fewer children but yeah so things like this but also okay looking at um fairer wages fairer distribution of profits fairer taxes of corporations and the ultra rich to pay into better social services better mental health services for people like there's just so much that could be done to support people in there being less of a focus on work and honestly survival and more focus on like

connection and family formation and creativity and all of these things I think would make it easier or would make focusing on family life more appealing the other thing is like i discovered this statistic only recently so since the book has come out but it took 300 000 years for the human population on planet earth to reach 1 billion in 1800 and so it's only like 220 years later we're now at eight billion so the population has absolutely ballooned exploded in the past 200 years which is not very long and this coincides obviously with massive advances in modern medicine we're able to extend human lifespan far fewer wars being fought on the battlefield far fewer women dying in childbirth far fewer children dying in infancy but we've made so much progress in terms of quality of life that we've almost now got too

many people and i sometimes feel like the fact that people are just saying you know i just want to enjoy my life we have now so much more comfort ease health well-being than our ancestors could even expect to have in their lives and i think people are just saying this is great i just want to enjoy this thanks don't feel the need to just like create loads of new people i don't know it's just there's something in that as well you know and you think that that's just quite a natural evolution in a way that it's yeah in a way recognizing that we don't actually need to pass on our genes quite so much right well i mean people used to have very big families because it was recognized that you would probably lose several of your children in their early childhood often siblings were given the same names because

it was recognized that one or two of them would probably die and that was the fact that those were just the facts of life that's not the anymore. And so I think another big part of this conversation is like a real re-evaluation of what a human life is worth and what a human life is for. Is a human life for survival, for its economic capacity, or is a human life for enjoyment pleasure ease connection these are huge questions but i think they're all part of this conversation you know and for someone that might be listening that's kind of having these questions or these thoughts about motherhood for themselves obviously you know we encourage them to read the book but what would your advice be for them that are struggling with these thoughts and feelings i can talk to people about it like someone commented right at the end of the event last night she was like i don't have children i've chosen not to have

children it's some it's a choice i think about every day as in how is this the right choice how is this going to play out over the course of my lifetime and she's like this being here tonight is making me realize i never talk about it this is central to who i am it's central to my life and i never talk about it because we don't have this conversation because it's still such a given that becoming a mother is what you will do eventually and what is the natural thing to do the best advice i can give people is just talk about it because equally i've met people who i've had these kinds of conversations with and they've realized as a result i actually really do want to have children i really do want to be a parent and that's made them really get real about is the career path i'm

following conducive to that could i be living somewhere as a city i'm living in conducive to me might meeting a person that i might want to do this with like just making really big important grown-up life decisions about if this is something i want then maybe i need to make some changes because so i just want to point out so i'm by no means am i recommending not having kids like this is right for me to really think about incredibly personal and also what you said about you know the majority of people what was it that they it was circumstantial childless by circumstance is the kind of terminology that gets used yeah yeah and I've got plenty of friends that didn't really think about it have conversations about it were quite indifferent and then suddenly were like

actually I I do think I might want to have children but I haven't met my partner or whatever and basically just left it too late yeah and they say to me they're like whatever you feel about it just make sure you do the things you need to do to put yourself in a position that you have the choice as long as you can if that's if it's something that you might want rather than letting you know because the very real thing is that biological clock piece it's very real yeah it is there's a whole chapter in the book really about the twin concepts of acceptance and regret and i mean ultimately i land on the place where there's no such thing as a life without regrets all we can really hope for is a life where we got to do majority of the things that where the majority of the things that we do are things that we got to do majority of the things that where the majority

of the things that we do are things that we want to do and that feel good and that feel right for us and that help us to contribute something useful and all of the things that make life feel good um but yeah there's always going to be we're never going to get all the things we want i don't really think it's possible to have it all. And I do think that that's something that has become very apparent. Really? I think it is. I think it is possible to have it. I don't know. I kind of had a similar conversation with my therapist about this very theme, actually,

to be completely transparent. And I was like, you know, I do feel I want motherhood at some point, but I also want these things. And I don't know how I can have both. She was like, like well why not who tells you you can't do both and that in itself felt revolutionary and harder perhaps to do and I I recognize that I'm in a position of privilege that I can mold my career around that a little bit more than a lot of people can but equally i think we can i think

the whole concept of having it all has really become synonymous with having a for women having a career and having children yeah and i think for a lot of people that's really really hard and something is always suffering there's some there's always some compromise and often what's compromised is your personal needs personal space personal time and for some people that's less tolerable than for others yeah as somebody who is very introverted who needs a lot of alone time am i yeah i really need to be able to make my own schedule which sounds again incredibly privileged and it's something that i've actually worked very hard and made a lot of quite important decisions to be able to facilitate for myself yeah and so um again this comes down to having the conversations so you really know okay if I do want to have a

career and a child I'm going to have to get very strategic about putting the right structures in place reaching out finding the right support like proactively building my life to support that the more consciously we can enter into anything that we do in our lives the better we can prepare ourselves for it and sort of set things up and i think crucially i touched on get the support that we need one thing i really touched on or that really came clear in the book is that like once you have dependents you need other people that you can depend on and I think that's been really eroded by the way that so many of us now live quite far away from our families of like our parents for example lacking community massively massively COVID obviously accelerated that but we were on

that trajectory already with advances in technology that are all designed just to make life so uber convenient that you literally don't need to interact with another human being ever i mean you literally don't at this stage yeah once the majority of your resource in terms of time and energy and finance honestly is being put into caring for other small human beings who don't have the capacity to contribute you need other people putting resources into you and that's really lacking yeah well such a big subject such a big subject i mean time has flown by i think that is all we have time for to say but Ruby thank you so much well thank you

thank you for coming back yeah it's great to be back and I'm super excited about your book and for everyone to read it and congratulations putting it out into the world thanks again thank you so much for listening to this episode of Saturn Returns with myself and Ruby. If you want to find more about her, you can find her at rubywarrington.com. And don't forget to pick up a copy of her latest book, Women Without Kids. And also for those that do not know, because I'm not the best self promoter, we have launched the Saturn Returns course and it is currently on sale for £98. It was £228 so this is a massive discount and this is a seven-week course that really allows you to delve deep into all the lessons and principles that come up during your Saturn return or any visit from Saturn.

Essentially setting you up with the foundation so that you can live a life from a more truthful authentic place and get to the core of what you're really about the things that light you up the aspects of yourself that perhaps you denied and in this course there's a combination of video workbook content and audio meditation it's everything that I needed in my late 20s, early 30s. And I put it all together in a course for you guys. And of course, I am the one guiding it and created the whole thing. So I'm very, very proud to put this project out into the world. And seeing so many of you getting it honestly brings me so much joy because I love helping you guys with what you're navigating. brings me so much joy because I love helping you guys with what you're navigating so if some of the themes from the podcast resonate with you across the seasons but you want to kind of delve

a little deeper and you need support in doing that please check out the course at saturnreturns.co.uk we have all the information on the website about it so you can get everything you need from that and thank you so much for listening as always remember you're not alone goodbye