On a recent episode of the Las Culturistas podcast, Charli XCX shared the inspiration for one of her songs: a friend who’d just become a mother. Charli told the hosts that “I think about it all the time,” from her new album, Brat, came out of a songwriting session at a friend’s Stockholm apartment. The friend was wearing the same clothes she usually wore; her apartment looked the same as it always had; they were writing songs together as they always did. But at the same time, “Everything was different,” Charli said. “Because she has the key to this door that I’m not even in the same room as yet. Do you know what I mean?”
I do. Charli is 31, a year younger than I am, and I’m weirdly comforted to learn we’re experiencing the same kind of millennial ennui. I’m also an insecure jangle of nerves at one moment (“Guess I’m a mess and play the role”), then confident I’m hot shit the next (“It’s alright to just admit that I’m the fantasy”), as well as desperately curious about what parenthood must be like — though I’m afraid, like Charli, that a child would “make me miss all my freedom.” (Among a million and one other terrifying things.) We’re standing on a generational precipice, Charli XCX and I.
“I think about it all the time” is a little more subdued than the rest of the album, musing and rueful; you can picture Charli speak-singing the lyrics as if she’s reading from her Notes app or sending a voice note to a friend, staccato to a beat: “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father, and now they both know these things that I don’t.”
I, too, think about whether or not to have kids all the time; it is, I think, at least for the moment, the defining question of my life. Charli’s framing of desiring motherhood as the desire for knowledge, to know what it’s like to deliver a new human being Earthside — one you’ll love in a way you can’t yet possibly imagine — that resonates with me.
She also captures a more familiar refrain for those of us living through the so-called “panic years”: “I might run out of time.” In your 20s, anything seems possible; the world is open at your feet. Your options are limitless! But then the years inevitably pass. And decisions, irrevocable ones, have to be made.
My TikTok “For You” page knows this about me. It serves up endless fodder to feed my voracious baby fever: cute babies with pets; cute babies with their older siblings; cute babies dancing; cute babies being cherubic and adorable and hilarious. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved babies. Watching them be so adorable hijacks our brains and drives our behavior, Oxford neuroscientists have found. With every baby’s belly laugh or joyous reaction to Ms. Rachel or precious show of affection for their parent, my stupid little brain lights up like a Christmas tree.
I’m just as susceptible to a very different kind of content: videos about the darker side of parenthood. There’s this one woman on TikTok who reads anonymous letters to her sent by regretful parents, and I stop to listen to her harrowing tales every time: parents, almost all mothers, who no longer recognize themselves; who hate their kid-oriented lives; who, even though they love their children, long desperately to return to a time before they chose to have them. I’ve watched women weeping about their struggles raising a severely disabled or terminally ill child, co-parenting with a narcissistic ex, dealing with mom guilt at work, healing from a traumatic birth.
I will watch, or read, pretty much anything about motherhood, and the culture amply provides; seems I’m far from the only one who’s obsessed. My favorite nonfiction is about being the daughter of a mother, or the mother of a child, or, ideally, both: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up. I adore a long, detailed birth story, like the writer Meaghan O’Connell’s: Give me every gory detail! Ann Friedman’s excellent newsletter series about having a baby at 40 despite being “a middle-aged woman who has staked a large portion of her identity on being child-free,” and reckoning with how little control we have over anything at all, felt like it was tailor-made for me. I want to know. I want to know everything. “It’s like you’re Wirecutter-ing parenthood,” a friend told me.
“Would [a baby] give my life a new purpose?” Charli wonders on “I think about it all the time.” I’ve wondered this, too, though that approach to parenthood also makes me nervous; a human soul shouldn’t be yanked out of nonexistence to fulfill my unmet needs, I’ve told myself — an unfair and impossible obligation. More compelling to me is when Charli admits later in the song that she’s “so scared I’m missing out on something.”
Curiosity is a powerful force. I also look at my few friends raising young children with wonder and awe; what might they know that I don’t about devotion and love and meaning and sacrifice? We’re all familiar with the biological drives and social norms that encourage the reproduction of the human species; how often do we talk about FOMO?
“Should I go off my birth control?” Charli muses at one point in “I think about it all the time,” presumably to her fiancé, the 1975 musician George Daniel. Perhaps she will, at some point, and simply see what happens. The friend in Stockholm who inspired the song, Charli told Las Culturistas, hadn’t planned on parenthood: “It just kind of happened.” I envy her and all straight people’s opportunity to leave the humongous decision of Kids or No Kids up to chance — to fate. As a woman married to a woman, I would need to be much more thoughtful and deliberate; I’d have to really, really, really want a child.
Ultimately, though, I think that’s a good thing — having to be sure. If I don’t want the responsibility of making a choice one way or the other on a baby, do I really want the responsibility of the baby themself? And as I remind my baby-obsessed self all the time, I wouldn’t only be signing up for the baby but the child, the preteen, the full human person.
My mom loved babies too. I remember her clearly with my youngest brother, who’s ten years younger than me: She was so beautiful, so natural and at peace with a baby nestled in the crook of her arm. But she was much less interested in parenthood as soon as we were old enough to start expressing our wants and needs, our individual and autonomous selves forged outside of and apart from her.
Lately, I’ve been reminded of Sylvia Plath’s famous fig tree from The Bell Jar, which has taken on new life in a TikTok trend (RIP Sylvia, you would have loved/hated social media): “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor … I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” How might Plath’s life have gone differently if she chose a different fig? How might my own go differently if I stopped microdosing other people’s lives as parents while my figs drop and rot at my feet?
For now, both Charli XCX and I are still in limbo, unsure whether or not we’ll ever cross the rubicon into motherhood. I don’t think it’s at all an accident, however, that “I think about it all the time” is Brat’s penultimate song; the album ends with the hyper-pop banger “365,” a euphoric ode to the “365 party girl.” Charli’s left her friend’s unknowable little universe of domestic bliss and has returned home to the rave, cheekily asking fellow partygoers, “Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line?”
Some on the website formerly known as Twitter have groused that 30-somethings shouldn’t be preparing for their “Brat summer”; they should be starting a stretching routine. As if 365 party girls can’t do both? As if Brat isn’t by and for women in our 30s — the ones who are kind of a mess, who fantasize about buying a gun and shooting themselves one minute and how sweet it would be to have a baby the next? (Okay, maybe we’re not ready for a baby; maybe we never will be.)
Brat is the biggest and most critically beloved album of Charli’s career so far; she’s 30 (one), flirty, and thriving; she’s only just getting started. Though she worries that her career sometimes “feels so small in the existential scheme of it all,” there’s nothing small about encouraging a bunch of tired 30-somethings to stop doomscrolling, get out of the fucking house, and experience the holy ecstatic communion of sweaty bodies clashing together to the beat. As an alt gay icon forged in the fires of London nightlife, Charli knows this too: There is plenty of meaning and purpose and family to be found on the dance floor. So perhaps it doesn’t matter, right at this moment, that all the sloppy, broody 30-something party girls out there don’t have it all figured out. “Keep bumpin’ that” Charli repeats, over and over, at the end of “365”: and so we shall.
