The Maternity Ladder

How are we meant to climb it wisely if it doesn't have a name?

image by Samantha Garrote via Pexels

We all know about the corporate ladder. It’s the way we’re told careers work. We’re told that if we start at the bottom, we can climb our way upwards, rung by rung, to the top of our field. We’re told that our willingness to work hard will determine how far we get up the ladder, and that our ascent will be the measure of our success in life.

We all know about the property ladder, too. It’s about buying your first apartment or house, and being able to buy and sell your way to bigger/ nicer/ more properties down the line. We’re told it’s to our advantage to take on a sizeable mortgage if at all possible, because otherwise we’ll spend our life paying rent that goes towards someone else’s.

But it strikes me that there is an entirely different ladder we should be talking about. Or rather, that there is another one that people allude to all the time, but without a name to apply to it. One that is absolutely related to these other two, but has much higher stakes. I call it The Maternity Ladder.

I think some people, just hearing that phrase, will immediately know what I mean. But I checked, and if you Google ‘maternity ladder’, all you get are glamour shots of pregnant women in fluffy dresses standing beside short ladders. Why, I do not know. But I take it to mean that the term, as I am using it, hasn’t been established. So I seek to do so here.

The Maternity Ladder is the path women take to realise their maternal potential. And it used to be relatively simple. I’m not saying it was an ideal arrangement, or a system I’d wish to return to. But everyone knew how it was meant to work. A young woman reached childbearing age. Her family would look around for a man to partner her up with, based on whatever economic, religious, or other metrics were deemed important in their culture. And after some number of months of married sex, if both spouses were in decent health, the woman got pregnant. And she tended to keep doing so, over and over again, until she either died, was widowed, or reached menopause.

There were other routes to motherhood of course. Lots of women found themselves impregnated by strangers and employers in the context of war, servitude, slavery, and prostitution. And many others were impregnated by fellows they might have liked very much, but were not married to, and so were faced with the difficult decision to either get rid of their ‘illegitimate’ children or risk being sent away themselves. Basically, whatever your lot in life, maternity was most likely something you’d be hard-pressed to avoid. And, in general, it would be easier for you if you could get on the standard marriage-based Maternity Ladder. Again, not a delightful life for a lot of women, who found themselves essentially owned by their husbands. I’m not saying it was good for the personal thriving of all women. But, for most of our known history, it made the path to motherhood pretty clear: menstruation, marriage, maternity. More of a step-stool than a ladder, really.

Not so in our weird, modern, corporation-driven world. What are young women being told is the ‘sensible’ way to get on The Maternity Ladder now?

• Do great in school. Be very careful about losing your virginity, because girls are becoming fertile much younger than they ever used to, so they are more at risk of teen pregnancy than ever before. And if you get knocked up in high school, everyone will regard this as very bad news.

• Do great at university. Definitely lose your virginity now, because these are the years you’re meant to get out and ‘experiment’ or ‘play the field’. Get on some kind of birth control though, because female fertility peaks in its twenties, and even though it would be less-bad than in high school, getting pregnant in the middle of your degree would still be bad news.

• You probably also need to do great in grad school, or the Peace Corps, or some other post-graduate exertion, because so many people have a college degree now that in many cases they aren’t (despite costing thousands upon thousands of dollars) really worth much on their own.

• Get a great job. One where you can afford to put about half your salary into rent, and pay off your student loans, and save for the future. Also, you may live in a country where you only get decent health and leave benefits from your employer (Hello, America). In which case, you’ll need a job where you’ll work about forty hours a week, but if you’re at all serious about climbing the corporate ladder, you’ll probably be expected to work more than that - quite possibly under a contract where you are exempt from overtime pay.

• Meet someone who is actually interesting and kind and you can stand sharing a room with for years at a time, who is emotionally robust and employed and wants to commit to you and have children in the near future. If you are heterosexual, this person will have to be a man. Good luck with that. If you are a lesbian, there will be other logistics to consider.

• Find literally anywhere you can afford to live that isn’t with your parents. Ideally, buy your first home. Realistically, try to rent a flat with a closet large enough to convert into a nursery.

• Get all of the above sorted out by the time you’re about thirty. Because your fertility will start to slip, and then drop markedly by your late-thirties, and you might very well find yourself being pushed to scramble over a whole other series of stranger and stranger rungs. Like paying for the invasive, unreliable, expensive procedure of freezing your eggs. Or the invasive, unreliable, expensive procedures that go into IVF. Or buying a man’s sperm. Or buying another woman’s eggs. Or paying another woman to have a baby for you.

• At the same time, keep in mind that your thirties tend to be a real make-or-break period of one’s career in many professions. If you have maternity leave, think carefully about how you use it; do you want to risk getting eternally side-swiped into the ‘mommy lane’? If you don’t have maternity leave; how on earth will you pay the rent in the weeks before and after birth? What is the minimum amount of time you can spend with your newborn?

• What will you do about child care? You probably moved far away from your family a long time ago. And they’re probably all busy anyhow. At any rate, they’re probably not around to help all week. Will you pay someone else to look after your baby for the forty to sixty hours a week your job takes up? Can you afford that? Can you bear it? Or do your economic and emotional calculations tell you it makes more sense to ‘give up’ on the career ladder for now, and be ‘nothing’ but a stay at home mom? Do you have the ‘luxury’ of taking care of your own child?

• Know that whatever set of steps you take, a huge swath of the general public will think you’ve gotten it wrong; that the choices you make, to the best of your ability, based on your very personal circumstances, have somehow let them down.

• Oh, and never, at any step along this ladder, let anyone know that you care about climbing it. If you have a real ambition to be a mom, don’t tell people that. Because people will call you anti-feminist, a ‘trad-wife’ wannabe, desperate, ruled by your hormones, or some other thing meant to insult women who have a clear desire to have a family.

“But wait,” I hear you asking. “What about men?”

Good question. The path to paternity is very different from The Maternity Ladder. The most dramatic difference being the length of time men have to get there. Yes, male fertility also declines with age. But their decline starts about a decade later than the female decline. And it’s nothing like as dramatic. Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have, and after menopause, women simply don’t ovulate anymore. Men keep producing sperm pretty much until they die. Millions and millions a day. They won’t make as many, and the ones they produce may not be of as good of quality, so they are less likely to lead to viable pregnancies. But they can still make children. Children who are far more likely to have autism, Down-Syndrome, cancer, and a whole host of other health problems throughout their lives. But children nonetheless. Children which they will not be the ones gestating, birthing, or breastfeeding. Which means that, in general, they can live their lives on an entirely different timeline than women do. They can afford to dick around, and dally, and prioritise their careers decades longer than their female counterparts.

My own life gives a clear example of this difference. My husband was thirty-eight when my stepdaughter was born. He was fifty-two when we had our son. He was able to completely put off fatherhood until middle age, and still father two of the healthiest, brightest, nicest kids you’ll ever meet, with a fourteen-year gap in between.

I do not have such options. If I had waited until I was thirty-eight to have my first kid, I’d have already been pushing my luck. Instead, I decided to start trying to conceive very soon after getting married, and was ‘only’ thirty-four when my son was born (one year shy of the ‘geriatric pregnancy’ cutoff). Even so, if I wanted to have another kid fourteen-years late, that would mean trying to give birth to the next one at forty-eight. That - apart from the rarest of medical wonders- isn’t an option for women.

I don’t begrudge my husband the difference in our fertility; I wouldn’t have my beautiful son without it. But I’m very aware that there is a difference. And we should be more clear about that with young women. Because they have different reproductive choices to make than their male counterparts. And those choices have a huge impact on their ability to climb the corporate ladder, and the property ladder, and The Maternity Ladder. And they should know that before they start climbing, rather than being shocked when they run into the crunch face-first, as so many women of my generation keep doing.

image by Michael Schaffler, via unsplash

I know of women who are amongst the most successful figures in their fields, who also have three or four kids. I mean, I don’t know anyone like that personally, but I’ve seen them in the news. They seem to have been able to figure out how to climb all the ladders at once. Maybe they knew they wanted to climb them from an early age, and were able to find partners equal to sharing the challenge early on, too. Maybe their families were extra supportive, too.

I also women who abandon the corporate ladder, and leave that to their partners, to focus fully on climbing The Maternity Ladder. This enables them to focus on mothering three, five kids, sometimes eight kids. Often homeschooled. Impressive, old-school stats.

And of course, there are women who want to eschew The Maternity Ladder altogether. Just as there are folks who have absolutely no desire to get on the property ladder - they prefer the freedom of renting, thank you very much.

And then, between those mastering the climb and those opting out, there’s the rest of us. The majority in the middle. Muddling our way along the best we can. Assessing tradeoffs between the different ladders, and making compromises. Getting stuck on one rung, or falling backwards. Or not even aware that maternity even is another ladder we have to climb - thinking it’s, I don’t know, an escalator that will just deliver us to the top if we so much as step on it; so we can just keep focusing on the corporate ladder, like our male colleagues, as we have been trained to do.

Which of course, is not true. Many wonderful women have told me about their wishes to have families, and how they have not come to pass. I have heard and read many podcasts and essays with women sharing their difficult experiences. Seen many others shared in the comments on other Substacks. I mean, I know some of these women are definitely living wonderful lives on their own. Some people might refer to them as ‘child-free’. But ‘free’ implies a kind of lightness that does not match the weight of what they describe.

That’s the thing about The Maternity Ladder; lives are at stake. Yes, getting waylaid on the corporate ladder is a bastard. I am painfully aware of that. And not having so much as a toehold on the property ladder can be a nightmare in this age of rental crises. I am acutely aware of that, too. But not being able to climb to where we want on The Maternity Ladder is a truly existential matter. Literally, it is a question of which children will exist, and which never will. And so, of the three ladders, it should be the one we attend to with greatest priority. Though that’s generally not what is encouraged.

I feel from my crown down to my toes that I could not have been more fortunate in the son I have gotten. And so I wouldn’t change anything I’ve done to bring me to being here, with him, and his dad. However, that doesn’t mean I think I made great choices, or used my youth wisely. I know I did not. There are loads of things I could have done better, just for my own sake. And if I’d had my heart set on having multiple children, with comfortable age gaps between them, I’d have needed to start climbing The Maternity Ladder earlier than I did. And I’d need a bigger dwelling to house that desired brood, which means I’d need to have gotten to at a better place on the property ladder than where I am (renting a small, scruffy flat). Which would require a substantially better income, which means I would had to have been waaaay better at climbing the corporate ladder than I ever was, and/or have found a husband who was amazing at it. In short, I’d have had to have done everything in my 20s completely differently. And maybe I would have, if I’d had even the slightest inclination before thirty that I would ever have even the slightest desire to procreate. Which maybe I would have had, had I been raised in a culture that told me that being able to create and care for my own beautiful child is better than anything the corporate world will ever come up with. Which it is.

The Maternity Ladder seems to have gotten far harder to climb in the twenty-ish years since I began my clueless meander up it. But I believe that at least some young women have copped on to what bullshit they’re being sold to obscure the path before them. I hope they will see where society is helping or hindering their progress, and judge culture-makers and policy-makers accordingly. And do whatever they can within their own circumstances to prioritise whatever their sincere maternal desires may be. Because it is absolutely worth it.