05 March 2023

The ‘wine aunty’ life – approaching forty with no kids and no regrets

WRITER: AS TOLD TO TESSA KING

PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHELLE MARSHALL

Writer Sionainn Mentor-King, 39, lives in Whangārei Heads, where she has ‘settled’ – at least briefly – to take a breather from her adventures. She is living a happy, fulfilled life as she approaches her fortieth birthday – without children.

I’ve been living out here on family land for about a year now, slowly renovating a derelict off-grid cottage. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life living in Asia, and I’d like to continue to travel and explore now that it seems like the world is getting back to normal a bit, but keep this place as my base while I continue to do things out in the world.

Not having kids hasn’t been a conscious decision as such. As a child and younger adult, I thought I would have kids – as a woman, it’s just what you expect to do. My cousin Michelle, who has been my best friend all my life, and I had planned it all out – we would have this many kids, these were their names, this is where we’d live. I have a very active internal fantasy world, and possibly that’s part of why I’m okay with not having kids. My life has followed the path of my karma rather than my fantasies. That has led me to being a single thirty-nine-year-old, and I am very happy doing my own thing right now. When I think about meeting someone I would want to have kids with, it’s a process that would be longer than my biological clock would allow for at this late stage.

I first got engaged when I was fifteen, so my life could have been very different. Then I did get married (to someone else) when I was in my twenties. I absolutely intended to have children with my ex-husband, and in my mind those children came into existence – as a fantasy of our future together – and when that marriage fell apart it was like they kept existing in a parallel universe, but it was a path I moved away from. I think that made it easier for me to let them go – it’s almost like maybe they do exist somewhere else, in an alternate reality. My ex-husband does have a beautiful little girl now, and I’m happy for him.

Career has never been my main focus in life – I’ve always been a writer, but I’ve supported it with hospitality work. It’s only in my late thirties that I’ve stayed still long enough to really make a living from writing. I left New Zealand in my mid-twenties, and I did all sorts of things living in India – but never settled down. That’s a big part of why I’m single and don’t have the mindset to bring a child into the world. I feel like I’m too young!

Michelle has three children now, and when she was pregnant with her youngest, she joked “this one is yours.” I think she knew at that point that I wasn’t going to have any kids of my own. I love her kids. I love it when they come to stay, but man! I don’t think I could do it myself. It really is a case of the wine aunty cliché – I love your kids, but I love it when they go home. That high energy, that attention they require... As Michelle’s kids get older, though, there’s more that I can share with them. Her seven-year-old daughter Bowie, in particular, is starting to become interested in playing music, so I can see a real shared-interest relationship forming with her. And it’s also nice to be able to provide that female adult input from outside the home environment.

My mother is very supportive of me not having children. She has a pragmatic, realistic view of the world as it is right now and whether it’s a safe place to be bringing children into, though I do sense a bit of regret from her that she won’t get to be a grandma. I don’t think my dad has entirely accepted yet that I am not going to have kids – he thinks I’d make a great mother.

Personally, I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t want to be resentful of children, and I think there is a risk that I could be. You can’t mother without giving up huge chunks of your own existence, and I just don’t think I could be committed enough without feeling a bit resentful of the things I’d have to let go of – the books I’m writing, the trips to Asia.

When I first went to India in my early twenties, I saw the number of children there who don’t have parents, and it made me realise that there was the possibility of fostering or adoption. I’d never considered that before. If at some point in the future I have a partner who really wants kids, but I’m a bit older, I feel like that is a fall-back option – it doesn’t have to be my own biological child that I raise. I can still be a mother in that sense if I want to be one day.

But for now, like all good wine aunties, I have a neurotic cat! To be honest, if it wasn’t for her, I think I’d really feel the isolation of living out here. I’m planning a trip to Thailand at the end of the year to volunteer at a school in an agricultural village on an island in the Chao Phraya River in the middle of Bangkok, and the biggest consideration I have is who will look after my cat!

I feel very comfortable with not being a mother and a wife at this stage. The Buddhist view of renunciation is giving something up because you’ve moved away from it. You actually don’t want it anymore – not like Lent, where you are depriving yourself of something you really want. It’s a natural detachment, and that’s where I’m at right now with relationships and the prospect of having children.

I’ve just got myself a little red sports car. It’s kind of like I’m having an anti-midlife crisis. I’m at such a happy place in my life, I can do the cool things that I want to do in other countries, and at home I can drive around with the top down and music blaring like the “gangsta aunty” Michelle reckons I am. I guess I didn’t fall into the box – getting married, buying a house, having kids. I very easily could have, and the box would have produced a different me – in this fortieth year of my life, I would have been a different person. But I don’t think that life would have made me happier than I am now.