Read the latest from Marie Claire columnist Grace Dent

By Grace Dent - Tuesday 5 April 2011

Grace Dent

I’ve spent a lot of time play-acting being a princess or a wicked witch this weekend. My three-year-old niece Lola was giving out the roles. The games start promptly at 5am with the door to the guest room being flung open, a small face pressed against mine and a shout of ‘Hooray, you’re still here. Shall we play?’

Despite not having children, I do love them and I’m a whizz with childcare. I’m the number one name on my friends’ go-to list of ‘fools who will show up, watch Rastamouse and bake cakes with a two-year-old who is in the bitey stage’. ‘Pghh, bite me if you like, kiddo,’ I think. ‘I get ten hours’ sleep a night and I’m going home to a quiet house, with a glass of Chablis and a good paperback. Not a problem.’ After years spent trying for a baby, and many appointments involving bleak phrases such as ‘Nurse, bring the vice and the blue dye’ and ‘This might hurt for four days’, I decided that perhaps life would be fine without my own children. I never say never, but in this day and age I hardly feel alone being child-free.
It’s fun being a super-auntie or a super-godmother with its short, sharp bursts of babydom.

My super-auntie childcare regime is based on three principles.

First: looking after any under-three-year-old is like being trapped in a room at a party with an unreasonable drunk, except for 15 hours. My job is less nanny, more party security: stopping them pushing toast into the DVD player or escaping through windows, before they pass out behind the sofa.

Second: conversation-wise, talking to children is a lot like interviewing an A-list star like Angelina Jolie. The child has already pre-agreed with him or herself what they will and will not talk about today, no negotiation. (Will talk about: snot, getting a goldfish. Will not talk about: bedtime, how they’ve managed to lose one mitten). I no longer frustrate myself with MI5-style questioning.

Finally: most kids are very affable if they never hear the word ‘no’, so an option is to just keep saying yes, within reason, until your shift is over. This may mean the child is handed back covered in smoky eyeshadow, having lunched on Maltesers, wearing a christening gown and flippers. But at least I deliver a happy child.

A lot of women, I feel, don’t like to admit that they find being childless quite pleasant because their reasons sound selfish. I can live in a house with white interiors full of easily-smashable objects. I don’t need to take a break from the career I’ve worked on for two decades. I can go on long-haul holidays without having to spend ten hours walking around a Virgin Barbados flight covered in baby vomit with a crying toddler.

One of the guiltiest things about being child-free is what myself and some child-free friends call the ‘NMP’ rule (‘not my problem’). School catchment areas, vaccination dilemmas, breastfeeding problems… I empathise, but they’re not problems I have. Of course, mothers ask me if I’m scared I’ll have no one to look after me when I’m older, but then I just don’t think a baby comes with the guarantee that in 40 years it will still like me enough to live next door and hear me talking endlessly about my bowels and the goings-on at my Tuesday club.
Obviously, I hope that in the future the kids in my life will remember what a fantastic auntie I was. Let’s just hope in the meantime they never catch me waving them off after a three-day session, closing the door, lying horizontal in a darkened room with a G&T wimpering, ‘I love them with all my heart, I truly do, but it’s bloody brilliant when they’ve gone.’