I don’t know of a woman on this planet who hasn’t been asked about settling down and having kids at least once. Is there a woman who hasn’t heard ‘when you have kids’ or been told they’d regret not having any? Well, Someone Other Than A Mother by Erin Lane might be a good fit for any of you who are wrestling with those opinions.

Erin Lane is a retreat facilitator who has studied gender and religion extensively. She and her husband also decided against having kids of their own. They planned to not have kids at all, but eventually started fostering and adopted the their first placements. Despite becoming a legal mother, Lane still struggled with the title and what it all meant, so during the pandemic, she wrote her way through it.

Someone Other Than A Mother reads like part memoir, part academic paper (and I don’t mean that in a negative way). Lane shares her experience and stories of other childfree women, then blends research into the mix.

I put so many tabs in this book. The pages are chock full of nuggets that anyone who has heard the comments about motherhood on repeat will understand. While the writing itself is a bit on the flowery side, I still enjoyed it for the most part.

And as a side note, there has been some discrediting of the book online because she isn’t completely childfree anymore, but those haters are kinda missing the point of her journey. It’s worth giving this book a shot and judging the content for yourself instead of disqualifying her thoughts because she ended up adopting kids.

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