How David Beckham made me question my life's purpose

We've all been there

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at David Beckham, and not only because of that underwear ad he did a few years ago.

I used to have a job that involved monitoring the social media accounts of celebrities including David and Victoria and their kids — witnessing them celebrate birthdays, weddings and christenings, swim laps in their Miami pool and cook breakfast at their Cotswolds farmhouse.

It was while watching one of the latter videos, David wearing a cable knit jumper, daughter Harper mixing pancake batter, Victoria hovering in vertiginous heels, that I started to cry.

Ridiculous, I know.

I hate to cook, have no desire to marry David or Victoria and I’ve never wanted a house in the countryside (where I live is remote enough; we only got Deliveroo in 2023).

I’ve also never wanted children, a fact that has amazed (and occasionally offended) friends and strangers alike since I was an adolescent. It’s not that I dislike kids or can’t stand the thought of having them.

It’s just that I never felt the urge to become a mother.

As I’ve written before, I love the Diane Keaton movie Baby Boom and always thought the best bit was the beginning, where she strides down Madison Avenue, swishing her bob and swinging her portfolio, not the end, where she has a baby and a Laura Ashley-swathed money pit from which she churns out endless jars of apple sauce.

Rituals like wedding planning, trips to B&Q and Sunday mornings mowing the lawn make me feel claustrophobic and I’ve never understood if everyone else finds domesticity stultifying but is just playing along or if I’m a lone weirdo.

Even as a child, I thought mothers usually got the fuzzy end of the lollipop: ferrying children to after-school activities, coming home from a thankless job to iron uniforms, tasked with cooking something different every day while being alternately taken for granted and branded an embarrassment.

And yet when I saw that video taken in the Beckhams’ Cotswolds kitchen, I cried.

I cried because it looked nice to be part of a family.

I cried because they seemed happy.

I cried because I was jealous.

I felt lonely. I sensed, for the first time, that I might be missing out on a rewarding experience. And I wished that it was something I could have wanted, been capable of and enjoyed.

Perhaps if I didn’t live with chronic illness, we weren’t still in the middle of a global pandemic and I wasn’t grieving like I’ve never grieved before, then I wouldn’t be thinking about this.

I might have an in-person job, a relationship, a cat and a close group of friends. I might join clubs and go out all the time and not feel like I was missing anything. That’s certainly the future I imagined when I was younger.

I wonder, though.

What I didn’t realise when I pictured my future as a kid, what I didn’t know until just over six months ago, was that my mum was central to my sense of safety in the world. Now she’s gone, I feel untethered; incapable of cosiness, of rest, of calm.

Where I used to feel a sense of comfort there’s now a howling void.

I feel like a fool for not realising something my primary school classmates had figured out by the age of ten: the reason most people want to get married and have children.

I didn’t understand until these last few months that by electing not to have a family, I was inadvertently choosing isolation.

Aside from the Golden Girls or the occasional non-culty commune, society has decreed that this is how we all should live: in long-term romantic partnerships, with family members or utterly alone.

It makes me sad, not just for myself but in general, that we’re so separate and so lacking in imagination when there are hundreds of better ways to live. It’s not good for us, either — for ageing couples or single parents who’d welcome support or for people on their own who’d like to provide it.

For the most part, because we live in a capitalist society and don’t have the energy or capacity for more, we’ve restricted love to just our partners and immediate family and left everyone else searching for scraps.

We’ve created a society where the most popular memes are about the joy of cancelling plans but any given Instagram video has a hundred comments from people with no close friends.

It’s not surprising so many of us prioritise romantic rather than platonic love, when it’s often the only way to gain community and social currency.

Soon after my mum died, I found myself thinking “I need to find a relationship,” despite not being mentally or physically capable of maintaining one right now, because I wanted to escape how I was feeling: like I’d scrambled for the last seat in musical chairs and been elbowed onto the floor.

I know from all the support groups I’ve been to that grief is still lonely when you have siblings and a partner and children but I find it hard to believe it’s as alienating as this, that a niece or godchild or bestie down the road wouldn’t make things a little bit easier.

I don’t want to be the stereotypical spinster third wheel but I feel myself becoming consumed by envy when I hear about other people’s huge family Christmases, group holidays and engagements, even though I never used to aspire to any of those things.

I think it’s partly that they signify having a life as opposed to watching one go by.

And I’m newly aware of that tendency, too: how few risks I’ve been willing to take because I’ve been anxious my whole life.

When you’re anxious, it is a relief to cancel plans, to tell yourself you’ll go to parties and meet new people and pursue your ambitions at a later date, when you magically feel braver.

Then you look back and see everything you missed out on because you weren’t willing to take a risk.

Was it that I didn’t want children or that I was scared of doing it wrong? What if I’d hurt them? What if I’d lost them?

It’s too painful to imagine.

But it leaves me wondering what my life is supposed to be, where to find meaning now I’m no longer anyone’s favourite.

When I saw Claudia Winkleman perched on two giant men’s shoulders in an especially camp episode of The Traitors, I thought, why couldn’t I be like her? She seems happy.

She has a husband and three kids, has made herself a home where people love and support each other and have someone to spend important occasions with.

Meanwhile I stood back, scared to get things wrong, to birth someone who tortures animals or becomes a murderer or votes Tory.

But having children isn’t something you can take a chance on and hope you like it. I wouldn’t want to be one of those women in a Marie Claire article about mothers who wish they’d never had kids but can’t admit it to anyone except a journalist they’ve just met.

And I don’t think I’m self-assured enough to withstand a two-year-old’s tantrums or a teenager’s scorn.

If I’m really, really honest, which unfortunately it seems like I am, I’m not sure I was jealous of the Beckhams because I wanted to be like David or Victoria (you know VB wasn’t going to eat a single one of those pancakes, and being that wealthy and famous seems like hard work).

I was jealous of their kid. Harper.

She must have been 11 at the time, around the age I was when my parents divorced.

Instead of passing notes between them and hanging out with indifferent stepbrothers, she gets to spend her weekends feeling comfortable with family members who love her.

In a disappointingly conventional part of myself, I feel shortchanged that suddenly and without warning, my parents split up and there were no more trips to eat chicken nuggets and chips at the Crucible Theatre cafe, no more caravan holidays with those little packets of cereal, no more stops at Redgates for pick n’ mix (my early childhood fun was very food-based).

I was lucky to still see my dad regularly and to have a mum who did everything she could to make our lives special, including taking me on any holiday she could scrounge, whether it was to stay with her penpal in Florida or a trip to France funded by vouchers cut out of toilet roll packaging.

I wasn’t ungrateful but — in the same way that my mum used to wish my grandma would stop baking beautiful cakes and buy some Mr Kipling already — you often want what you don’t have.

As a teenager, when my friends had to rush home on Sundays because their mums were cooking a roast for them and their siblings, I felt a pang. When they had regular get-togethers with extended family, I felt a pang.

Part of me was radicalised by the opening lyrics of Young Hearts Run Free: What’s the sense in sharing this one and only life/Ending up just another lost and lonely wife… and part of me wanted to be one of the children in The Waltons.

I didn’t grasp that becoming an adult would involve having to pick between two extremes: the drudgery and heartbreak of motherhood in a patriarchal society or the emptiness of eternal singleness in a world that considers uncoupled non-parents surplus to requirements. Shouldn’t one of the options be non-stop thrills?

I wish there was more.

I wish we’d developed better ways of living and more empathetic ways of supporting each other outside of traditional family structures. I think we’d all be happier. In the meantime, depending on where you live, at least there’s Deliveroo.

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PS: Today’s my birthday (I know! I seem ageless) and if you wanted to give me a gift you could donate to The New Normal, the charity that’s played a huge role in helping me (and many others) survive the horrors of grief. Just £2.52 gives one person access to a peer support meeting and £10.08 pays for their attendance at a month of meetings.