Fruits of Labour

Betty Doyle’s Fruits of Labour charts coming to terms with childlessness, from initial symptoms and diagnosis, grief and uncertainty, to emerging with acceptance, hope, and survival. Doyle explores the impact of childlessness, and the threat of infertility on the speaker’s sense of self, femininity, and family. While initially the body is examined from a place of shame and regret, it also becomes a site of resilience and abandon.

There is joy here, too – in the unexpected freedom that childlessness brings. Doyle rejects enforced gender roles, embracing independence and freedom of choice. While the body in these poems can be a site of suffering, or even viewed by some as deficient, it is also defiant, and ultimately, these poems emerge triumphant, surviving and thriving on the speaker’s own terms.

Being childfree is complicated. Poems like ‘Are all the babies in your poems real?’ outline external societal pressures which drive the speaker to wish for a child. Though the impossibility of that wish is initially met with shame, shock, and regret, Fruits of Labour finds relief, hope, and finally acceptance.