About babies and HEAs...
Is a baby required for happy ever after?
I had a really hard time getting pregnant and romance novels were the best and worst way to get through it. The best, because they provided such an escape from waiting, worrying, wondering if this was the hour/day/cycle that I’d get pregnant. I’d get immersed in the story and forget to think about it. But then I’d get to the epilogue and there I would find…Babies!
When I was going through fertility treatments, I was also writing romance novels and when I asked readers on social media what they liked to see in a happy ending, one exuberant reader posted this: “Babies! Babies! Babies!”
Reading that was…a moment.
And she wasn’t alone in expressing that sentiment.
And I felt like I had to write it. Because every epilogue I ever read until that moment had a hero and heroine blissfully frolicking around their country estate and… babies!
My mom has a theory that we want to see babies at the end of a historical romance novel so that we know the heroine lived through childbirth, which was a very legit worry in yore times, especially in the era where male doctors would go from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands. Surviving childbirth is still a really real worry today, especially in America, where maternal mortality rates are…not good. Especially for a “developed” country like the United States. Especially if you are a woman of color. Showing a woman living to love her child is a happy thing. Show a woman’s life as valuable is no small thing.
But also—
Defining the happy ending as marriage and babies is a way of ruling out who gets to experience it. If a baby is a requirement for an emotionally uplifting and optimistic epilogue, then we cannot have a heroine who is past childbearing years. And, frankly, most heroines novel heroines have been in their childbearing years. But love and passion doesn’t fizzle out once a woman ages past forty or fifty or whenever her fertile years end. (I will be writing more about older heroines in romance, stay tuned).
What about Queer relationships? Using the baby requirement could rule out Queer romances, especially in historicals, before the age of fertility treatments and surrogates. And before we say “adoption!” we should recognize that adoption can be traumatic for the mother and child. The thing is, plenty of Queer historical romance novels have showed us that we can have an emotionally optimistic and uplifting conclusion without babies. (Note: if a Queer couple does wish for babies in their HEA, I am all for it!). The expectation for heterosexual couples to reproduce by the epilogue still feels strong.
What about women who don’t want to have children? Studies have shown that the happiest people are unmarried, childfree women. I am thinking now of all the heroes who insisted that they did not want children—and all the heroines who just made them see that yes, really they did! Looking at you, Daphne and Simon of the first Bridgerton book, and a thousand other romance novel couples. I’m feeling conflicted about it, to be honest.
My fertility treatments eventually worked (yay!) and now I live on conscious discipline gentle parenting Instagram, or whatever we call it. And now I see the baby HEA in another light: it is a way for the characters to heal the generational trauma that almost prevented them from achieving their HEA. Remember the old school romances where the first hundred pages were dedicated to the relationship of the parents of the protagonists? Their relationship mattered for the one that was primary focus in the book because it was the relationship that created our main characters. My husband jokes that all my books need more about the hero’s relationship with his father and…we’re not having that discussion today but the point remains that the relationship of our parents, and how they parented, has profound affects on how we embark on our own relationships, whether we’re real humans or fictional characters.
To me, the couple in a romance novel is the dad with the shield in this graphic:
A romance is a story of people falling in love yes, but it’s really them doing the personal work necessary to get over whatever personal issues were holding them back from living their best lives. They help each other do that and rewrite the stories they’ve been told about themselves. And a lot of times, it’s stuff from their relationship with their parents. And what better way to show that they have changed the narrative for the better than to show them doing things differently with the next generation? There is a place for babies in an HEA.
So, I have written a few epilogues for the version of myself who wasn’t sure motherhood would ever happen, who needed to see a couple living happily without kids, and for the other readers who are childfree, or readers who still want an HEA without babies for any reason. I have also written plenty of “traditional” happy endings with boys that take after the father and girls who are just like their mother.
The HEA should make a reader—whoever they are, wherever they are in their lives—feel good. And the way to do that, I think, is to write what feels genuine and true for the particular characters in their particular story.
That will leave room for adorable babies, as well as characters with white furniture and free time.
I love and appreciate you and all authors who deviate from the baby-logue. The moment I finished reading Bombshell by Sarah MacLean, I messaged her with a heartfelt thanks that she had stayed true as an author to the character of Sesily she'd written. I'm not upset generally by babies in romance novel endings. But it's not for me, so I'm utterly chuffed that more authors are reflecting my reality. I am truly not fond of miracle infertility being cured or men who didn't want children being shown The Meaning of True Love by holding their child, but presumably that speaks to some people the way Sesily as the "cool aunt" spoke to me.
there may be a place for babies in an HEA--your points are eloquent as always--but i would really prefer not to have that as a default and to leave more space for main characters who are full and complete without biological offspring, especially in historical romances.