I always assumed I would have children. Although it wasn’t something I thought about much, and although I wasn’t actively hankering after kids, nor a man with whom to have them, whenever I pictured a future, it always included both. They were just there, waiting for me. One day.
But as I approached – and then hit – my 30s, I started thinking about it more seriously. It is around that age that you realise you are about to become Bridget Jones, assailed on all sides by “smug marrieds” and relatives with a “tick-tock” tic.
I began to worry. How was I going to fit this in? The career I’d always dreamed of had barely got going. I couldn’t take time off to have a child. And while any man I had a baby with would, hopefully, be of the vaguely enlightened sort, it seemed inevitable that I would end up doing the lion’s share of chores. Where would I find the time? As for paid-for childcare, forget it. Not on my salary.
The fact that all around me friends seemed to be having babies didn’t help – not because I was jealous, but because of how awful it seemed. I watched as capable women were defeated by tiny puking, crying, screaming machines.
I started to question just how much I did want a baby. I looked at the decisions I was making — and reflected on how they all made it less rather than more likely that I would have a child. I knew women who really wanted children, and had seen how they shaped their work and relationship choices to ensure that would happen. Meanwhile, I quit my job to go to university, was chasing an unstable freelance career, had broken up with my long-term partner at the age of 30 and was scraping every minute of every day for the maximum amount of work I could get out of it. These decisions didn’t scream “needs a baby”.
Then my sister-in-law got pregnant. Watching Sina go through pregnancy didn’t alter my growing conviction that I was OK with the idea that children were not going to happen for me. The foods she couldn’t eat, the drinking she couldn’t do. The unpredictable nausea. The constant exhaustion and the changes to her body: by the end of the pregnancy, water retention had caused her body to swell up so much that she couldn’t close her hand in a fist, and all she could wear on her feet were flip-flops.
But it was also a revelation. The exhilaration of feeling the baby kick for the first time when I placed my hands on Sina’s belly.
Taking Sina to scans and seeing a massive alien head with a tiny little nose appear on screen, and suddenly wanting to cry, and reach into the screen and hug this little being tight. Realising that I didn’t know this person-to-be, but that I already felt fierce about him. It took me aback. I hadn’t expected it.
Of course, I expected to be very fond of my nephew, no doubt to love him. But it had seemed abstract, rather like the children in my imaginary future. Just something that would be there. I hadn’t expected it to feel so overwhelming, so primal.
The first six months were tense. All these milestones we needed to pass, each time with a potentially horrifying “no”. Did he have a heartbeat? Had his organs formed? Was he growing at the right rate? Had he developed skin on his back? As each scan came and went, it became increasingly unlikely that anything would go wrong. But what if? It had to go wrong for someone – what if it was this someone?
Then the call came, the baby was being born. And there I was, on a train, miles away, unable to help, unable to hold anyone’s hand, travelling at speed in the opposite direction from where I wanted to be. I caught the first train back. Inevitably, it was delayed. As I sat looking out at a field somewhere in Suffolk, Marcus was born.
A few hours later, I rushed into the hospital room, sweating, dirty, breathless. Sina was lying back on the bed, exhausted. Nick, my brother, was cradling this tiny little baby in his arms, gently bouncing him up and down. He passed him over to me and I held him while Nick and Sina, who had been up for 24 hours, slept. I held him till my arms and back ached and then I carried on. Every time I stopped moving, he would start crying, so I didn’t stop. I was in willing subjugation to his every whim.
I am one of a generation of women who are told we have choices. And in many ways we do, certainly more than our mothers did. But when it comes to the choice of whether or not to become mothers in our turn, how free is the choice really? Britain has some of the highest childcare costs in the world – in some parts of London, childcare can be as expensive as a top boarding school. Most families don’t have such financial resources. I certainly can’t imagine ever having them – and I won’t pretend it isn’t a factor in my feeling that I will probably never have children.
Not of my own, anyway. But I can be an aunt, and, for me, this is almost better than parenthood. I have the fun, the chance to marvel at how warm he smells and how soft his skin is – but I also get to carry on with my career. In an ideal world, perhaps I would be able to do that with a baby of my own. But in this less than ideal world, my nephew is a pretty joyful substitute.
