Baby it’s old outside

The night before I turn twenty-nine my phone suggests a Metro article with the headline, ‘Half of women aged 30 don’t have children for first time since records began’. The people in the writersroom of my life really need some lessons in subtlety.

I’m not interested in spending too much time dissecting what is a fairly weird piece of journalism. The article in question seems to think that only women can be parents and that only children complete a family. It speculates on why so many more women are ‘delaying’ having children, which seems bizarrely tone-deaf to those who might be trying and struggling to conceive or adopt, or those who simply don’t want to be parents. It cites the high costs of living, housing, and childcare as possible reasons behind the great millennial baby drought, and compared this to the fact that 86% of women born in England and Wales in 1941 had at least one child by the time they were thirty (a comparison made with no reference to how access to reproductive healthcare has changed since then).

Until pretty recently my social circles were almost completely child-free. I know that several of my friends, however, plan to start having kids in the next few years. I also now know people who have had babies or are pregnant on purpose, people who actually did the thing of tracking their cycles and going out mid-month to ride their partner in a cornfield at midnight with a wolf howling nearby (I think that’s how it works) because they wanted to have a tiny human with limited spatial awareness as a housemate. So whatever the statistics might say about women my age not having children, sometimes when I look at my friends it’s like I can hear a rumbling wildebeest stampede of children’s light-up trainers.

I keep rereading that last sentence and wondering if it sounds unkind. It’s not meant to be. It is possible to have messy and conflicting thoughts about a mate’s choices without it being an attack on them, on parenthood, or on children. I often hold off voicing how jumbled my feelings are because I worry that anything other than screeching ecstasy about someone’s forthcoming heir will situate me in an enemy camp of joyless child-haters. When I get a WhatsApp message with an ultrasound image that looks like a photocopied croissant, sometimes my snap reaction is indignation. Excuse me, but I am a valued member of the team, and I don’t remember being consulted before this project was signed off on? Sometimes in my head, people I’ve known and loved for years briefly become bougie mummy-blog caricatures who say patronising things like you can’t really understand (X) unless you’ve got children. Sometimes I feel the sense of dramatic betrayal you get when you’re ten and your favourite girlband is splitting up because one of them wants to pursue a solo career. Often I feel sad. The friendships I made and strengthened throughout my twenties felt forged in a tribal steel of loyalty and hyperbole, unbreakable covens united in a cacophony of yas-queening and last orders chorus. Now we’re growing up, our lives are changing, and a child is something major that we will not have in common. I worry that I will struggle to care when I’m told what weight a newborn baby is like it’s a prize marrow at a county fair, and I worry that my friends will struggle to care about me when they have someone else’s boking and whingeing to deal with on a daily basis.

None of these feelings mean that I’m not happy for someone when they are excitedly sharing with me that they’ve made the choice to have a child. I’m not for one minute suggesting that I should have free rein to respond to someone’s pregnancy news by shouting, but what about me? and slapping them with a dead fish. But I think it is normal and healthy to feel anxious about the impact that children will have on friendships. Perhaps this in itself comes from a very childlike place of fearing change, of fearing being neglected or abandoned. And for me at least, this worry-swarm can also obscure an obvious fact: my friends with kids are probably worried too. Just because someone is mad excited to have a baby doesn’t mean they aren’t paralysed by the impossible notion of keeping it alive. Just because someone can’t wait to bring a new life into the world doesn’t mean they aren’t worried that it might put half their friendships into an induced coma.

A year from now I will turn thirty and I won’t have children, and a year from now many of my friends will. In Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell comments, ‘Death, taxes, and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.’ I expect there will be tears and tantrums on all sides. It won’t be easy; but we’re all trying.

Cover photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash