UPFRONT:RACING TO THE TOP of my list of resentments of late is my own biological clock. Not for some incessant, deafening ticking – this one's a silent little bugger, which may explain how I've made it to my mid-thirties without issue. No, what really incenses me about my biological clock is its very existence: silent or otherwise, this domineering, dictatorial timekeeper makes me every day more aware of how deluded I was to think that my fertility was ever really within my control.
I’m 35. The age at which fertility declines like an ailing dowager, and the last remaining eggs slip through the narrow funnel and join all their unfertilised sisters at the bottom of the upturned timer. And due to the undeniable relationship between scarcity and value, my dwindling number of eggs can only make the last remaining more valuable than the Fabergé variety.
To procreate, or not to procreate, appears to be the question, and an answer at this point is long overdue. My holding pattern for 20-odd years has been a general agreement with the concept of offspring, just not right now. Children have always been five to 10 years away, which was only right and proper when I was 15, appeared reasonable at 25, but is clearly Dicey Reilly at 35, given that in 10 years time I may be knocking on an early menopause. Eek!
There’s no prevaricating now. And in case I were in any doubt, there are plenty of people only too keen to remind me.
My mother, for one, who, like an alarm on snooze, gives me regular reminders that the sliver of opportunity remaining must be grasped with both hands, and a grandchild wrung therefrom. But she’s not alone in her advice to breed. Women’s magazines peddle glossy gossip about the terrible price of waiting too long. My doctor tells me I’d best get cracking. The internet is aghast that I’m still wasting time typing this when I could be upside down directing sperm to my withering womb.
In fact, the only people who aren’t busy reminding me to get busy with the baby-making are my male friends, many of whom would rather swallow whole babies than talk about them, despite being in their mid-thirties and childless themselves. They’re up against the clock as well. There may be plenty of sperm still treading water down there, but they’re hardly the eager specimens swimming 60-second laps that they once were. Yet for some reason, those languid tadpoles just don’t get the same kind of airplay that the lady-clock does.
And there I was, thinking that by the time I got round to breeding, things would have evened up a little: the men would be changing nappies and gazing wistfully at passing toddlers, and the women would be able to express their reservations about having children, or their desires to do so, without becoming social pariahs. Yet nothing will have an entire dinner party staring into its soup like a 30-something woman bringing up the subject of babies.
But isn’t this ticking a notional one? In my case, I may have been infertile since puberty or I may be super fertile and able to spawn perfectly healthy specimens for 10 more years, but it’s a question I won’t be able to answer till I knuckle down and give baby-making the old college try.
Of course, my esteemed colleague has just produced two almost edibly adorable specimens, which has further complicated matters: cuddling Róisín Ingle’s twins did cause unfamiliar melty, squishy feelings to stir within, a reaction to which I was embarrassed to admit for fear of being tarred with the broody brush. Because we all know that people fall over themselves when a man professes to like babies, yet when a woman – particularly a Woman Of A Certain Age – does the same, it’s like a stampede of elephants through the room.
I guess I grew up hoping that the freedoms menfolk are granted at birth would also apply to me, given the strides made by feminism within my lifetime. Yet I’ve reached the grand old age of 35 only to have my gender wallop me in the face. My choices are limited, the time bomb is ready to go off and the truth is, all I want is another 10 years that I know I can’t have.
But isn’t that what we all want when it comes right down to it, regardless of our genders? Isn’t that what makes the broodiness such a taboo, threatening as it does to replace the freedoms of youth with the responsibilities of parenthood? It seems to me that the ticking may have less to do with clocking eggs and more to do with the various cogs and levers that mark the passage of time in every body.
My biological clock is ticking, true, but it’s just one of the many little metronomes at work in all of us. Why panic over this one?
fionamccann@irishtimes.com