Broadside: To breed or not to breed – that is the question

I’m reliably informed that turning 39, as I will next month, prompts a flurry of activity for many women: a chance to get some life tune-ups in under the wire before the curtain falls on one’s 30s. The to-do list runs long and wide: driving lessons, visiting China, Bikram retreats, relearning musical instruments.

For single women, there’s something else to consider, never articulated but rarely far from mind. Is “the baby thing” happening, or a life milestone to be sent off into the ether for good? At 38, the feeling that it’s now or never looms large and occasionally sits on the chest, causing a slight breathlessness.

It’s a curious crossroads, after years of blithely assuming that motherhood would happen eventually, to now find the window of opportunity closing to a crack. There are a few options. One is to find someone – anyone – to have a child with. Another is a visit to the fertility clinic. According to one Irish clinic, 8 per cent of their clientele are single women my age: professionals who never met a significant other but have long wished for children. The last option seems the most sensible: embrace the very real possibility of being child-free for good. Shelve a long-held dream and simply get on with life.

That option prompts several questions: how much did you really want motherhood in the first place? How will your decision to forgo parenthood now go down later? To have a child now simply to appease my 50-year-old self seems foolhardy when there are countries to visit, lovers to meet and adventures to be had. Biology might have its say, but in so many other ways – emotionally, physically, psychologically – I am nowhere near ready for the job. And being a parent really is the mother of all hard jobs.

Foregone conclusion

But things aren’t quite as simple as that. Whether by dint of societal conditioning or personal longing (and often it’s difficult to prise apart the two), I have felt the pull towards parenthood for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, having a family of my own was less something to aspire to than a foregone conclusion.

Never mind that I habitually dragged my dolls around by the hair; I wanted six children, so no one would feel left out. In time, the ideal dwindled to four, then two. At 17 I told my mother that I was “finally” ready to have a child. She side-eyed me furiously, and her breath only seemed to return to normal when, a week later, I announced plans to leave college, move into a squat and become a poet.

But here’s the thing: when I was younger, I had no real idea of the bountiful possibilities in life that lay ahead. A family seemed like a wonderful thing to do until I experienced the joy of travelling to new places, creative fulfilment, indulging passions and the guilty, selfish thrill of solitude. Clearly, parenthood and these things are not mutually exclusive, but those at the coalface of motherhood have observed at least an element of wing-clippage.

Child-free friends of mine in their mid-40s don’t envy my particular life stage, and flinch when they recall that pressure, the dull feeling of tightness in the chest.

“From 35 to 40 was an absolute nightmare,” says one single friend, now 45. “I was fully ready to settle with anyone just to have a child. I was having relationships with some terrible idiots. And then, when I hit 41, my desire to have a child walked right off a cliff. It was a great moment.” Incidentally, she is taking several lovers, each of them fulfilling a different intimate need (intellectual, physical, emotional) for her. I believe her when she says she has never been happier.

Cultural imperative

There’s another obstacle for the child-free to mount: the widely held idea that childlessness is a pitiful and unnatural state of being; the preserve of the shallow or the selfish.

I take particular umbrage at parenthood as a cultural imperative masquerading as a biological instinct. Can we all just accept that everyone, whether or not they’ve given birth, is just trying their best at playing the hand they’ve been dealt in life? Just as parenthood is an many-faceted experience, so too is the alternative.

Some people are unapologetic about their decision not to have children. For others, the decision didn’t feel like theirs to make. As the writer Jeanne Safer has noted, denying a loss doesn’t make it disappear, but acknowledging it doesn’t mean one feels incomplete. The perfect life does not exist, and “to assert otherwise perpetuates a pernicious fantasy: that it’s possible to live without regrets”.

My own baby-lust appears to have passed, and maybe I will mourn it at a later stage in life. In the meantime, the stigma around childlessness that has remained stubbornly pervasive is due a sea change.

Fine, I’m self-absorbed and selfish, fond of pub lock-ins and escapades, prone to folly and misadventure. I’m an overgrown teenager. Yet as a nonparent, that’s my right. It’s not a consolation prize and it’s certainly not the reason I am childless. If anything, I like to think of it as an occupational perk.