Polly Vernon
YOU KNOW how, a couple of weeks back, I told you I keep getting stood up by FRIENDS?
Serially ‘ breadcrumbed’? Three of them ducked out on a dinner last week! Three! Fortunately, Person Four turned up. We slagged off the breadcrumbers; then Person Four asked for advice. Person Four is happily married, in her thirties, into her flat, into her job. Everything would be good – except that, all around her, friends are having babies. Person Four does not want babies. She’s struggling because: why does she not want this thing that everyone around her wants (more than they’ve ever wanted anything)? This thing which is leeching mates from her, picking them off like a social sniper, leaving her excluded and subject to pitying speculation.
‘I know they think there’s something wrong with me, my relationship, my values. I know they think I’ll regret it. What if they’re right? Should I ignore every fibre in my being, every synapse in my brain, and get pregnant anyway?’ she asks.
It’s the third such conversation I’ve had with a 30-something woman lately. This makes me sad because I’d hoped we were over this. Hoped we were beyond ghetto-ising women who choose not to have kids. Beyond undermining them, patronising them, looking at them all ‘ Well, you’re gonna die cold and alone, hun!’
I realised I didn’t want children when I was seven. I’ve spent the intervening decades having people lecture me on the selfishness/stupidity/short-sightedness of this. I too have lived through Person Four’s doubt-sparking era: stood powerless in the sidelines, while my dearest friends hurled themselves head-long into an experience I didn’t want, but which deprived me of them, nonetheless. My people, my tribe, who’d forsaken me, joyfully and willingly, for squawling, puke-making, attentionsapping starter-bundles of humanity.
It’s tough to hold your nerve through that. Tougher still, when all around you are Mummy ’grammers and Mum-preneurs, entire industries – a whole society! – devoted to condemning this baby-refusnik madness that has you in its grip.
But here’s what I tell all baby-shirkers. You know your own mind. Trust it. And trust me when I say there will be no moment of awful realisation. No waking up at 3am screaming, ‘ Why haven’t I had children? WHY?’ There will only be a life lived your way, navigated according to your terms, with due attention to the things most likely to make you happy, because you’ve thought about it properly. Because you didn’t just do what everyone else was doing.