A post-lockdown baby boom looms. But can we have a party first?
Experts are predicting a post-Covid baby boom – but I want to taste freedom before being tied down forever
Did you know there was a baby boom nine months after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales? I didn’t, but a spokesman from the Royal College of Midwives said so on the news this week, so it must be true. Seems a pretty odd aphrodisiac to me, but there’s no telling with some.
Experts are predicting similar after the pandemic. Apparently, a quarter of 25- to 40-year-olds say that having children is more important to them now than before Covid struck, meaning that 1.9million babies could be born in the two years after the restrictions are lifted. If this proves true, with everyone perhaps finally tiring of Netflix, it would outstrip even the frantic hurly-burly of the post-war era. Imagine all the baby photos on Instagram. It’ll be exhausting.
But will it come true? I have my doubts. As a single 36-year-old, I wonder daily whether or not I want to have children. Towards the start of the drama, last spring, I thought seriously about doing it by myself, and this remains a lurking idea. Plenty of wise older women have told me that going it alone would be simpler in many ways, rather than bickering with a wellmeaning but fundamentally useless husband who changes one nappy and expects the Victoria Cross.
I absolutely accept that the challenges of the past year have reinforced the importance of family, as with plenty of other disasters and tragedies (such as Diana’s death, apparently). Recent pictures of visitors being allowed into care homes for the first time in months, holding hands with their relatives, were magical. If I don’t have children, who will hold my hand at that stage? Are dogs allowed in care homes?
And yet after a year of largely staying indoors, at home, drifting about in my stretchiest clothing and eating a lot of toast, I’m not sure that the first thing I’ll do, when we’re allowed out, is to sign up for a squawking newborn. Because for me, this past year has also reinforced the importance of personal liberty, and as far as I can see from friends who’ve had babies, maternity leave looks eerily similar to lockdown; you drift around in your stretchiest clothing while eating a lot of toast, but there’s much less sleep.
Why would any of us want to commit to that now, just as we sniff freedom? Most friends who don’t have children are desperate to be unshackled for a while, to go out, to travel, to party, to have several really, really crashing hangovers again before pregnancy and a subsequent baby rules that out.
There are job implications to think about, too. Plenty of friends in their mid-30s have found their career stalling over the past year, and babies look pretty expensive. If I decide to attempt solo motherhood, I need to work like a Stakhanovite for a while yet. As will many others, making up for a period of treading water.
Of course I can say all this, blithely contradicting experts, safe in the knowledge that I went through a round of egg freezing last summer and now have 22 eggs sitting on ice in a hospital laboratory. They don’t guarantee a baby, but offer a very good shot, should I come to use them in the future. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t mind an extremely long holiday and a piña colada first. Is that so much to ask?