‘it’s changed my mind about having kids’

of honeycombed sourdough ‘starter’ ready to be transformed into loaves, focaccia and even bagels. It may be disastrous for my waistline but there is something magical about watching flour and water swell into a great pillowy ball of dough. A sourdough loaf takes at least 24 hours to make – far too long in pre-virus times, but now I enjoy measuring my day by the size of the bubbles in my bread.

Between the germination in the greenhouse

For a few years I’ve been weighing up whether I want children. ‘Would I like one of those?’ I’d think, squinting at friends’ babies as if they were a shirt in a shop window. Usually I’d decide that my friends’ lives seemed too horrifyingly altered from their existence before children and it wasn’t for me. What if I had a baby and didn’t like it? At least you can return a shirt.

I seemed so unlike many women I spoke to who knew definitively that they wanted to be mothers. Perhaps I’d become a mysterious and eccentric aunt instead, who’d often be travelling but breeze home for Christmases, dole out exotic presents and make inappropriate remarks after necking the cooking sherry. But when I turned 35 in February and remained single, I made the decision to freeze my eggs. For me, it meant keeping my options open, even though my biological clock remained pretty silent.

By March, I’d started the freezing process and had temporarily moved in with my sister, her husband and their two young daughters when we went into lockdown. The move meant I had to stop the egg-freezing drugs, since I wouldn’t be able to get to hospital for scans and my subsequent egg collection, but more alarming still was the idea of being trapped with a family, even my own family. I was more used to living alone and my nieces (seven and nine) are noisy; they chuck their vegetables on the floor to avoid eating them; the little one has regular nosebleeds because she’s a picker; the big one constantly farts; they forget to flush the loo and they’re prone to asking the same questions about Harry Potter again and again.

But as we settled into the rhythm of family life, my feelings changed. Although the nieces continued to shout and leak and thunder up and down the house like very small elephants, I started appreciating the pure, distracting and uncomplicated joy of children. I came to love them sneaking into bed with me to read stories, to enjoy our discussions about the tooth fairy and Dumbledore. Any glumness about lockdown is forgotten when the nineyear-old asks me to help her find ‘funny horse’ GIFs online, and I honestly enjoy asking, ‘Have you washed your hands?’ 93 times a day. In a shrunken world where the irritations of daily life have vanished and family is the only thing that matters, I’ve come to realise I would like a child very much.

Other single girlfriends have spoken similarly in the past few weeks too, but quietly, almost as if they’re ashamed of this desire. Because the trouble is, if you’re a single 35-year-old woman, publicly admitting that you want a baby is like standing on a street corner and screaming you’ve got gonorrhoea – potentially off-putting to men and liable to earn you pitying looks from others. But that’s a problem to solve after lockdown. Most likely I’ll do one round of egg freezing and then start looking for donors or a co-parent (in my situation, this would be a man with whom I could share a child but, liberatingly, not his bed). We’ll see. For now, the realisation that I do want the dementing, messy, loud, nerve-shredding and exhilarating experience of my own child is progress enough for me.

Sophia’s latest novel What Happens Now? is published by HQ, price £7.99