…IN MY 30s

Important life lessons from Roopa Farooki

"It's not about a happy ever after"

‘I WANTED MORE THAN TICKS IN THE BOXES’

job, house, relationship. That’s how I’d defined success in my 20s. Getting a tick in every box. When I was approaching 30, it seemed I’d finally managed it. I had a decent job in advertising. We’d bought a grown-up house in Tooting, London, and I’d just married the boyfriend I’d been dating since I was 19. I’d entered my 30s as a success. Then I started throwing all of these away. Maybe Oscar Wilde explained it best. He said that there are just two tragedies. One is never getting what you want. The other? Getting it. All I knew is that I wanted more than ticks in the boxes. I didn’t want to be a respectable woman in a respectable house. My husband and I gave up our jobs and travelled around the south of France looking for a place in the sun. When we found a ramshackle farmhouse, we sold our London home to buy it. I wrote my first novel camping in the grounds while my husband took charge of renovations. No job. Un-tick. No habitable home. Un-tick. Friends said it was a stupid idea. ‘Who retires to France in their 30s? It’ll be a disaster.’ They were right. Mid-renovations, my husband said we should never have got married. We threw around the D word and started counselling. Relationship on the rocks. Un-tick. We’d been struggling for a while, but thought giving up our jobs would be a solution. We’d have time for each other. Time to become parents, too. We’d underestimated the stress of starting again, especially if you’re living in a tent, showering from a container hung off a cherry tree.

We thought pregnancy would pull us together, but discovered my polycystic ovary syndrome meant we were unlikely to conceive naturally. I wasn’t ovulating. The waiting list for fertility treatment meant we started in the private sector, where we were cheated and mistreated. Friends were falling effortlessly into pregnancy and we wondered if it would ever happen for us. We wondered if it should. Combining fertility treatment with relationship counselling was a risky life strategy.

It took me a while to realise that the person who had wanted that job, house and relationship wasn’t the person I was becoming. Counselling helped. We realised divorce wasn’t the answer. It was the situation we hated, not each other.

By the time our NHS appointment came through, we felt confident enough to commit to a new course of fertility treatment. Our first pregnancy pulled us together and apart, as we stopped being a couple and started being parents. We became stronger. I spent the first five years of my 30s barefoot and pregnant, writing novels, having children. I started writing stories about happy ever after.

Then I realised the only stories with a happy ever after are the ones that haven’t finished. I was a successful writer with a home in the maize fields and four beautiful children. I felt guilty. Too far from family and friends to be there for them.

We went back to England. We got jobs that gave back something to our community. Years ago, I’d wanted to be a doctor, but thought I wasn’t strong enough at science. By the end of my 30s, I’d realised that you choose the person you want to be, so I home-studied biology, chemistry and physics and sat the graduate medical entrance exam. I started medical school at 39.

It’s another journey – that’s the message I want to share. It’s not about tragedy or happy ever after. It’s definitely not about success. I had the best and worst of times in my 30s. I made mad decisions. But I don’t regret it. I think you will only regret what you don’t do.

Farooki is an ambassador for Relate, the relationship counselling charity; relate.org.uk