I don’t feel bad about having ‘only’ one child

Not a day goes by without someone or other asking me if I am going to have another baby

Ikeep meaning to have another child, because as a 38-year-old mother-of-one – only one! – that is what I am supposed to do. I think. I can’t be sure, of course, but if I read the cues coming from … well, just about everyone, this seems to be my purpose in life – as well as doing a job, paying a mortgage and fighting the patriarchy. And that’s just before breakfast ( joke! It’s just a joke, honestly. This isn’t going to be a column about how much we women do, while men just lie around watching sport, I promise. OK, maybe it will be a bit, but I mean it in the nicest, warmest way possible).

Not a day goes by without someone or other asking me if I am going to have a second child. I’m standing there, at my desk, trying to make a nativity play costume out of an old T-shirt and 500 packs of cotton wool, while simultaneously writing a 1,200word feature about mental health and responding to texts from my husband asking if I could just remind him again where it is we are spending Christmas this year, when a well-meaning colleague, usually male, passes by and says: “Oh, how is your

daughter? Are you thinking of having another one yet?” And I want to say: “Another one? Am I thinking of having another one? I already have two children, if you include my 38-year-old husband who, in stark contrast to his five-and-a-halfyear-old child, seems incapable of writing down simple instructions and memorising them. I wonder, are you thinking about taking on another job and sacrificing your weekly visits to the golf course? No? Well, there you go then.”

But I don’t say that, of course, because I have learnt from experience that this is viewed as passive aggressive, when as a woman, I am just supposed to be passive.

Was I surprised to read, this week, that one in five mothers stop after “just” one baby, in contrast to a decade ago, when it was one in eight? No, I wasn’t. I was just relieved to know that I wasn’t alone in my apparent parental laziness.

“Oh, you’ve only got one,” people say sweetly, and I swear what they really mean is “wow, that poor kid, stuck with only its parents for company,” as if we weren’t emotionally on the same level as a primary schoolchild.

According to the Office for National Statistics, which analysed the figures, “increasing childlessness may be due to a decline in the proportion of women married, changes in the perceived costs and benefits of child-rearing versus work and leisure activities … and the postponement of decisions about whether to have children until it may be biologically too late”.

Which brings me to what I really want to say to wellmeaning people who ask if we are “thinking” about having another child: “Yes. Yes, I have thought about having another. I have tried to have another. I have been trying so damn hard that a few months ago I found myself in an opulent clinic near Harley Street, my legs in stirrups and a probe inside me checking out the state of my eggs. “Poor me,” I thought. “Poor, geriatric me with my withered old eggs that fall out of me each month, instead of becoming the beautiful, bouncing babies I am supposed to be having!”

But then, the next day, I had lunch with a dear friend who has just gone through her fourth unsuccessful round of IVF, and I thought that I should probably be a little less self-pitying and a little bit more grateful. I thought that perhaps I should stop focusing on the children I don’t have, and start paying more attention to the one I do have. Because the fact she exists at all, that any of us exist at all – that our parents had sex at the precise moment they did and not 10 seconds earlier or later, potentially creating a completely different outcome – is a miracle in itself.

I have a brilliant friend who laughingly tells me that most mornings, she has wiped three bums before 7am, none of them her own. I am in awe of women who have more than one child, just as I am in awe of the women who, for whatever reason, have no children.

“You’ll get to 45 and regret that you only have one,” is something I have been told. But I think the thing I would really regret is bringing my daughter up to believe that the only value she has is to be found in her ovaries.