![]() But I know I would not have been fine if I hadn’t had kids. You can keep your billionaires and your supermodels: there is no demographic I envy more than women who are contentedly child-free because, of the ones I know, their lives are brilliant. For a while, I was barely able to function. When I failed to become instantly pregnant, and then when I later miscarried, it was an all-consuming heartbreak, but unlike with romantic heartbreaks, there was no promise of eventual redemption. When I hit my late 30s, the desire to have kids walloped me and left me so dazed that I lost the ability to have conversations that weren’t about fertility. Women who are desperate to have them and have endured hideous losses and medical treatments would never be treated so blithely by me, not least because I have been there. I can only assume it’s done mainly by parents who are trying to reassure themselves that they definitely made the right life choices when they realise that, for the next eight years, their weekends will no longer be about seeing their friends, but consist entirely and only of shepherding their kids to playdates and making awkward small chat with random people who just happened to have had kids around the same time as you.Īlso, this is advice I give only to women who are ambivalent about having kids. It’s strange how often people confuse the cause and effect here. That your life becomes entirely about your kids once you have them is not proof that’s how life should be – it’s a reflection of what kids are like. First, this is in no way a reflection of my feelings about my own children, whom I genuinely cannot imagine my life without, even though I lived for almost 40 years without them. ![]() It kinda sucks being the only one among her friends without kids, when the WhatsApps are full of Hey Duggee chat, and what will happen to her when she’s old? Will she be all alone? So should she have a baby now? I look her right in the eyes and I tell her what I always tell women in these circumstances: don’t bother. ![]() So I find myself increasingly having this conversation – usually with a friend, but sometimes with a nice woman I bond with at a party or somesuch – and it goes like this: she always assumed she would have kids, but she didn’t meet the right partner in her 30s, and actually it was fine because she was so busy with her career, and who can afford kids anyway? But now she’s 40 and while she’s not desperate to have kids, she’s also not that keen on losing the option. I am of an age when most of my social group is in their late 30s and early 40s, and, as has always been the case, the majority of my friends are women.
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