The lie that all women have a yearning to be a mother can feel like biological gaslighting. I’ve had a different kind of life – and it is meaningful, rewarding, joyous
When I was 28 years old, the first of my university friends gave birth. We marvelled over her baby, but her tone changed when I started to talk about my future because, well, “Was I planning …?” and: “Wasn’t I thinking about …?” and: “Didn’t I want to have children?”
Until that moment, I had not asked myself the question. I thought it was no longer something that had to be asked, or answered; this was the 00s, not the 50s. Women no longer ran their lives by the internalised tick-list of husband, house and baby. But in the following decade, the world began to look and sound as if it was full of timeless, retrograde anxieties and paranoias over fertility windows and body clocks.
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