So the results are in. After I’ve eliminated the don’t-knows, the cancelled-outs and any other complications, I discover that over half of the women on my list didn’t have children. Given that the vast majority of women in the world do – and the percentage was even higher in the past – it’s a staggering statistic. In fact, on the basis of my list, you could go so far as to say that if you’re a woman and you’re going to do something big, you’re more likely than not to be childless.
For a moment I feel excited that I’m in such good company. But then I feel something else: a pain all too familiar. Because what I really want to know is whether it was enough for these women that they did something with their lives which has resonated for generations to come. Or did they, deep down, wish they had been mothers?
Blue Monday
Monday morning, mid-January. The weather is cold, grey, resolutely Januaryish. I get on the tube to work and open the paper to see an article that says it’s officially the most depressing day of the year. Blue Monday, it’s called. I look at the people sitting around me. The obligatory person listening to music too loudly on their headphones. A woman playing a game on her phone in which she seems to be doing something, I don’t know what, with colourful shapes. Another woman with electric-blue eyeliner staring into space. And a man sitting opposite me who is reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The cover looks new; perhaps he was given it for Christmas.
I wonder how they’re all feeling inside. Are they depressed? Are they dreaming of doing something big with their lives too?
The tube pulls slowly into Hammersmith. I’ve been coming to the same station for over a decade, longer even than I’ve been trying to have a baby. I run a theatre here. Not an operating theatre – one with a stage where people perform. This distinction has become important over the last few years, given the amount of time I’ve spent with fertility doctors, lying on trolleys with my feet in the air. Whenever they ask me what I do, their eyes light up in recognition, until I correct them.
I know that the people I work with will be surprised and shocked at the lengths I’ve gone to to try and conceive. Publicly, I am a successful ‘career woman’ (that terrible term which is never used to describe men) but privately I’ve been desperately trying to become a mother. For years I’ve done my utmost to avoid detection, arranging clinic appointments wherever possible before and after work. Even when going through IVF treatment, I’d have my eggs collected under general anaesthetic in the morning and be back at my desk by lunch. I know I can’t be the only woman to have done this. They say that around one in six couples struggle to conceive. I don’t know how they get these statistics but if it’s true it’s happening on every street in every town. Yet most people don’t talk about it, not openly or often anyway, because infertility is a stigma still shrouded in secrecy and shame. And now I’ve gone and written about it and everyone is going to know the full horror.
I walk out of the station, cross the road with the crowds and head into Pret to pick up some breakfast. I hover by the fruit salad for a moment and then think, bugger it, and get a croissant and a coffee.
My first meeting of the day is a long and tedious one. We’re building an extension to the theatre and the costs are getting too high. We are going through each item, line by line, to try and bring the budget down. I’m surrounded by men in suits who work on the management side of the construction industry and are getting frustrated with me because I refuse to compromise on how nice I want the new toilets to be. Unfortunately for them, I raised the money for this project and am paying their extortionate fees, so they can’t ignore me. As they tap on their calculators, comparing the cost of full-height versus half-height tiling, my mind wanders,
I can’t help thinking that feminism has a lot to answer for. Of course I wouldn’t say that if Mary Wollstonecraft or Emmeline Pankhurst were in the room. But they’re not, they’re dead, so I figure I’m all right. Nor do I want to seem ungrateful for everything they did to help liberate women from being seen only as wives and mothers. It’s because of them that I am educated and have the right to vote (even if I’ve not always been very good at using it). In fact, you could say it’s because of them that I am sitting here now and these men are ultimately going to have to listen to my views on tiling, because I already know I’m not going to compromise. But even though Mary and Emmeline unquestionably achieved something big for me and all of womankind, I do feel there is something that they never fully grappled with, and that is this: nature is not a feminist.
Like many women of my generation, I didn’t ever consider that I would have a baby before my thirties. I went to an all-girls comprehensive school in north London renowned for turning out independent, go-getting young women. We were all encouraged to attend university and get on the career ladder in our twenties. The limited sex education we received was mainly focused on how not to have a baby. Teenage pregnancy equalled disaster, or so we were led to believe. No one was supposed to settle down with the first boy they kissed, it was good to be picky, and every girl was looking for the perfect modern man. In fact, motherhood wasn’t much discussed at all. It was certainly never presented as a career path, and for those of us who knew we wanted to have children, we just assumed it would happen as and when we were ready.
This would be fine if everything went to plan. But if you’re a woman and you get to your thirties before deciding to have a baby, and you then find that getting pregnant isn’t as easy as you thought it would be – as you were told it would be – time is suddenly running out. Because the thing we’re not told at school, or at least not explicitly, is that a woman is born with her lifetime supply of eggs, and day by day, from puberty, these eggs diminish in number and quality as she gets older. This essentially means that the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be to conceive. It doesn’t mean you can’t and won’t get pregnant – in fact because so many people are leaving it later, the average age of first-time mothers is increasing, and there are definitely social and economic benefits to becoming a parent later in life. But any good doctor will tell you that the optimum biological age for a woman to have children is around twenty-five; if you leave it until your thirties or forties, it might not happen as easily, and there will be less time to sort out any problems if you have them. Because even though life expectancy is increasing – another reason that later parenthood is not necessarily a bad thing – the average age of the female menopause has not changed, and around ten years before a woman reaches it, her chance of giving birth to her own biological baby massively diminishes. That age is generally around forty-three, but the hard truth is your fertility has actually been falling off Beachy Head since puberty; that’s just the age when it hits the sea.
Forty-three is a prime number. It has its own Wikipedia page. It is also a centred heptagonal, a Heegner and a repdigit. Forty-three is the atomic number for technetium, a silvery grey metal. It is the international dialling code for Austria, the name of a Spanish liqueur and the number of the bus route that goes from Barnet to London Bridge. Now I am forty-three, and like all prime numbers I seem to be divisible by only one, and that one is me. Like I said, nature is not a feminist. And maybe that’s why the number of women entering their forties childless has doubled in a generation. If these women are anything like me, it’s not necessarily because they’ve actively chosen not to have children – many of them probably assumed they would be mothers too, and now they’re left wondering what the hell they’re going to do.
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It’s hard to explain the pain of losing something you never had. Something that was never more than an expectation, a dream or at most a cluster of cells. It’s not like