Why I'm so happy to be childless, says high-flyer
After a string of disastrous relationships, high-flyer Sarah Churchwell, aged 37, believes there is more life than motherhood
Incredibly, the majority of female graduates nearing 40 are childless. Here, one high-flyer says a wonderful career - and a string of disastrous men - have convinced her there's more to life than motherhood:
Last month brought yet another report warning about women 'waiting too long' to have babies.
The report had a clear message: "Time is running out. If you aren't impregnated soon, you'll rue the day."
I enjoyed this one because it was about graduate women born in 1970, which would be me.
Apparently, 40 per cent of these women have had children. I am firmly in the other 60 per cent.
Given that my seemingly hazardous decision to "wait" primarily means that I avoided having babies in any of my previous relationships, I don't rue a darn thing, thank you.
I can't imagine anything worse than still being tied to some of the men I've had relationships with - for me, or for any child unfortunate enough to have resulted from those doomed affairs.
I am a far better and far happier person today, having just turned 37, than I was five or ten years ago.
I may perhaps have been more fertile then, but I was definitely more of a fruitcake, as are so many people in their 20s (even if they don't realise it at the time).
The sad truth is that I was pretty needy - but not, thankfully, needy enough to marry the men I dated then, or bear their children.
Should I have had children with my first serious boyfriend, who moved in with me after we graduated from university? The one who couldn't find full-time employment, so that I paid both our rents and living expenses?
After two years together, I got a call one day from a woman who informed me that when I had dental surgery and my mother came to take care of me because my partner was away "on busines", he was actually having a sexy weekend with her.
She also told me that the time he had left urgently in the middle of the night - borrowing my car and money for flowers for his mother's friend, who had suddenly been taken to hospital - he was, guess where? With her.
She got the flowers; I never got the £1,000 he owed me. Clearly, it was time to change the locks.
I think I was supposed to be grateful when he called me the next day and told me that she meant nothing to him, and that he was desperate for me to forgive him.
In order to convince me of how little this six-month affair meant to him, he told me that he wouldn't care if she were hit by a bus the next day.
I asked him what kind of a monster can have sex with a woman for six months and not even care if she dies a horrendous death. Just think, this man could have been instructing my children in moral values.
Would it have been wiser for me to have had children with the man my friends and I still call "the swooper"? He was a treat. We met once or twice through mutual friends, and I asked him if he'd like to meet for a drink some time.
He said he couldn't, and wrote me a long, heartfelt letter explaining why he thought his life was too complicated at the time. I didn't know it was so complicated just to get a beer.
Six months later, he called me out of the blue, telling me to drop my plans for the evening and have dinner with him.
At dinner, he told me he thought he was in love with me. I said he couldn't be because he didn't know me. He thought this was unromantic, which I suppose it was. But it was sensible.
I was wary, but interested, and so we dated for about six months.
When I decided that he really was a miraculous white knight who had genuinely fallen in love with me from afar, I declared my feelings.
He said, and I quote: "I don't think I'm into this any more", and dumped me. He swooped in and he swooped out.
Oh, if only I had got pregnant as soon as I started dating Swooperman, how much better off I'd be - not only would I have the mental scars he left me with, but also the child he left.
Or should I have had children with the not-so-repressed homosexual I once dated?
The catalogue of bad relationship choices goes on, but if they sound disastrous, ask any other single woman - or man - in their mid-30s and you will hear similar stories. Most of us make mistakes on our way to finding the right person.
Clearly, some of the fault was mine. But timing and luck have a lot to do with the ability to make good choices.
My reluctance to make reckless decisions is partly just my character - I'm fairly analytical - but it also relates to my upbringing.
My parents had two children in five years - and then divorced. Their split was probably as civilised as one could hope, and happily I remain close to both.
Divorce, however, even at its kindest, is no picnic for the children involved.
We are all concerned about the effects of single-parent families. I was one of the lucky ones, with a father close to hand even after the divorce, as well as a devoted mother.
No one doubts the importance for children to have both their parents in their lives, though you might think people would remember to ask whether women should put the cart before the horse.
Whatever anyone else may think, I believe I've got the order right: find the right man first, and wait for the cart (with or without infants) to come along later.
Wanting children by hook or by crook - or by IVF - is not a foregone conclusion just because you're a woman. I have never said I don't want children, but I would like them to arrive into a happy home.
Reports like the one I mentioned at the outset seem to me to presume that the decision of when to conceive is entirely in a woman's hands: as if I and millions of women like me have been dillydallying, careless and negligent, through our adult lives.
The trouble is that the implication I have faced all too often in society at large is that women who forego having children are selfish hedonists bent on pursuing their own desires at the expense of their obligation to help ensure the survival of the species.
But not having children isn't necessarily a selfish decision.
Over-population is an enormous problem, not just in terms of the well-being of the population which already exists - many of whom don't seem to be doing too well, not only in Africa and Asia, but also at home.
Perhaps I ought to help care for the babies who already exist and give them access to some of the privileges with which I have been blessed.
Angelina Jolie I'm not (until I have her income, I can't afford her menagerie), but I could certainly try to help.
Similarly, having children is not always a selfless decision. Many people have children for appalling reasons, subjecting them to all kinds of consequent abuse.
Some parents are driven by narcissism, in search of a 'mini-me' child who will fulfil the dreams which eluded them; others have children because they are lonely or needy, a kind of pathological take on that revolting line in the movie Jerry Maguire: "You complete me."
Adults can opt out of the demand from another that they should be available to complete another person, but what about the poor child brought into the world to "complete" his or her parents, whose life is presumed to be at the service of someone else's needs?
Tracy Emin recently said she fears growing old surrounded by newspaper clippings because there are no children on the horizon for her.
But who's to say that if she did have children, they'd surround her as she grew old?
They might stick her in a rest home and drop in every couple of years, when they find the time. Having children to improve your old age is not a noble reason to become a parent.
You'll notice I haven't yet mentioned my career. Being a woman with a profession important enough for you to call it a career seems to have become shorthand for 'selfish' - or spinster - in our society.
You never hear a man being warned not to put his career first: why should I have to put up with this endless hectoring? I know it's difficult for many to accept, but I not only love what I do, I am what I do.
After working for eight years on a PhD I now teach literature - and I write, which is the only thing I ever wanted to do in my life; it is fundamental to my sense of myself.
Many women do not have jobs only to pay the bills, or support the kids. I'm fortunate that my vocation is actually rather compatible with raising children.
The question is, how can I be myself - a devoted career woman - and have a child at the same time if I feel defined by something other than being a mother, or hoping to be a mother? If I knew the answer to this question I would share it. For now, it remains a question.
Not every woman knows she wants children and can have them.
Some women, like me, aren't sure; other women desperately want them, but can't have them; some women have them and aren't sure they want them. (Nor, of course, do all men know exactly what they want and manage to achieve it.)
Only the ones who know what they want - babies, or definitely not babies - and can have what they want are the lucky ones. The rest of us must struggle a bit more.
That said, I am the proud aunt of three dazzling children. At a recent family event I shamelessly monopolised my two-year-old niece's attention; we took long walks - actually, we took short walks, very slowly - during which we managed to sing an alphabet song 127 times. I have been boring people ever since with stories that prove she's a genius.
The devotion I feel to all three of my sister's children sometimes makes me think that maybe I am mother material after all.
Either way, ultimately I will have to live with the consequences of my decisions.
I may well try to become a mother, maybe even soon: believe it or not, there has been a lovely, noncheating, non-swooping, definitely heterosexual man in the picture for a few years, and children are something we talk about. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
And if I no longer can have children (assuming I ever could) and come to regret that, well that is my heartbreak. It won't hurt the children I don't have and, in fact, might help the children I would probably try to adopt. < It may, of course, hurt the man in the picture; this would be another question. But he could also dump me for a more fertile option.
I'm not being flippant; merely realistic.
In this life, you pays your money and takes your chances.
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