To baby or not to baby

One of my best friends phoned me up the other day and shrilled ‘l’ve got some news’, l instantly know she was pregnant. l was right she’s just conceived her second child. L was thrilled for her and shed a few tears of joy but after coming off the phone l plunged into over analytical thinking about my current situation in life. At least half my girlfriends are married and have babies and both my sisters too. I’m not married neither do I think I’m close to trotting up the aisle and l’m certainly not planning for the pitter patter of tiny feat anytime soon but l’m  ok with that so why did l momentarily panic?

It wasn’t feeling of envy or jealousy about wanting something l don’t have; for all the faults I have envy isn’t ones of them it was more a moment of, ‘should l be having children now? Am l going down the wrong pathway in life’?’Am l missing my window’? Am l defying my genetic encoding?

The thing is l don’t want to have children yet and it’s not because l’ selfish; quite the contrary it’s because l know how much hard work and effort goes into being a good mother and l’m not ready to make those sacrifices in order to play that role just yet l think it’s more selfish to be one of those people who has a baby half heartedly and then ends up resenting the child for taking up so much of their time.

The latest research says that one in thee female graduates born in the 1970s won’t be having children. A well know celebrity magazine also carried out a survey on women aged between 28 and 32 (I fit somewhere into that age bracket} which found that 45 per cent of us consider having children as the bottom of the pile in a list of priorities. Personal relationships came first followed by family and career so hopefully this will mean that newspapers will stop publishing articles accusing us childless women of being career obsesses designer label wearing egotistical creatures that laugh in the face of nature and start focusing on what’s caused this change in women’s thinking.