It’s probably the first time I’ve been bang on trend. I’m usually the person watching Saltburn six months after everyone else, and my first pair of Gazelles arrived at the door the day they became passé. But in 2022, I joyrode on the zeitgeist by having a baby aged 42, just as ONS figures were released that showed not only were mothers continuing to get older, but half of all Millennials now turn 30 without having had kids—“the first cohort” to do so, the report said. I spent most of my thirties adamantly not wanting kids. I even wrote a piece about not wanting kids for this very magazine. I was set, definite, resolved.
But beneath the breeziness in that article about being a sensitive, sleep-fond, book-reading, nomadic introvert fundamentally unsuited to parenting (all still true. Pls stroke me, give me a book, then leave me alone) was this: an unshakeable conviction that I would be a terrible mother. Given I’d only just learnt how to mother myself in my late thirties (that’s a whole other article), how could I be trusted with a brand new human? The parenting police would be alerted, surely, and snatch the apricot-cheeked fuzzball away.
