Standing in a circle of women waiting for an exercise class to start the other day, I found myself laughing and commiserating with them about the bugs their children kept catching at nursery, wondering when I was going to be caught out. I knew the question was coming, “Do you have children?”, followed by the usual uncomfortable silence when I said: “No.”
I have always dreamed of being a mother. I am in my late 30s – past the scary age of 35 when a woman’s fertility is meant to fall off a cliff. I’m also single. Every day I struggle to suppress the bubbling panic that I might never have children.
It has been mentally exhausting and often lonely, hovering between potential motherhood and ending up permanently childless. The experience has been made all the more fraught by what feels like a growing chasm between childless women and mothers. In recent years, it feels like both camps have developed a chronic lack of empathy for the other.
