I awoke with a start. Someone was lying on top of me. Someone who smelt like Davidoff Cool Water and stale fags. Was I back in the 00s? Had I travelled back through time? As I ran my hands across his back (yes, it was a man) I felt hair bristle beneath my fingers. The weight of him was quite comforting but I needed to pee. In a few weeks I’d know whether I’d been successful or not. Already I was hoping not.
My head hurt and I’d a bitter taste of stale booze in my mouth. This was my first attempt, the first step in my plan, but I was worried I hadn’t set the standards high enough. He was hairy, emitting an eggy smell, and had a terrible taste in home furnishings (who chose black furniture these days?). OK, I’m not perfect; I have a black hair that grows out of my left nipple (this is quite common, apparently, but repellent nonetheless). Each time I pluck it out, it comes back stronger. I have an index finger that is slightly shorter as the top came off in a door when I was eleven and I have thick legs, which make shorts out of the question.
In the bathroom, I breathed in the fresh, toilet-block smell that emanated from the loo. At least I wasn’t going to be sick – I was not that hungover. I needed a pee, but if I was going to get pregnant, if it had actually worked, I needed to be careful that I didn’t dislodge his sperm. Hairy had been drunk enough not to notice that there was a sizeable hole in the end of the condom. This hole I’d engineered with a safety pin before we’d got into things. I’d been surprised that he’d requested a condom as he’d been so drunk but luckily I’d been prepared for this eventuality anyway. I was ovulating but was no spring chicken. I would google to see what the stats might be this time. And perhaps it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t sure about passing on these super-hairy genes to my offspring anyway. Body hair was very unfashionable now, and I’d be cursing this future child to a lifetime of waxing and epilation fees. Although, if the climate was rapidly warming up, was more body hair a good thing to help regulate body temperature?
Last night had been the first step in the baby plan I’d formulated. I’d yearned for a baby for some time now. I got a pang whenever I was confronted with yet another photo on social media – the first scan, the gender-reveal party, cake with either blue or pink sponge inside, the bump accompanied by a playful sign denoting how many weeks along it was now, then the wrinkled baby and birth story (usually quite harrowing), and so it continued: the first day of eating solids, the nursery, school, holidays… If you didn’t have kids then what did you actually post about?
At first I’d kidded myself that all was OK, that time was still on my side: ‘Oh well, at least Lydia Sotherby isn’t pregnant – I mean, at school she was popular but it looks like she’s still stuck in a job she hates and has no partner.’ Then a couple of months later I’d see a grainy, black and white scan photo with the declaration: ‘TWO BECOMES THREE!’ and I’d be, When had one become two let alone Three? Scrolling through Lydia’s photos, I’d realise there was a photo two years back of a wedding ring which I hadn’t even noticed (why hadn’t I been invited?) and I’d have to find someone else from my past that hadn’t yet done what we were all supposed to do. ‘Oh, at least Angela Rodgers hasn’t had a baby,’ I’d chant to myself. But it wasn’t just peer pressure. It was a biological thing. It was an ache. It was also the fact that my life was a pile of donkey manure and, without a child, it would continue on the same trajectory (one that was ultimately very dull) until it was game over.
Was Angela Rodgers pregnant? I made a mental note to double-check on that. She’d been massively unpopular at school, had terrible acne and was tall – but not the kind of tall that men deal with easily.
Aged thirty-eight and time was running out. One older friend (forty-two) that I’d been to uni with was already a grandma! This wasn’t ideal, but at least she’d benefit from all those comments on how amazing she looked, how lucky she was to have got all the parenting wrapped up already – though nowadays being a grandparent was tough and you were expected to pretty much do 50 percent of the childcare if you were capable. My twenties had been a blur of listening to Radiohead and staring out of various windows smoking – waiting for something important to happen. My thirties were when I started to realise that nothing important was happening and the onus was on me to make things happen. I’d never, in fact, felt a sense of agency over my life (this was changing now with my plan in place) but around thirty-five I realised the following:
- I was never going to be discovered.
- There was no such thing as a perfect man.
- I would never wear denim shorts and get away with it no matter how many carbs I cut out from my diet.
Now my social media was awash with tiny, scrunched-up faces and love-heart emojis.
Eddie arrived at 5.08am this morning and we’re over the moon #blessed
Tabitha came unexpectedly (how so?) this evening and we can’t believe how lucky we are #newparentslovedupbigtime
We are excited to announce the arrival of our new baby. We can’t stop pinching ourselves! #howluckyarewe?
Was it luck though? All these babies were planned, babies that arrived in long-term relationships. There was no photo of a woman staring into the camera with a blank expression on her face.
Kate is happy to announce that nothing has happened of note #nolife #norelationship #nobaby #nada
#stillwaitingforsomethingtohappenbutnothing
Mum would have been disappointed. She’d always given me pep talks. ‘You need to be the director of your own narrative. Enjoy life but make sure you have a great career and don’t rely on anyone. Don’t leave it too late. You have to plan and then plan some more.’
Her words echoed in my ears. She’d been worried about my lack of baby. In the later years, just before she’d died, she’d kept bringing children into our conversations.
‘So … are you thinking about babies, Kate?’ she’d say if we were watching a nappy advert on the TV.
I’d look at the mum on the TV’s adoring, blissful expression and feel a hiccup of sadness.
‘I’ve still got time, right?’ I’d reply. ‘There’s no big rush.’
At that stage I’d been thirty-five. Thirty-five didn’t feel too bad as it wasn’t approaching forty. I was also in a relationship then. There was hope.
‘I don’t want you to put it on the back burner, darling. So many women seem to be doing that. I had my kids in my twenties. Now there must be an awful lot of women who are missing out.’
‘And don’t settle,’ Mum would say. ‘That was the mistake with your dad. He was good-looking but only interested in himself. I only realised when it was too late.’ Dad had been a sound engineer and travelled around different studios, recording classical music. I didn’t have any desire to contact him – what kind of person abandoned their children just like that? What kind of person never tried to stay in touch? No birthday cards, no Christmas presents…
‘I hope I’ll get married one day,’ I’d said to Mum – I wanted to have a different life, a more stable one. ‘I want the whole caboodle – 2.4 kids, the lot.’
And she was right about lots of women missing out on having kids. There were plenty of news reports and statistics that showed that fact. Yes, of course it was fine if you didn’t want to have kids – I read interviews with these women to see if I could make myself feel the same sentiments, but I didn’t and couldn’t share their conviction. The baby plan had been concocted one evening after I’d returned from drinks with an old school friend. She’d had her second baby, was six months in, and had invited all her old mates out to celebrate.
‘I’m so tired! I sometimes wish I could be pushed around in that damn buggy all day,’ she’d said to me at some point in the night, ‘but Kate, I’m so happy. I mean, it’s awful, but it’s a happy kind of awful, and it’s stopped me from obsessing about myself.’
‘In what way?’ I’d asked, curious. I was always obsessing about myself. I was like one of those telescopes where you peered down one end but instead of seeing lots of bright, sparkling colours you just saw an anxious, wide-eyed face staring back at you.
‘I just don’t have time. It’s only when you have a kid that you stop thinking about yourself. It’s liberating.’
‘But awful, too?’
‘Yes, sort of. And tiring. Did I tell you how tired I am?’
‘Yes, you did.’
Something about this conversation made it all click into place. I’d always been too focused on me. This was the source of my anxiety, the reason why I woke every morning with a bad tummy and butterflies (on the good days) and heart palpitations and sweats (on the bad ones). One benefit of becoming a mum would be to shift the focus and perhaps shut off some of the mental chitter-chatter that drove me bananas.
The baby plan was simple.
- Choose fertile times in the calendar with the aid of ovulation tests which were ninety-nine percent accurate; quite expensive but could be bought in bulk on Amazon.
- Locate a man in a bar/gym/supermarket/wherever.
- Have sex.
- Repeat above until pregnant.
Another reason I wanted a baby was that when I thought back to happier times in my life (and there had been some) they involved taking care of someone else. I’d had a cat called Kipper when I was seven years old. He was a giant, orange, loved-up thing, very overweight and affectionate. I’d put a baby bonnet on his head, wrap a blanket around his body and push him around our tiny square of garden in a doll’s buggy. Mum would watch and say, ‘Be careful, I’m not sure he’s enjoying that, Kate – he might scratch you.’
I felt perfectly calm when I was looking after Kipper. I knew that looking after a baby was different, but even looking after Mum in her last few months had given me a sense of meaning. Besides, what did women do if they didn’t have a proper career? You could be one of those women who strode about the place getting shit done or you had kids. And yes, all the living in my own head was exhausting: the ruminating about small stuff, the endless hypothesising, the worrying. If I was going to be anxious all my life then it made sense to do it over something important rather than the fact I’d seen a small brown mark on my left thigh that might be cancer but might be a speck of Magnum that I’d dropped in my lap last night. I’d always been too earnest. The kid at the party watching. I was the classic ‘old head on young shoulders,’ Mum used to say.
Like many women, I’d assumed that having a family would just happen. For a while it had looked like I was on course.
Dear Carl,
What can I say? How come it hurts to think about you three years later? And do you know that every time I smell Le Labo Santal 33 perfume I think of you (and it seems like everyone is wearing it these days – you always said it was the perfect unisex scent and I guess you were right on that one).
Kate
The truth was, we weren’t compatible. He was an extrovert; I was quieter, more guarded. I realised that he was frustrated by my lack of communication skills. He thought girls should naturally be more open and chatty and didn’t understand that we weren’t all cut from the same cloth.
‘You’re more like a boy, really,’ he’d say sometimes and then launch into a long and boring chat about his latest work gripe – how some young intern had been promoted and then given a lot of responsibility but had then failed spectacularly and Carl had taken the blame. He worked in PR, which seemed to be incredibly tough. At thirty-nine he was considered ancient, a dinosaur who struggled to keep up with the latest apps and buzzwords. I was secretly envious back then as he earnt a lot of m...
