Prue Corlette
A few weeks ago, I was at a bbq when I got into a rather awkward conversation with a woman I slightly know.
She was having a cuddle with my boys, and said she couldn't wait until she had children. I know she is in either her very late 30s to early 40s, and is in a steady relationship, so I asked her what she was waiting for. "The right time," she replied. "I've just got too much stuff I want to do first. It's never too late!"
I just couldn't help myself. Call me rude, tell me it's none of my business, but yes, I told her she was running out of time. Rapidly. If she was so keen on having kids, she needed to start trying, sooner rather than once she had done all of her "stuff" Stuff is always there. Fertility is not.
Scrolling through my list of friends on Facebook the other day, it struck me how a good number of these women, many hitting the big 35, were child-free. Many of them are old school friends. I went to a selective school which prized education, career and academic achievement above all else. Every issue, the Old Girls' newsletter is filled with the career stories of past students but the valete never recalls how great a mother the deceased was.
To my great embarrassment, I never even knew how to get pregnant until I actually wanted to. Of course I knew the mechanics of the whole affair, but sex-ed at school focussed on how to avoid pregnancy, with condom on the banana type stuff. Not once was it mentioned that if you wanted kids, you better get cracking before 35. It was all about HSC, uni, then of course post-grad studies, travel, career, meet a partner, buy a house, then a few years later, start thinking about starting a family.
So I look back on the Class of '93 and see a bucketload of over-achievers. Lots of mums - which one expects in a class of almost 200 girls - but also lot of women whose biological clocks are ticking like crazy.
Of course it's perfectly fine to be child-free by choice - some of my best mates are - but what about those who don't choose it. I have a girlfriend who hadn't met the "right" guy by her late 30s, so she took matters into her own hands and visited her local fertility clinic. Four miscarriages and ten IVF cycles later, she is the mother of a gorgeous girl, but she never expected it to take five years to get there, just scraping in to motherhood by 45.
Because IVF, that great saviour for the career girls and those who didn't meet Mr Right until later, is lauded as the solution. Only by the time you get to the stage where you need it, it becomes apparent that it's not necessarily the safety net the mass media had promised.
And while recent comments by a prominent obstetrician suggesting "older" mothers were selfish, condemning their offspring to a life taking care of geriatric parents were greeted with outrage, I agree with him to an extent. Not that women of a certain age shouldn't be having kids, but that if they want them, and KNOW they want them, they should pull their socks up and get on with the job.
Many years ago, I made a pact with three gay friends that if I hadn't met The Guy by 35, one of them would put his hand down for the job. Given that they now live in Shanghai, San Francisco and Paris, it's lucky my now-husband came along. Would I have been prepared to put in the call had he not arrived? Probably not. To tell you the truth, until I met him, I wasn't even sure I wanted kids, and I definitely didn't want to be a solo mother. But I know there are plenty of women out there who want the child more than they want the relationship and to you, I say go out and investigate your options. And to those who are in relationships and waiting for "the right time", get on with it and stop practising. As one of my best friends once told me (who went the solo route at 27), you'll never regret the children you have, just the ones you don't.
Should women consider starting a family earlier? Comment on Prue's blog.
