In the more than five years I have been writing this column, only one subject has generated anywhere near the level of correspondence as my father’s death and, before it, The Break-Up: the question of whether to have children. It’s a question that crosses my mind increasingly often – prompted by the knowledge that I am about a year off the age at which the NHS would consider me of “advanced maternal age” (supposedly a gentler term for what used to be called a “geriatric mother”), and by the increasingly prolific reproduction of my peers. In my childlessness, I am now very much in the minority among friends of the same age, a reversal that has occurred over the past couple of years with dizzying speed.
I found myself considering the question with more intensity than usual over a recent long weekend spent with one of my dearest childhood friends, B—, her husband and their beautiful four-month-old boy at their home in Norway. Our friendship is one of those golden ones that when we are reunited, immediately feels (to me, at least) easy, natural and close.
Over the course of the weekend, I found myself returning again and again to the subject, both in conversation and in private thought: how do you know you want to have children? How do you know when you’re ready? How do you make it work, practically? How do you afford it? B— is open, pragmatic, and so I felt more able to talk in circles around these questions with her than I would with most. I truly believe that if B— was finding motherhood a terrible and deeply regretful experience, she would tell me as much. (Thankfully, she is not.)
The question of affordability is easier to answer if you live in Norway, where the state funds 49 weeks of parental leave at full pay. I, meanwhile, have done the maths, and it would be a struggle to pay my rent if I were to take more than six months off work. And quite who would look after the hypothetical baby after that point is a glaring TBC. Both these facts are decidedly suboptimal. Many friends have simply told me none of this matters: if you want it enough, you find a way to make it work. This is, I fear, a fantastically privileged position to take, and not all that helpful if you’re not sure you do want it “enough”, but you still might, maybe, theoretically, want it a bit. B—, by contrast, had reassuringly few answers.
During one of his many stays in hospital, my father reflected with unexpected sagacity that it must be strange for me to find myself suddenly on a different fork in the road to most of my friends. I remember what he said next quite clearly, because he rarely offered any comment on my life choices, whether positive or negative: “I don’t know why anyone of your generation has kids before their mid-thirties.”
Dad had his children in two distinct phases: first, in his early thirties, he had me and the eldest of my two brothers; then, in his late forties, he had my youngest brother. He went on to tell me that he’d had a far more positive experience with parenthood the second time around. I tried not to take this as a thinly veiled insult about what a nightmare child I had been. Instead, he meant – I think – that he felt he’d been a better father when he was older, established, surer of himself. And, by extension, sought to reassure me that there is still time to have children, if that’s what I want, and that, in his experience, I might enjoy it more a little later in life. (Of course, this principle was, biologically speaking, more straightforward for him than it is for me.)
I have, over the course of the past year or so, come to realise – and perhaps this was obvious to everyone else – that part of the pain for me, in adjusting to this new reality in which all my friends have children and I don’t, is that at least part of me wants what they have. That watching them get married and buy houses and have children only serves to remind me that I, too, once imagined all these things for myself, and that life hasn’t quite yet worked out as I’d hoped it might.
Time to move to Norway, perhaps.
[Further reading: This theft is the Louvre’s next exhibition]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop