There’s a weird thing about being a woman in your thirties without children.

People notice.

They don’t always say anything, but you can see it sometimes. That little pause when children come up in conversation. The quick look at your face, as though they’re trying to work out whether you’re choosing not to have them, struggling to have them, or just haven’t got round to it yet.

I never know what answer people are hoping for.

The truth is, I don’t know.

Which is a bit ridiculous because I’m in my thirties. Surely by now I’m supposed to know.

Sometimes I think I do.

Then I’ll be lying awake at some ridiculous hour and I’ll start wondering what a child of mine would have looked like.

I don’t even know why.

I don’t sit around imagining school runs and packed lunches. It’s more random than that. I wonder if they’d have my eyes. Whether they’d be funny. Whether they’d be shy. Whether I’d have liked them.

That sounds awful.

Would I have liked who they became?

I don’t know.

And then there’s the question of whether I would have liked being a mother.

There are days when I’m very glad I don’t have children.

I like my life. I really do.

I like the quiet. I like sleeping until I wake up. I like being able to decide on a Saturday morning that I’m not doing anything today and then actually not do anything.

I like having money to waste on stupid things.

I have Funko Pops.

Quite a lot of them.

I don’t even have a good excuse.

I just like them.

I can spend an afternoon reading. I can watch rubbish television. I can start some ridiculous hobby and lose interest halfway through it. Nobody needs to know.

I like that.

Then sometimes I think about having a child and it isn’t the freedom I think about.

It’s the person.

What would they have been like?

That thought can sit there for a while.

I don’t really know what to call the feeling that comes with it. Sadness, maybe. Grief sounds too definite. How do you grieve somebody who never existed?

I don’t know.

I’ve never found a satisfying answer to that.

Fertility problems have made it worse.

There’s a difference between not knowing whether you want children and wondering whether you’ll actually be able to have them.

Once that possibility is hanging around, you start questioning everything.

Do I want a child?

Or do I want to know that I could have one?

I honestly can’t always tell.

If somebody told me tomorrow that I could have children whenever I decided, would I feel relieved?

Probably.

Would I then decide I wanted one?

Maybe not.

That’s the problem.

Or maybe that’s not the problem at all.

Maybe I just don’t want children.

I’ve thought that plenty of times too.

Then why does it hurt sometimes?

Annoying.

That’s the only word I’ve got for it.

My childhood probably doesn’t help.

I had a difficult childhood. There are things from it that still follow me around, although most of the time I’m not thinking about them.

You grow up and get on with things.

You go to work. You pay bills. You forget why you walked into the kitchen. You have a normal conversation about what you’re having for dinner.

And then something happens.

Sometimes it’s something stupid.

Motherhood is one of those things that can bring up stuff I thought I’d dealt with.

I’ve wondered whether I don’t want children or whether I’m frightened of becoming a parent.

I’ve wondered whether I’d know what I was doing.

Whether I’d lose my patience.

Whether I’d panic about everything.

Whether I’d repeat things I spent years telling myself I would never repeat.

That’s the one that gets me.

Because you can tell yourself, over and over, that you’ll be different.

And maybe you would be.

Maybe I would.

I don’t know.

Then again, maybe I’d be perfectly fine.

I might actually be a good mother.

It’s strange that I can imagine both things so easily.

And then there’s my partner.

We didn’t meet as two perfectly sorted people with everything worked out.

Thank fuck.

We’ve both got history. Some of it we’ve dealt with. Some of it hasn’t stayed dealt with.

That’s the annoying thing about old wounds. You think you’ve finished with something and then, years later, it finds another way back in.

Being with someone for a long time means you see all the bits.

The good bits, obviously.

The irritating bits too.

You know when they’re tired. You know what they’re like when they’re stressed. You know which stupid little thing will annoy them and, occasionally, you do it anyway.

They know yours.

It’s not particularly romantic when you put it like that.

But it is real.

And then you have to talk about the future.

Money.

Marriage.

Where you’re going to live.

Children.

That last one has never felt simple to me.

It’s not really a question of whether we like babies. I don’t think anyone is asking that.

It’s whether we want to become parents.

Sometimes I think we could do it.

Sometimes I think we’d be alright.

Sometimes I look at our life and think, why would I change it?

We’re sitting on the sofa. The dog is asleep. Nobody needs anything. We’re watching something neither of us will remember tomorrow.

And I like it.

I like being selfish.

There. I’ve said it.

Maybe that’s not a very nice thing to admit.

I like being able to think about myself.

I like deciding what to do with my weekend without considering somebody else’s needs first. I like eating when I’m hungry. I like sleeping. I like having hobbies that are completely unnecessary.

I can buy a stupid plastic figure because I want it.

I can spend too much money on books.

I can stay in bed reading a filthy romance novel and feel absolutely no shame about it.

Well.

Not much shame.

My dog is probably the closest thing I have to a little dependent, although that’s not really fair because he is a dog and not a tiny person whose entire development depends on me.

He is still my family, though.

He’s there when I get home. He knows my routines. He knows when I’m upset, although his response to most emotional situations is to see if there’s any food available.

He doesn’t know I’m in my thirties.

He doesn’t know I don’t have children.

He doesn’t care.

He just knows me.

I like that.

Maybe because of where I came from.

I don’t know.

He has a warm bed. He gets fed. He gets spoiled. He knows where he’s safe.

Sometimes I think about that more than I probably should.

Maybe because I know what it feels like when home doesn’t feel safe.

Or maybe I just really love my dog.

Both can be true.

That’s probably why I get irritated when people act as though a woman without children must have some massive hole in her life.

What if there isn’t one?

What if my life is just my life?

I’ve got my partner.

I’ve got the dog.

I’ve got books everywhere.

I’ve got far too many Funko Pops.

I’ve got things from childhood that I’m still trying to understand.

I’ve got fertility problems that I wish I didn’t have.

I’ve got a relationship where neither of us arrived without baggage.

And I’ve got this question sitting somewhere in the background.

Do I want children?

Sometimes.

Maybe.

Not really.

Fuck knows.

It changes.

That’s the honest answer.

There are women I know who have children and love it. I can look at them and think, I’d like that.

Then I see one of them trying to get a screaming child into a coat and think, no fucking chance.

Five minutes later I’ll feel guilty for even thinking that.

Then I’ll forget about it.

Then something else will happen.

That’s how it goes.

I think I’ve spent too long trying to work out which feeling is the correct one.

There probably isn’t one.

I don’t need to prove that being childless is better.

It’s not.

And I don’t need to pretend motherhood wouldn’t have been wonderful either.

It might have been.

I’ll never know.

That’s the bit that catches me.

There are so many versions of your life that you never get to meet.

You make a choice and the other version just disappears.

Or maybe it doesn’t disappear. Maybe you just stop looking at it.

I don’t know.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like with a teenager.

Then I remember teenagers.

Actually, no.

Let’s not.

And yet I still wonder.

I can imagine being seventy and thinking I should have had children.

I can also imagine being seventy and being completely relieved that I didn’t.

I can picture both.

That’s probably why I don’t trust myself when I try to predict how I’ll feel in thirty years.

I might change my mind.

I might not.

Maybe fertility will always be the thing that makes me wonder whether I wanted something I never got to properly choose.

Maybe I’ll stop thinking about it altogether.

Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow.

Who knows.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my thirties treating every feeling like evidence.

Sadness doesn’t automatically mean regret.

Relief doesn’t automatically mean I made the right decision.

Envy doesn’t necessarily mean I want somebody else’s life.

Sometimes you see something and it gets to you.

That’s all.

I’m still learning that.

Although I hate saying things like “I’m still learning that” because it sounds like the end of an Instagram caption.

Anyway.

The point is, I don’t know.

And maybe I’m finally getting a bit less frightened of saying that.

I have a life.

It’s not the life I imagined when I was younger, although I’m not entirely sure the younger version of me knew what she was imagining anyway.

She probably thought I’d have everything figured out by now.

That’s funny.

I barely know what I’m having for dinner half the time.

So this is what I’ve got.

My partner beside me.

My dog taking up half the sofa.

Books I haven’t read yet.

Books I’ve read three times.

Funko Pops I absolutely did not need.

A childhood I can’t change.

A body that hasn’t always done what I wanted it to do.

A relationship that isn’t perfect, because neither of us is.

And a future I can’t see yet.

Some days I look at all of that and feel incredibly lucky.

Some days I wonder about the child who isn’t here.

Some days I don’t think about it at all.

I don’t know what that means.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.

Tonight I’ll probably get into bed with my book. The dog will somehow take up most of the space despite having an entire bed of his own, and my partner will probably be snoring his head off in my face.

I’ll probably laugh.

And then, at some point, I’ll turn the light off.

Maybe I’ll think about it again.

Maybe I won’t.

That’s probably enough for today.