Is my biological clock not working, or is motherhood just not for me?

I think I know the exact moment I decided that motherhood wasn’t for me. Parent-teacher interview night, 1997. I watched as my mother exited my teacher’s classroom as Ms Novak, crossed the hall, and entered my half-sister’s with a different name. How strange to think that my mum could be two people at once, and that neither of them had a first name.

I didn’t know then that it was a defining moment. I wasn’t that precocious. Years later, I would revisit this blip of a memory and layer fresh context over it. I had noted my missing maternal instinct and went looking for answers. I thought about one day losing my identity to some imaginary baby and immediately opted out.

“You’ll change your mind someday,” said plenty of people, like a threat, so I spent my 20s armed with prophylactics, waiting nervously for my biological clock to betray me and prove them right. Reporting now from my 30s, I’m yet to hear the trill of any such alarm. Are the batteries dead in this thing? Was I right all along?

Maybe it’s because the whole experience gets a bad rap. Stay-at-home parenting is lauded as challenging and rewarding in one breath, then dismissed as an easy ride in the next. When someone boards an aeroplane with an infant strapped to their chest, the rest of the passengers pre-emptively seethe. We hear about morning sickness and episiotomies, sleep cycling and toilet training, tantrums, quests for childcare more harrowing than The Hunger Gamesthe House of Mouse theme song so constant in your home that you’ll be humming it in the afterlife, and all your hard work thrown back in your face 20 years later, when your name comes up in some therapist’s office.

Little imbalances seem magnified within the context of familial roles: dad bods versus mummy makeovers; the way women provide childcare, but men only babysit; how single mothers are condemned and single fathers revered; all the anecdotes about the lopsided mental load; and those damning sitcom tropes of the rigid, fun-crushing mum and the hapless good-cop dad. It’s a “no” from me.

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I know there’s joy. I’ve heard about the door that unlocks inside your chest when you hold your baby for the first time, opening on an endless expanse of love and meaning previously undiscovered, and it sounds wonderful. So why don’t I want it? I’m not an anti-natalist. I don’t hate kids; I don’t hiss at playgrounds or glare at children in restaurants. Whenever I see those teeny-tiny Converse on sale, I feel a strange compulsion to buy them. In a long, unbroken chain that stretches back to when we were fish, I’m the last link. Does that make me defective?

It’s just that whenever I’m alone with my three-year-old niece, I feel the same way as I do when a bird finds its way into the house. I like my weekends free, my money to myself, and my body the way it is.

I hear the response already, always from parents: selfish, immature. There, you can save your breath. I won’t argue. I’m also impatient, short-fused, fickle and unadaptable. If parenting is a full-time, lifelong job, I don’t think I meet enough of the entry criteria to apply. Couldn’t you argue, then, that it’s kinder to spare that imaginary baby a mother like me? Every child I know was carefully planned and desperately wanted, not born as insurance policies against future regret. Isn’t that how it should be? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if that were always the case?