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The plates of Easter Sunday roast lamb were still being passed when my mum and eldest child got stuck into something almost as meaty at the lunch table. A conversation about whether at 31 he’s any closer to fatherhood.
No, said Jack. I don’t think I’ll have kids. Not affordable to raise them in modern Australia in a capital city. Even if I could afford them, I’d question what sort of life they’d have in this world.
Having children is not always as rosy as many parents claim.
It’s an open joke-not-joke that I’d sell several organs or swear off Italian shoes until eternity to be a grandmother.
Later, Jack and I had a chat about his complete future and my shattered hopes. I bit my tongue not to bore him witless with the old, “The thing about having a baby is you don’t know how much you’ll love it until it’s born.”
My experience has been like a line from Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace: “The two things in life you never regret are having a swim and having a baby.” I never leave the ocean thinking, “waste of time”, and felt an instant, irrevocable tsunami of devotion when little Jack made me a mother in 1993.
But lately – watching women friends scurry about at Easter and during these school holidays – I do get there’s a proper, terrifying flipside to that.
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Having a baby is the rare thing you can’t back out of. Tatts, vasectomies, vows, all reversible. Babies, not so much. What if you do it and realise it’s not for you? Even if it’s decades later, and you question not your love for your children but what your life would have been like without them. Whether you’d make a sliding doors choice if you had your time over.
Not having a baby is just as permanent. What if you get comfy not being a parent, then watch mates dangle babies over christening fonts, share junior-sport war stories, walk brides down aisles, and are driven mad wondering if you made the right call?
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