Some of us wait forever to be a mum - Others are certain it is not for them

Tuesday 21st of January 2014 | Category: Opinion | Written by: Leoarna Mathias

I will be forever fascinated by what it is that drives us women to want to be mothers – and equally intrigued by those who are certain that they don’t want to be.

Clichéd though it sounds, I have always wanted to be a mum – at least I can’t remember ever thinking that I didn’t want to have children. My first marriage eventually failed because of this single issue, as my ex-husband finally voiced his decision not to be a father, I knew I couldn’t stay with someone where I had zero hope of fulfilling my own heartfelt ambition. When I did meet someone new I made my feelings clear – at 33, I knew I couldn’t really give any more of my time to someone who didn’t want kids. Luckily, he did. Unluckily, as it turned out, my clock was already ticking a little erratically, and we endured a number of very painful treatment-filled child-less years, before finally finding the end of the rainbow. I am now 42 and the (tired but happy) mother of a 5 year old girl and 2 year old boy.

Patterns across Europe

As a representative of my generation, my story or something like it is probably replicated a great deal throughout the UK. We are now it seems, arriving at motherhood later than any other nation except Germany, with the average age of a woman when her first child is born now set at 30. My generation, it seems, is also enjoying greater choices around motherhood, including the decision whether or not to become a mum at all, than any generation previously. A remarkable 20% of all women under 45 in this country are not parents, which is twice the rate of women born in 1945. mum and daughter

What the statistics can’t tell you is whether in every single case a woman is child-free by choice or child-less by circumstance – and there is a huge difference between these two seemingly innocuous little phrases. Ultimately, it is because there is a vast difference between those who choose to not have children, and those who find this status flung upon them by biology or circumstance, that the state can’t do much to change it, however much the Chief Medical Officer voices her concern about how late women are leaving things (as she did last week in this piece from The Telegraph). She expresses concern about the women who as she sees it are relying over-much on the advances of infertility medicine to cancel out the risks of leaving it until later. It can be a little tiring to hear this somewhat patronising admonishment when you are in the middle of battling with your own gynaecology. I personally couldn’t bear the thought, when it was happening to me, of anyone assuming that I had been blasé about my procreational choices. Despite all this, the CMO does at least concede that it is not for her to tell women ‘what to do’, a welcome shift in policy from this campaign that I blogged about last year. After a few thousand years of civilisation we should at least, if nothing else, be able to decide whether we wish to bring another life into the world, with all the responsibility that entails, without feeling undue pressure from the state and beyond.

Choices and Struggle

So for every woman who makes a healthy decision not to be a parent, there is another woman fighting as hard as possible to overcome startling biological odds to reach motherhood. Kelly Mosely endured 20 miscarriages before finally giving birth to a son who is now 9 months old. Kelly had a rare condition where natural killer cells in her body attacked foetuses, and in the end, a drug that is usually administered for malaria and rheumatoid arthritis gave her hope where nothing had before. Her specialist, Hassan Sheheta, acknowledges in this piece from the BBC news website that the treatment is unorthodox, but has had 70% success rates with the small cohort of women he has now treated in this way.

Before my own bundles of joy arrived I endured 3 miscarriages, and lived under a very dark cloud for 3 years. Kelly’s endurance of such unimaginable heartache, over a much longer period of time, has my upmost respect – as do the women who calmly and rationally decide that motherhood is not for them.