Up The Duff

What is that song with those lines: All my friends are getting married? That’s not quite the case these days but I tell you what is. It’s:

All my friends are having babies….

As a woman, get to your mid thirties and what do you know? All the females around you start getting up the duff. It’s like mushrooms in a field. One minute – just grass and overnight – lo behold – mushrooms everywhere.

The past few months have been spectacular for mushrooming. I’ve had to start writing down due dates in my diary just so I don’t forget to send a baby card at that time rather than an invite to a cocktail party.

This burgeoning state of affairs has led me to reflect on my own un-pregnant state. Suddenly it seems that I am in a minority. My frame of reference has changed. Instead of just being; I am now in the reference category of pregnant or non-pregnant.

As a woman, it’s not a nice thing when this happens to you. One day, you’re trundling along –quite happy with yourself and your place in the world. All of a sudden, you’re head over heels in love with the idea of being pregnant. Quite why this happens – who knows? Is it the biological clock? Or the fact that everyone else is doing it so you want a piece of the action too? The reasons are endless but the idea is there, planted within yourself, even though nothing else is.

This sucks because once the idea has taken hold, you become restless. You are acutely aware that you are not pregnant. Some small part of your innocence has gone to be replaced by a yearning for something you’ve never had.

For the longest time, I never considered kids. I was not a maternal type. Even as people around me started becoming parents, I felt good that I was not. I valued my independence, solitude and freedom far too much. I had committed to marriage but that was as far as it went, so I thought.

Well bollocks to that idea. Something happened because I am now fully pro-baby. Disconcerting though it is to find myself in this space, it’s also reassuring. Even if for the simple reason that I now understand all those magazine stories about women who go to all sorts of measures to get themselves pregnant. I get it. As to how I got here, to this strange new space – who knows?

What I do know is that a few weeks ago, it suddenly seemed that the whole word was pregnant. Everyday I would get news of another baby-in-the-making. I was happy for those involved but felt my axis shift slightly each time towards some un-named abyss. I decided to give myself a reality check. I made a list of all the women I knew that were pregnant and all the women I knew that weren’t. The results were about 50/50.

Seeing it down in black and white gave me some sort of solace that breeders were not taking over the world. But I know that hearing about another pregnancy might tip me over the edge into god-knows-what.

Unless it’s mine of course.