The Egg and Sperm Race: including a review of Panorama: The right time for a baby? (BBC1, Sunday 18th June 2006)

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By Mikki Goffin

When I was a little girl, my friends and I naturally had no real concept of what being a ‘mother’ might be like. All of us though, without exception, knew that we wanted to have one “before we got too old”. Back then, “too old” was probably 20-something.

But when you’re a kid, the very possibility of ever reaching such an age seems vaguely ridiculous; completely unimaginable. It’s like another lifetime away, and in many ways I guess it is. You feel forever immortalized as a 10-year-old (and even when you’re nine, 10 seems just-out-of-reach somehow), and boys are then merely objects of wonder, intrigue and mild repulsion. All this changes, of course, when puberty hits you like an Intercity Express just a few years too soon.

As well as our beloved ‘lifelike baby’ dolls, we used to play a silly game called “The Game of Life”. This involved traveling round a board in a little plastic ‘car’ and collecting a husband on the way (we all made sure we landed on the square that said “Congratulations! You get married! Collect ?50 from each of the other players!”), various other life events (most of which I can’t remember but one of them might have involved getting a job), and obviously the birth of a few babies. These offspring were represented by little pastel-coloured plastic pegs in blue (for a boy) and pink (for a girl). In hindsight, there were few games more meaningless and crass than this one, however it remained a firm favourite for a while.

When we played this game, each of us tacitly believed that the winner was not necessarily the first across the finish line (somehow I don’t recall that this last square said “Congratulations! You’re dead!”), but whichever player had successfully collected a spouse and the most amount of children. There was only room in the ‘car’ for one husband and up to four children, but we squabbled over those stupid pink and blue pegs until each one of us ended up with plastic ‘babies’ strewn all across the board like a roadkill scene from Toy Story.

My friend Nicola wanted two boys and a girl when she grew up. I wanted two girls and a boy, and maybe a bonus fourth child if my husband (who would be Robert Barnes, in the year above me at primary school) didn’t mind. In fact, for a while, I thought I wanted seven children. Seven, at the time, seemed like a reasonable number. Seven! There was no question that we were going to be wives and mothers – no question at all. It was just a simple fact – like there was always going to be cake at a birthday party and a new Barbie at Christmas.

Even in my early 20s, just after finishing University, even after shifting my maternal goalposts ever so slightly, I still believed that motherhood by 30 was one of my major goals. Thirty, to me, represented the absolute unequivocal death of youth and the start of a proper, settled, sensible adulthood. I had two serious and loving long-term relationships in my teens and twenties and although throughout both I felt broody, ridiculously so, something made me keep popping those pills and feeling incredible relief at the sight of blood each month.

I am going to be 30 in just a few months, and I can honestly say that the idea of becoming a mother now puts the fear of God in to me. Why? Because I am selfish? Because I still just want to have a good time? Because I can’t afford it?

Er…. Yes, yes…. And yes. I know a number of childless women in their 30s who would also answer ‘yes’ to those questions, and are furthermore hampered by the fact they refuse to lower their necessarily high standards in the ‘race’ to find a worthy father to their potential children. Just how easy is it to find a good, honest, reliable, attractive, witty, clever man these days – and I mean one with no baggage or addictions? The nature of sexual relationships these days is such that it is perfectly normal for a woman to experience several serious relationships through her twenties and thirties and fall in and out of love quite naturally – but in this disposable society, going ahead and reproducing with someone you do not feel 100% certain about is pure folly, surely? Especially as, like it or not, by having a baby, a woman has to sacrifice much of her self-sufficiency in order to put everything she’s got in to the nurturing and raising of that child. Certainly her career has to be put on hold. To do it alone, even if you have the money to do so, is an enormous strain, and every other aspect of your life will be dictated to you for many, many years. Worth it? I am not convinced.

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