Alice, is this the worst idea I’ve ever had? In one sense, maybe yes. If everything goes right with the pregnancy, the baby will probably be due around the start of July next year, at which point we may still be in lockdown, and I would have to give birth alone in a hospital ward during a global pandemic. Even shelving that more immediate concern, neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes. But then again, no matter what I do, hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine.
Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them. I’m not saying, by the way, that I think that’s important for everyone. I only think, and I can’t explain why, that it’s important for me. Also, I could not stomach the idea of having an abortion just because I’m afraid of climate change. For me (and maybe only for me) it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future. I don’t want to belong to a political movement that makes me view my own body with suspicion and terror. No matter what we think or fear about the future of civilisation, women all over the world will go on having babies,
and I belong with them, and any child I might have belongs with their children. I know in a thin rationalist way that what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense. But I feel it, I feel it, and I know it to be true.
The other question, which may seem to you even more pressing – I wish I knew what you thought! please write back quickly and tell me! – is whether I am fit to parent a child in the first place. On the one hand, I’m in good health, I have a supportive partner who loves me, we’re financially secure, I have great friends and family, I’m in my thirties. The circumstances are probably as good as they’re going to get. On the other hand, Simon and I have only been together for eighteen months (!), we live in a one-bed apartment, we don’t have a car, and I’m a huge idiot who recently broke down in tears because I couldn’t answer any of the starter questions on ‘University Challenge’. Is that appropriate behavioural modelling for a child? When I spend the day moving commas around and then cook dinner and then wash the dishes, and after this simple set of tasks I feel so tired I could physically sink through the floor and become one with the earth –
is that the mentality of someone who’s ready to have a baby? I have talked with Simon about this, and he says feeling tired after dinner is probably normal in your thirties and nothing to worry about, and that ‘all women’ have crying spells, and although I know that’s not true, I do find his paternalistic beliefs about women charming. Sometimes I think he’s so perfectly suited to being a parent, so relaxed and dependable and good-humoured, that no matter how awful I am, the child will turn out fine anyway. And he loves so much the idea of us having a baby together – already I can tell how happy and proud he is, and how excited – and it’s so intoxicating to make him happy in that way. I find it hard to believe anything really bad about myself when I consider how much he loves me. I do try to remind myself that men can be foolish about women. But maybe
he’s right – maybe I’m not so bad, maybe even a good person, and we’ll have a happy family together. Some people do, don’t they? Have happy families, I mean. I know you didn’t, and I didn’t. But Alice, I’m still so glad we were born. As for the apartment, Simon says not to worry about that, because we can just buy a house in a less expensive area. And of course, he has suggested again that we might think about getting married, if I want to . . .
Can you imagine me, a mother, a married woman, owning a little terraced house somewhere in the Liberties? With crayon on the wallpaper and Lego bricks all over the floor. I’m laughing even typing that – you have to admit it doesn’t sound like me at all.
But then, last year, I couldn’t really imagine myself as Simon’s girlfriend. I don’t just mean that it was hard to imagine what our families would say, or what our friends would think. I mean, I couldn’t imagine we were going to be happy together. I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life – difficult and sad – because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another – it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called
‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end. But I really used to believe that it did. Every evening now when we’ve finished our work, Simon turns on the news while I cook dinner, or I turn on the news while he cooks dinner, and we talk about the latest public health guidance, and what’s been reported about what everyone is saying in cabinet and what Simon has privately heard everyone is actually saying in cabinet, and then we eat and wash up, and afterwards I read him a chapter of ‘David Copperfield’
while we lie on the couch, and then we look through the trailers on various streaming services for an hour until one or both of us falls asleep and then we go to bed. And in