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‘Yes!’ cried a now-excited Billy, his bright blue eyes widening by the second. ‘Trucks! Mummy, can I have a truck? Billy wants to play with truck!’ he said, tossing the car to one side.
And with that, Felicity shot me an evil look, took Billy by the hand and hurried over to the toy box at the other end of the room, I suspected not just to find a truck but to get her darling son as far away from the potty-mouthed single childless weirdo as quickly as possible.
She needn’t have bothered. I decided to go for a walk and clear my head.
Felicity had struck a nerve. The baby decision weighed heavily on me. On the one hand, I believed women shouldn’t need to be married or be mothers to be complete. However, on the other, the older I got, the stronger the yearning to be a mum became.
Not because I felt the pressure to conform to society’s 2.4-children-with-husband-dog ideal, nor because I wanted someone to look after me when I was too old to do it myself. But because I would genuinely like to nurture a child, help him or her grow up to achieve amazing things and make a difference to society in their own way. And I’d like to think I would be good at it too.
As I wandered down Hampstead High Street, I thought again about how quickly the years had passed. I’d spent my late teens and early twenties desperately tryingnotto get pregnant so that I could focus on my education. Then came work, and after launching the agency at twenty-five, that had become my life. So when most of my friends had started having kids in their early thirties, my baby was the business. And although the kidterrogations had become more frequent, I was so overwhelmed with building the company, plus taking care of clients and the team, that procreation had been inadvertently placed on the back burner.
I was also conflicted. Realistically, would I have the time to look after a child as well as myselfandthe business? When I looked at my friends with kids, they were often exhausted. Desperately trying to juggle working with waking up at the crack of dawn to make breakfast and get the little ones ready, doing the school run, ferrying them to after-school clubs and birthday parties, making dinner, attending parents’ evenings, homework…the list seemed endless. Whilst they’d never be without them, raising children is definitely not child’s play.
Then there was the guilt. Full-time mums were made to feel ‘unworthy’ for being ‘just a mum’ (clearly bonkers seeing as it’s the only role in the world which involves you being available to work 24/7, 365 days a year for at least two decades). Then women whodidwork were chastised for not being with their child at every moment, yet were also berated for taking time off to spend with their family or leaving work early to attend a school play. It was nuts.
As annoying as she was, maybe I could understand Felicity’s surprise (but not her intrusive grilling). After all, most of my friends had had kids by the time they were thirty-five, and whilst not as many were married, the majority had settled down, so I clearly didn’t conform to ‘normal’ standards. Then again, I never had.
It wasn’t normal for someone in my family to go to university or to graduate with a first-class French degree. And it certainly wasn’t normal for a twenty-five-year-old with no prior business experience to set up her own PR agency from scratch and go on to create a million-pound company from it.
No. I was anything but normal. And career-wise, so far it’d worked well for me. My professional life was good—great, even. But now I really needed to work on getting my personal shit together.
