By ALEXIS CAREY
I visited my GP to pick up a prescription and I left with a lecture on the need to have a baby. Pronto. Like, yesterday.
I was a trifle taken aback, to say the least. You see, I’m 26, not 36 or 46. I kept waiting for the good doctor to break into a chuckle and scream “APRIL FOOLS!”
But no, apparently he was serious. According to him, at 26, it is high time I started planning my reproductive life.
Now, I love babies and children and I’ve always pictured my future with one or two mimi-mes in it.
But having babies has always been an abstract idea to me; something that Other People did and something that might happen to me one day, in the very, very, VERY distant future. It has never occurred to me that it is something I could actively do, right now.
So I stammered a lame explanation about “needing to find the right time” and left, vowing to find a new, less-stress-inducing GP in future.
The thing is, my life couldn’t be less suited to accommodating a dependent infant right now and to be honest, the idea truly terrifies me. I live in a teensy studio apartment that is about the same size as most people’s bathroom. I spend two and a half hours a day commuting to work and my relationship with The Boy, while long-term, is not exactly locked-in-for-life.
But on the other hand, we’ve all heard the horror stories about women who kept waiting for the perfect baby-making moment, only to hit their late 30s or early 40s to find it’s Game Over for their fertility.
And then there are the horror stories of young women who are healthy and in the prime of their lives, but who still face a heartbreaking struggle to conceive or carry a baby to term.