Two weeks ago, in this newspaper, India Knight wrote: “What amazes me most of all is the sweetly retro notion of mooching around pining for Mr Right, as the clock ticks away. My advice to all my girlfriends, and to you, should this ring a bell, is: just do it. Get pregnant. Don’t wait. Mr Right can turn into Mr Wrong overnight: there are no certainties.” But just how sensible is this? Two women, in very different situations, suggest it might not be as simple as all that.

Sarah Marchant got pregnant at 35 in the early throes of a relationship. Two years later, she found herself with two boys under two and no home, no boyfriend and no job

I read India Knight’s piece and was amazed. Was she honestly suggesting that women rush into having babies, with no thought to the reality that will loom if you don’t have a home, a boyfriend or much money?

I was in the early stages – very early stages – of a relationship when I discovered I was pregnant. From that moment, I felt I just had to go for it, partly because I was approaching the milestone of 35, when a woman’s fertility famously drops, and partly because I didn’t want to be one of those “old mums” India talks about (not that I actually knew any at the time). Fortunately, the baby’s father seemed to take all of this in his stride, and soon we found ourselves with two little bundles of joy. But then, we split, and I was on my own with two under-twos and a mass of fear. Where was I going to live? How were we going to cope financially? I had had to give up my career in television to care for the babies. How was I now going to manage this on my own?

I was incredibly lucky in that I found somewhere to live through my extended family, and my ex agreed to some financial support. But the real difficulty came with the huge adjustment we all have to make as new parents. To have to do this on my own, along with the physical demands of two young children, nearly finished me off at times, and has required the deepest tapping of all my inner reserves to help compensate for the fact that dad isn’t around. There is rarely any respite for a single mum and I remember this relentlessness hitting home when I went to stay with some friends. Sweetly, they offered to look after the children in the morning. As I lay there at about 8am, lazily drifting in the knowledge that I had another hour or so in bed, the darling husband came in with a tray full of breakfast and I burst into sobbing, body-wrenching tears, as I realised I hadn’t had a lie-in for about a year and I certainly couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a cup of tea brought to me in bed.

It would be so much more bearable if there were someone there when I emerged, grubby from the coalface, at the end of each day, someone with whom I could have a little off-loading moan, or on whose shoulder I could have just a tiny, pathetic sob, who might then make a few totally unhelpful observations or suggestions before disappearing off to watch television and order us a takeaway. Someone who is around at the weekends, who actually rather enjoys taking the kids to the play barn for an hour or so while I go crazy in the luxury of a long, morning bath. Someone to harrumph with at 4am as to whose turn it is to tend to a fretful child for the umpteenth time that night.

It’s going to be very difficult to find someone I’m happy to share my life with again, and anyway, I don’t want to take risks with men and relationships as I have my children to consider. Frankly, even having the time to find a boyfriend seems laughable just now, although I know it’s something I need to prioritise – for myself as well as the children, who need a positive male role model.

The reality is that I’m too shattered most of the time for anything extracurricular. I go out once or twice a month, and try hard not to drink too much (reasonably unsuccessfully) as I’ll be up early, whether I like it or not. I did manage a week’s holiday last year, without the children, so, yes, it really was a holiday. I’ve got to try to organise another, as I vaguely remember feeling reborn and full of joie de vivre afterwards – for about a week.

I suppose we have to weigh up so many things to decide when the time is right for children and I simply wasn’t ready when I was 25 (which India suggests is the “right age” to go for it). All my energies went on my career and social life, and I was enjoying my new-found financial independence. I wasn’t mature emotionally at all, and although I’d had one or two serious boyfriends, there had been nobody with whom I’d wanted to settle down.

In the end, my hand was forced as I found myself having to go for it aged 35. I have survived due to a certain amount of luck, a lot of physical fitness (I’m actually in better shape than I have ever been) plus a bit of emotional strength boosted by a great deal of counselling. But this is not for everyone. Why not wait a bit longer if it means you are able to draw on the strength a loving relationship provides, or to have a little more financial security or a little more personal maturity? As any parent will tell you, as this little bundle of love crashes into your world and your life changes almost out of all recognition, for ever, the more secure you can be, the better.

Kate Spicer always hoped for a long-term partnership and kids, but at 38, finds herself single and childless. She explains the choices she has made along the way

If, in time, a Britain evolves in which the 17-year-old me, who got pregnant the night before her second economics A-level paper, could have given birth to a child with my first and ill-suited boyfriend, and still retained the freedom and fulfilment of potential we value for women in our society, perhaps having babies in your physical prime would become ideal again. Occasionally, I have some overwhelmingly powerful feelings about the potential lifetime I aborted, because at 38 years old, single, and childless, it looks as if that might have been my only chance. My son would be 20 now. Would I have made something of my life had I given birth so young? The fact is, I didn’t think twice about the termination – middle-class girls were positively discouraged, by their own frustrated and unfulfilled mothers as well as female role models, from having children early. And I was not a bohemian kid about to break all the rules. When Tamara Beckwith was kicked out of Cheltenham Ladies College for having a baby at 17, I, like all the other girls floating even vaguely near her racy orbit, was deeply shocked. Having kids young was what the girls who left school at 15 with one CSE in home ec did. No, I did not even think twice about having an abortion, traumatic as the whole experience was.

As I stumbled into young adulthood, I remember having this magic age, 27, in mind, when I would start to aim for a long-term partnership, and then kids at about 30. But as my twenties progressed, it became clear that I was not easily given to making long attachments. The expectations of marriage faded and I just got on with living life as it happened – complicated, unpredictable, exciting, difficult and nothing like the organised view I’d had of it as a child.

I lived with two of my boyfriends in my twenties; but in my thirties, when the emotional, biological and practical urges to get pregnant began in earnest, I didn’t live with anyone. This is a significant cause of the continued “situation vacant” in my womb. I now knew that there would never be a right time to have kids; so instead, I started a reckless approach to contraception whenever I met men I felt love for. But making babies is not straightforward. The window of ovulation is small: if you aren’t living with someone and shagging frequently, it’s quite likely you’ll miss it, unless you’re cynically manipulating your diary around your egg’s travel plans. I am not a good planner. I never got pregnant.

Should I hang my head in shame admitting I had sex with men because I wanted to get pregnant, even though they were not actively complicit in my desire? You know what men are like: they just love the sex. I never lied; I always let them know they were about to have unprotected sex. Two years ago, while having a rackety affair with an intelligent 27-year-old, I remember saying to him: “I am not on the pill.” We went on to have unprotected sex regardless. When we had finished, I laughed at him and said: “Are you insane, doing that with a late-thirtysomething, single, childless woman?” He said, as quite a few men I have been in similar situations with have also said: “I don’t care.” Perhaps he panicked later.

Friends of my age are frequently working at maximising their fertility as if it were a mission to Mars – I don’t know that I have ever had the money, sperm or organisational skills to go at it like that. I never realised that babies, like mortgages, were something you had to save up, scheme and suffer for. I thought you just had them, ideally with men you love who would stick around in the old-fashioned way.

All my friends who gave birth before 25, and most of the ones who gave birth before 30, are single parents now. And I am 100% certain that would have been my fate had I had a child at 18. But single-parenthood seems better than no parenthood at all. And that, given my age, is a statistical likelihood I am not always able to confront.

To have a child is not my sole ambition in life, though. If it were, I would have said yes to the three male friends who have, in recent years, offered to father a child platonically with me. At its core, parenting seems to be about unconditional and nurturing love for the next generation, and that’s something you can give to a stepchild, an adopted child, godchildren, nephews and, in my case, much younger siblings – and, I hope, not just to thousands of cats. I try not to think of a childless future like that.

Read India Knight’s original piece here

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