A Different Perspective

However turbulent those teenage years, my friends and I had all dodged the baby bullet and left school without a sproglet in tow. I don't actually recall anyone in my school becoming a teenage mum, let alone my group of friends. Of course, we knew of gymslip mums who lived nearby, or went to a local school, but I didn't know of anyone personally. It wasn't close to home. We passed our GCSEs with flying colours, the majority of our school year went on to study at Sixth Form, got good A-level grades. 

Of the dropouts, I later heard that a few had become pregnant; we spotted them out at the shopping centre at the weekends sporting a tell-tale bump under their clothes and then later pushing a pram, a mewling red-faced infant tucked inside. It was a topic for gossip, pity almost, not admiration or envy. Yet those girls, the ones we'd been brought up to believe were "under-achievers" would ultimately become a source of unexpected jealously on my part. The girls I'd thought of as having "thrown their lives away" by becoming young mums would always have something I never would. They'd have a family. 

I wonder if the message in schools these days is any different, now that we're surrounded by older mothers and IVF has become commonplace. Perhaps the teachers are now encouraging girls to settle down and have a family early in the way that our parents did, thus reducing the likelihood of later finding it impossible and the heartache that ensues. (I wouldn't know what goes on in schools these days - I don't have any children, remember?).

Around one in five women are childless at 45, a figure which is on the increase, has almost doubled since the nineties and is expected to grow, through either choice or circumstance. Choosing not to have a child is one thing, being physically unable to reproduce, quite another, as I was going to find out...