This is an article thats seemed to have created much discussion in the observer this week.
I'm 31 with 6 month old dd and I would love to have more. I'm just wondering how anyone else feels about this?....
Why I wish I'd been a young mum
Viv Groskop had her first child at 30. As debate rages about whether babies are boring, she says she should have started 10 years earlier - and backs stay-at-home mums
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer
Are babies just not that interesting? Anna Pasternak, author and mother of a one-year-old, argued in the Daily Mail last week that being with her baby made her feel like a stay-at-home slave. She felt 'trapped, and, frankly, bored'. On a phone-in the next day on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 she went further. Babies do nothing but eat and excrete for five months - how tedious is that?
The switchboard was jammed with irate women saying how exciting their babies were. Others congratulated her, making reference to their PhDs. For them, mummy talk was the preserve of the brain-dead. The Mail ran a follow-up feature with mothers' comments - was Pasternak a baby-bore whistleblower? A selfish monster? Or truth-telling heroine? This was turning into Middle England's favourite sport: a cat fight.
Listening to the debate on the radio in the kitchen as I fed my 11-month-old son his lunch, at one point I was so annoyed I burst into tears. 'Don't worry, Will, no one thinks you are boring,' I assured my little boy at one point, covering his ears and clasping him to my maternal bosom. 'Where is your baby?' I screamed at Pasternak's voice (completely unfairly as I also work part-time).
But on went her rant about how trivial other mothers were, how dull their nappy conversations. I cheered when one caller chided Pasternak: 'Can I ask you a question? Do you ever draw breath?'
Most of all, though, I was intrigued by the number of women who agreed with her wholeheartedly - in print and on the radio. For every caller as appalled as I was by the egotism of a woman who could call her own flesh and blood boring, there was another who breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God someone is speaking out, they cried. Babies don't do anything. Any woman with a brain cannot stomach motherhood for more than a few hours and should head for the nearest nursery. At last someone is brave enough to tell the truth.
But whose truth is this? Eight women were interviewed in the Mail 's follow-up article. All except one had their babies, like Pasternak, after the age of 35. Only two thought Pasternak's comments were unreservedly selfish. The rest identified with her to some extent and commended her honesty. They described being a mother as 'terribly difficult', 'agonising', 'unpredictable'.
Several of the radio callers who thought babies were boring mentioned their ages or made references to their careers that also put them in the over-35 bracket.
It has become very fashionable lately to talk about the 'awful truth' about having a baby. But the last taboo is not that babies are boring or that motherhood is a trial. It is admitting that it is simply unnatural to leave having a baby until you are in your thirties, especially until the latter half.
The longer you wait the more selfish you become, the more used to your own life, your own money, your own company. The more likely you are to think motherhood is 'boring'. The awful truth is not that motherhood is horrific. It is that according to Mother Nature after the age of 35 you are just too old to be having your first baby.
I felt this instinctively as soon as I became pregnant at the age of 29. At 30 I gave birth and it hit me that I should have done this 10 years before. The average age a woman has her first child has risen from 26 to 29 in the past 10 years. I thought I was the norm. But as I met other first-time mothers I suddenly felt young. Most were older, many by a decade. The more middle-class and the more successful in their careers, the more likely they were to be older, of course.
With the passing months I felt physically more decrepit - and I was lucky with both an easy pregnancy and labour. What must the women who were five or 10 years older have been feeling like, I wondered? (I don't think it counts as much for subsequent children, by the way - it's the shock of that first one.) I began to fantasise about being a teenage mother. If I had known I would love babies as much as I do, I would have given myself a chance to have loads more, spaced farther apart. I felt incredibly relieved that I had not waited any longer than I had. I was not on such a professional treadmill or so obsessed with my personal fulfilment that I found it a sacrifice suddenly to devote myself to someone else.
Of course, I told myself, it would have been impossible because I wouldn't have the freedom that I have in my work as a writer, I wouldn't have met my husband, I wouldn't have my life set up. But why do we assume that all these factors are fixed points? Aren't all those things cultural factors that we have chosen? And if they aren't working for women - and they're finding their babies boring and motherhood unfulfilling - why are they continuing to accept things as they are? Why, if women want a life as well as a baby, is nothing set up so that women have no choice but to wait until they're too old to really enjoy it?
The advantages of being an older mother have been drummed into us for years. You will be more financially secure. You will have fulfilled a lot of your ambitions in life. You will be established in your career and in a better position to negotiate with employers about flexible working hours. The baby will be planned, wanted.
No one talks about the downside of waiting. You will be knackered. For every extra year spent being an independent adult pleasing yourself, you will find it that bit harder to get used to the fact that now someone else is in charge. You probably won't be able to contemplate a slower, possibly more meaningful, pace. You might even be so used to working and 'using your brain' that - like most men, unimaginative fools that they are - you can't even see how special tiny babies are. If you work, you will feel guilty. If you don't, you will feel bored.
The 'later first pregnancy' was presented as the perfect answer to the women and work dilemma. Now the cracks are showing. It is a solution that permits women into the world of work and education on male terms - only if they delay having a child for as long as possible and then pretend they don't really have one. We have come so far down this road that it is culturally unacceptable - and professionally impossible - for women to have children earlier.
Worst of all, the shortcomings of this solution are surfacing at the same time as new evidence from psychologists that - surprise, surprise - babies actually need their mothers more or less full-time. This research is frighteningly politically incorrect in its conclusions. As popularised by books such as Oliver James's They F* You Up , the theory goes that for the first two years children require a full-time parent or carer who is a super-enthusiastic cheerleader.
That person pretty much has to be their mother, at least in the early weeks or months. If they are in the company of an adult who doesn't find them interesting enough because they've got too used to the cut and thrust of professional life, it's a disaster.
This situation is completely at odds with the lie we are still swallowing that everything will be fine as long as women delay childbirth. Society perpetuates the male attitude that paid work is all that is truly worthwhile in life. The voices of full-time mothers, energised younger mothers and, most of all, fulfilled and happy mothers of all descriptions (whether they work or not) are rarely heard. Would looking after a baby and spending time at home be so 'boring' if maternal values weren't regarded as laughable and a bit sad?
In Pasternak's defence, I think all she was really trying to say was that she thought she would enjoy being a full-time mum but she didn't - because she missed work too much. But I wonder if she would have enjoyed her baby more if her selfish streak had had a few less years to develop.
Still, we can console ourselves with the thought that she'll never be bored again. She said on the radio that she definitely won't be having any more children.