Panic & Joy by Emma Brockes
Author:Emma Brockes [Emma Brockes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571354818
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00
It’s not that I regret not having started out sooner. I’m not so lost as to believe that my younger self could have handled this; in fact, it seems to me the only thing worse than my present predicament would have been to be in my present predicament but with fewer resources. Neither do I wish I had ‘frozen my eggs’, a proposition that strikes me as ludicrous. The ideal time to freeze one’s eggs, like the ideal time to start preparing for one’s retirement, is in one’s twenties, when it seems as if it will never be relevant. Nevertheless, I have two friends in their mid-thirties who are looking into the possibility of freezing their already quite elderly eggs, with a view to buying themselves another ten years to find a man. (Interestingly, both are confident their families will pay for it. Where parents once laboured to cover their thirty-something’s wedding, now they’re on the hook for their thirty-something’s egg-freezing operation. ‘They have to do it,’ said a friend the other day, ‘because they gave my sister a shit-ton for her problems, so they owe me. And anyway, otherwise they’re not going to get grandkids.’)
Besides, I like the focusing element of working to deadline. The shelf life of a woman’s reproductive system is generally perceived to be a bad thing, but there is something to be said for being forced to prioritise. Meanwhile men can drift on for years, messing up themselves and everyone else in the process. If I am unambivalent about wanting children, I am equally unambivalent about the value of the years I’ve spent not having them.
What I’m not prepared for is the complete lack of a plan as to how my life might look in their absence. Having kids in one’s late thirties or early forties coincides almost exactly with the first sniff of midlife crisis, which is good if the baby thing works out. There is nothing like new life to defer one’s encroaching decrepitude. If I don’t have a baby, however, those years just got harder. I’ll have more time on my hands, in which case, like any surplus resource, the value of that time will fall, and with it, somehow, the value of whatever comes out of it. If I do have a baby, on the other hand, I will create a background condition in which I am forced to be sharper and more resourceful than if I had to provide only for myself. I want a baby for all the reasons mentioned, but I also want a baby because I function best when there is some kind of resistance to overcome. Having a child is supposed to undermine one’s ability to work, but that’s not how I see it. In the tiny chamber of my brain dedicated to pure self-advancement, I think a baby will maximise my performance.
But I’m not having a baby. I have a job to do, followed by another. When I leave the conference in Vancouver a night
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