The Life I Haven't Chosen Yet

“Do you want to have kids?” If you’re a woman, chances are you’ve been asked this question before – probably more than once – and often by people who have no business asking. It arrives at weddings, over dinners, during family gatherings, somewhere between the second glass of wine and dessert. Sometimes it’s posed with genuine curiosity; sometimes with the quiet assumption that the answer is obviously yes. At 34, I have a great job and a great life I’ve built deliberately around the things that make me happy. And sometimes I find myself wondering: do I really want to give all of that up to look after a tiny human?

It feels almost sacrilegious to admit that. Motherhood is still spoken about as though it is the natural progression of womanhood – the next box to tick, the great love story waiting patiently to begin. We are encouraged to talk about the sleepless nights, the childcare costs and the loss of spontaneity as temporary inconveniences, because apparently the alternative is somehow unthinkable. But what the alternative is what I want? What if I love my life as it is, and the idea of fundamentally rearranging it for someone else doesn’t immediately fill me with the certainty I’m supposed to feel?

I’m not anti-children. I’m not anti-motherhood. I’m simply undecided, which at 34 increasingly feels like a position I’m expected to justify. There is a strange social discomfort around a woman who cannot – or will not – give you a definitive answer. ‘Maybe’ seems to make people more nervous than ‘no’, while ‘I don’t know’ is often treated as a problem to be solved.

And perhaps that is because women are still given a very particular script. Grow up, fall in love, get married, have children. Even as almost every other part of that script has been rewritten, motherhood remains the chapter we are expected to eventually arrive at. We can choose careers, travel alone, freeze our eggs, buy our own homes and build lives entirely on our own terms – but there is still an expectation that, at some point, we will want to add a child to the picture. The trouble is, I don’t know if I do.

This time last year, I had just finished freezing my eggs. It was a process and a procedure I chose to undertake for exactly this reason: I don’t know when, if ever, I want to have children. I did it to take the pressure off, to buy myself a few more years in which I could continue living my life without the feeling that some invisible biological countdown was ticking loudly in the background. Somewhere in Healthcare City, a stainless-steel vat now contains 37 tiny potential futures, sitting patiently in cryogenic suspension. And, as it turns out, 37 is a rather encouraging number: I’m apparently a very fertile candidate who may never even need to use the eggs I went to considerable lengths to preserve.

Sounds like the dream scenario, right? Freeze the eggs, freeze the panic, and get on with life. Keep calm and carry on, as they say. Except it turns out that freezing your eggs only really takes the pressure off one part of the equation: the physical one. It does very little to silence the mental noise. Because even if you can preserve the possibility of having a baby, you can’t freeze the question of whether you actually want one.

Then there is the financial reality. Having children is expensive; having children in the UAE is really expensive. School fees alone can make your eyes water before you’ve even considered childcare, healthcare, holidays, clothes, extracurriculars and the small matter of keeping an actual human alive for approximately 18 years. I don’t even have a joint bank account with my long-term partner, let alone a shared financial plan capable of absorbing tens of thousands of dirhams in annual baby-related expenditure. Freezing my eggs may have bought me time, but it hasn’t necessarily made the decision any easier. If anything, it has given me more time to think about it – which, depending on the day, feels either like an incredible luxury or a particularly elaborate form of torture.

Thankfully, there is another narrative beginning to emerge – and it is one I find considerably more comforting. My Instagram feed has recently become a parade of women having babies well into their 40s: Sienna Miller, Cameron Diaz, Kourtney Kardashian – hell, Hilary Swank had twins at 48. I find these stories oddly reassuring. Not because I think every woman should have a baby at 40, but because they are evidence that the timeline we have been handed is not quite as rigid as we have been led to believe.

What is less comforting is the language surrounding these pregnancies. ‘Geriatric mother.’ The phrase sounds as though I should be reaching for a walking frame rather than considering whether I might one day like to have a child. The literal definition of geriatric is “relating to old age, older adults, or the medical care and treatment of elderly people”. Yet the term ‘geriatric pregnancy’ has historically been applied to pregnancies at 35 or older. I am months away from crossing this particular threshold. How, exactly, did 35 become the same neighbourhood as old age?

Of course, there are genuine medical considerations that come with pregnancy as we age, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But there is something profoundly jarring about language that can make a healthy, functioning 35-year-old woman sound medically ancient. The implication – intentional or otherwise – is that a woman’s body begins some precipitous decline the moment she leaves her early thirties. It is ludicrous, reductive and, frankly, damaging.

Perhaps what I am looking for isn’t permission to wait. It is permission not to know. To enjoy the life I have now without feeling that I am irresponsibly procrastinating my future. To understand that fertility is complicated, that motherhood is complicated, and that neither should be reduced to a deadline stamped on a calendar.

Maybe I will have children. Maybe I won’t. Maybe, in a few years, the answer will arrive with the kind of certainty I am currently missing. Or perhaps it never will. But for now, I am 34, and I am allowed to be here – somewhere between yes and no, with a life I love and a future I haven’t yet chosen.

“The life i haven’t chosen yet” IS PUBLISHED IN THE 19th EDITION OF GRAZIA Middle East. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.