I’m 34, single and desperate for a baby: what if I don’t meet the right man in time?

Guest post disclaimer: This article was written by guest contributor Greyeyebrowgirl. Her experiences and opinions are her own and do not necessarily reflect mine. Her story does, however, raise a question many women confront privately: what happens when you know you want a child, but the rest of your life hasn’t caught up?

At 34, Greyeyebrowgirl is still looking for what she calls “the love of her life”. At the same time, she is dealing with an increasingly powerful desire to become a mother. She calls it womb ache. I remember some of that fear myself. By 40, I wondered whether motherhood had passed me by. It hadn’t, as Cyrus demonstrated, but knowing how my story eventually turned out doesn’t erase how uncertain it felt while I was living it.

Greyeyebrowgirl’s circumstances are different from mine, but the question underneath them is familiar. What happens when you want the baby, but haven’t yet found the person you imagined having one with? Her story is funny in places, uncomfortable in others, and refreshingly candid about something women are often expected either to joke about or suffer quietly.

For one woman approaching 35, the biological clock is colliding with single life, money, family expectations and the uncomfortable knowledge that wanting motherhood does not make it happen on schedule.

Reality television has never been known for providing profound lessons about the human condition. Or many lessons at all, really. Normally, this apparently “real”, entirely spontaneous (yeah, right) and definitely-not-scripted television fodder consists of Kim Kardashian explaining how blessed she is, or people in Chelsea buying Dior handbags with roughly the same level of consideration the rest of us give to buying pants in Primark. Despite the fake tans, tears, eyelashes and tantrums, I love it. Yes, I am a grown, semi-functioning woman with actual responsibilities, yet there I am on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, glued to The Only Way Is Essex.

The glamorous, orange-tinged lives of Essex’s finest have me completely hooked. I’m in love with Pete “the Pirate” Wicks, I envy the eyelash extensions, and I remain deeply suspicious of everyone’s ability to maintain a concave stomach while apparently existing on brunch and booze. Usually, it’s escapism, the sort of ridiculous, shiny television that requires very little from me beyond a sofa and the occasional raised eyebrow.

Except recently, it stopped being quite so ridiculous. A few episodes made me cry, and I mean properly cry. Not a dignified television tear delicately wiped from one cheek, but real, snotty, mascara-threatening human tears. It wasn’t because somebody had fallen off a pair of death-defyingly high heels either. It was because, with dawning horror, I realised something I wasn’t remotely prepared for: I am Gemma Collins.

Like Gemma, I’m approaching my mid-30s without a husband, without a potential father waiting conveniently in the wings and with a biological clock that appears to have acquired its own loudspeaker. I’m 34 and I’ll be 35 in a few weeks. I haven’t yet met a man I’d confidently trust to make me scrambled eggs, never mind fertilise my actual ova. That’s funny when I write it down. It feels considerably less funny when I’m lying awake thinking about it.

Most of my friends have children now. Not theoretical babies or tiny newborns either, but actual little people with personalities, friendships, favourite television programmes and social calendars considerably busier than mine. I love those children and I love being part of their lives, but somewhere along the way I assumed I’d have my own by now. I suppose I imagined adulthood would unfold in roughly the order we’d been sold: meet someone, fall in love, settle down, have children. Nobody spends much time explaining what happens when one part of that sequence simply doesn’t arrive.

Instead, I find myself the last single, unfertilised woman in the group. I listen while friends talk about sleepless nights, tantrums and the relentlessness of motherhood. They’re exhausted and they’re entitled to say so. Motherhood isn’t a gratitude competition. But there is still a small, uncomfortable voice inside me thinking, I wish it were my turn. That’s the difficult part to admit. One woman can desperately need a night away from her children while another would give almost anything to be woken by one. Neither feeling makes the other less real.

I’ve started thinking seriously about my options, including egg freezing. There is something deeply surreal about reaching the point where your reproductive future starts to resemble a financial planning exercise. I’ve read about treatment, looked at what private care might involve and wondered whether I should have my fertility assessed. Then another fear creeps in: what if I go looking for reassurance and don’t get it? What if somebody examines my ovaries and effectively tells me the shop is closing? Perhaps ignorance isn’t exactly bliss, but occasionally it seems to come with a fairly decent benefits package.

Money complicates things further. Fertility treatment isn’t loose change, particularly when your bank account isn’t sitting there with several thousand pounds reserved for an existential reproductive crisis. Suddenly, the supposedly practical answer to worrying about fertility creates an entirely new set of questions about cost, treatment and whether any of it will actually work. There is something peculiarly cruel about being told to “consider your options” when some of those options may come with price tags you simply cannot afford.

Biology isn’t the only voice in the room. I come from a traditional Asian family, and that matters. From the outside, the solution can sound deceptively straightforward: why wait for a husband? Women become mothers alone, donor conception exists and families come in many different forms. I know all of that, but knowing your options exist isn’t the same as feeling able to choose them.

Turning up pregnant without a ring on my finger would not exactly result in a small shrug and somebody calmly putting the kettle on. Family and cultural expectations don’t disappear simply because society has changed, particularly when those expectations have shaped your understanding of relationships, marriage and motherhood since childhood. It is easy to tell another woman to ignore convention when you aren’t the person who has to navigate what that decision might mean within her own family and culture.

So I find myself caught between biology, tradition and what I actually want. Beneath all the jokes about ovaries, Tinder and reality television is the one thing I can’t make funny: I want to be a mum. Not because everyone else is doing it, not because society says I should, and not because I’ve reached a particular birthday and somebody has handed me the official woman-in-her-30s checklist. I simply want a child. Sometimes that want feels physical, which is perhaps why womb ache is the only description that seems to fit.

To the mums reading this, I know motherhood can be exhausting. There are nappies, crying, sleep deprivation, washing, worry and days when drinking a cup of tea before it goes cold starts to resemble an ambitious lifestyle goal. Mothers are allowed to find motherhood difficult and they’re allowed to complain about it. Loving your children doesn’t require you to enjoy every minute of raising them, whatever the more polished corners of the internet might suggest.

But there may be another woman listening to those conversations who goes home to a quiet house and wishes she were exhausted for the same reason. Those experiences don’t cancel each other out. A woman can adore her children and desperately need a break from them, while another can look at the chaos of family life and desperately wish some of that chaos belonged to her. There is room for both truths without turning womanhood into a competition over who is entitled to feel tired, sad, grateful or lonely.

There is also room for women who don’t want children at all. Not every woman hears a biological clock ticking, and motherhood isn’t the compulsory final chapter of womanhood. My problem is that I know what I want. I simply don’t know whether life is going to give me the circumstances in which to have it. So here I am: 34, nearly 35, single, broody, culturally conflicted and wondering whether the great love story of my life has missed its train. For now, I have womb ache, an inappropriate attachment to Pete Wicks and perhaps, just perhaps, a Tinder account to open.

Reading Greyeyebrowgirl’s story, what strikes me is how quickly female fertility becomes a conversation about numbers. We talk about 30, 35 and 40. We talk about egg reserves, fertility statistics and reproductive deadlines. Women can end up feeling as though somebody has placed an invisible countdown above their heads, while simultaneously expecting them to remain perfectly calm about the fact that some of the biggest decisions of their lives now appear to come with a deadline.

What we discuss far less is what a woman is supposed to do with that information when the rest of her life hasn’t conveniently fallen into place. There is an assumption buried inside much of the biological-clock conversation that wanting a child and being in a position to have one should somehow happen simultaneously. Real life is rarely that obliging. You can be ready for motherhood before you’ve met the right partner. You can meet the right partner and struggle with fertility. You can have the relationship but not the money, the health, the family support or the certainty.

I became a mother at 40, so I know life doesn’t always respect the timetable we draw for it. I also know how hollow a cheerful “you’ve still got time” can sound when you’re the woman privately wondering whether you actually do. Equally, telling women that fertility changes with age without acknowledging the realities of relationships, finances, culture and plain old luck hardly constitutes useful advice. Women cannot simply summon the right partner because their ovaries would find the timing convenient.

Perhaps, then, we’ve been asking the wrong question. Instead of endlessly asking women when they are going to have children, perhaps we should become better at talking about what happens when love, fertility, culture, money and motherhood arrive in entirely the wrong order. Sometimes the biological clock isn’t simply about age. It is about wanting a future you can picture perfectly clearly while having no idea how, or whether, you are going to reach it.

Did motherhood happen later than you expected, or did you find yourself wanting a baby before the circumstances felt right? Perhaps you chose a different route to parenthood, or decided motherhood wasn’t part of your story at all. I’d love to hear how the biological-clock conversation looked from where you were standing.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.