In between adulthood and motherhood.

That strange in between in your 30’s

This is a touchy subject as a woman in my early 30s and I’m sure for men or a person of a similar age. One that shows that although it’s now 2023, we’re still very much living in the standards of the 1950’s. 

I’m an adult woman, who’s married, who has a home, but please stop asking me if I want to have kids and when. 

It’s a personal question. 

One which just shows how as women we have no agency, sense of control, over our bodies, our bodies have always been something which we are judged and commented on throughout our lives. 

I understand that this isn’t mutually exclusive to cis gendered women, but here I can only speak on behalf of my own feelings and experience. 

In my twenties, I wasn’t expected to have a child, yet for me there was no transition from my late twenties into my early thirties, my ovaries didn’t coo with enthusiasm, I wasn’t just ready to have kids. 

Then the pandemic hit, so those of us that are millennials, who are now in our early 30s many of us have friends who now have kids. 

Which is amazing, I love my friends, therefore I love their kids. I love kids and babies, they are adorable. I used to teach 2 years old English in Japan, it was probably my favourite age group, I used to really enjoy making them listen to me, by saying I’d take away the Nendo, which is japanese for playdo, it was the kryptonite of threats and highly amusing to see their little faces horrified I’d take such joy away from them. 

I also can see how amazing my friends are at keeping up with the obligations of being a mother, a partner and to be working. Something which I must say would not have been common let alone normal in the 1950s.

Yet I am still very uncomfortable when someone asks me when I’ll have kids. 

I just had this weird idea that, I guess an assumption, I’d be ready when I turn 30. I’m now I’m in my early 30s, heading into my mid 30s very soon  and I am still undecided. It’s not to say that as you read this, I might not get pregnant and have kids, it’s just that society and its expectations sometimes are total crap and do not represent real life. 

I think it’s amazing that we now as women have the choice that our grandmother’s generation never had. We can through contraceptives and other measures choose to have children or not. 

My French grandmother had my father very young, at 17 I believe, she was still a teenager. She missed the contraceptive pill, the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. To be honest I always saw that there was a lot of resentment which came from her having children so young, she was literally a child herself. My grandmother didn’t fulfill her potential because of the circumstances of the times that she was born in. Is that why I’m so worried about having kids?

My father and his two sisters, then all have a history of mental illness. My father had severe manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder and he died in March 2020, I won’t go into the story but I will also be honest, it was either an accidental overdose of prescription medication or a suicide, but due to living in Japan and the pandemic starting I will never know exactly what happened.  

I’m not saying that my father and my aunties mental illnesses were due to having young parents, but perhaps my grandparents were not ready or mature enough to have children or were surviving therefore how could they be nurturing parents? 

It’s not even that I think my partner would make a terrible father, he’d be amazing. I guess it comes to overthinking it, but really I’m not entirely sure what it is, my response to “Do you want to have kids” is usually followed with a “Mmm, ergh” sort of noise rather than an actual answer and sentence. 

Which is what pisses me off. It’s a personal question, one which I really often ponder on an answer, but so far haven’t come up with a definitive fuck yeah, sort of answer. 

I’m sure that you get the same thought of, well what if I do want children? What if then it is too late? Do I want to spend $6,000 to freeze my eggs? Will this freezing of these eggs even work? (How do they freeze our eggs, we’re literally living in science fiction) Then what if I get triplets when I use those frozen eggs? 

I’ve spoken to one of my best friends, who is equally uncomfortable talking about this question by well meaning friends. 

Would I be more keen to have a baby, if I lived closer to home in England where my Japanese mother and English step father lived? Or by my mother in laws in the bush (countryside) of New South Wales Australia? My life isn’t there though, it's in the forest by the foothills of the mountain where it snows abundantly and is the most amazing place to snowboard in winter. 

I don’t think it’s a commitment issue entirely. I thought long and hard about marrying, I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Committed” which to be honest, didn’t help me make a decision. Turns out Gilbert divorced her husband, married her friend before she died of terminal cancer. So I don’t recommend her book to decide about marriage. 

I just chose what felt right for me. About marriage that is. But marriage never seemed so permanent, so life changing, it felt socially acceptable for sure. 

Coming back to whether the idea of being closer to my mother or mother in law, who live literally the polar opposite of one another on this planet. I’m aware that it takes a village to raise a child. 

Yet this is not the society that we live in. I do not want to raise a child just as a couple, I do want help, I get tired easily, I’m not the most organised, especially when I’m tired, I also live in Japan. Where things are done in its own special way, like not offering epidurals, telling you you’re fat and gaining weight, because it’s safer for the child to be small when giving birth. Because Japan is stuck mentally in the 1950’s. Yet that also has the lowest rate of child and mother mortality rate, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Is it financial? It’s known that a child will cost a million dollars over their lifetime, I am not fact checking this, it’s definitely something that I’ve heard, it might be an over exaggeration. But it is smart to bring a child into this world unless you are financially stable?

While I’m not a person who has decided to be childless completely. 

Again there is nothing wrong with childlessness in my eyes, there are many benefits to being more financially secure without the cost of children in your life as you age. 

Talking of aging, let’s be honest, just because you bring up a child into this world, doesn’t mean they’ll want to deal with your old bullshit as you age either. If you’re lucky they might but if you end up in a nursing home, you’re in the same situation as that childless person. 

For those who are currently childless, undecided like me for now, with child/children, can we also be aware of those who were not able to have children. 

This is the main one which strikes me, is that it is incredibly hurtful to go through a loss of a child in pregnancy, we don’t know why miscarriages happen still, because we don’t know everything even though we think that we do. 

The best advice I got from a social media post by a licensed therapist’s article, was to reply with “Why do you ask?” which is such a brilliant reply. As people have their own reasons for asking and sometimes it’s probably not personal to you, but at least it means you can deflect the answer. My only issue with this reply, it sounds so effing rude in Japanese, it'd be hard culturally to reply this way. 

I also just don’t believe in the saying that motherhood is all that we want as women. It’s the only accomplishment for a woman. I just don’t. I didn’t even believe in marriage for goodness sakes, I got married at 25, which is now considered young. I know that marriage requires work, a lot of it, commitment, compromise, which the last two years has been the case. As I grew up with a family of mostly divorced people, especially on my French family’s side. 

Do I see how you can find motherhood fulfilling, yes of course, we are innately selfish as humans beings, but helping others is always going to make you feel good, plus being able to nurture and see that child become a human being, yes that is the ultimate form of growth. 

I just don’t think we put fatherhood, because the standards are so low for fathers. I've discussed this with a mother friend who has great father’s as partners but the expectations from other men are so low, even in what we think is a modern age. I don’t see this fatherhood put on a cultural pedestal the way that motherhood is.

Men overall also have the advantage of not having the pressure of the ticking biological clock, not as much as women, or people with uterus’ do.  

Another thing which I’m very aware of being half Japanese, living in Japan. Is the low birth rate. 

Living in the countryside it is impossible not to notice, that people on average are over 65, personally I enjoy the company of older people. They have a lot of interesting perspectives with their age. When I go onsen (public hot spring bath) almost daily, I have a membership, my friends there are all elderly ladies, who we politely chat to while having our baths. 

So here I do feel like I am part of this problem of the low birth rate. Yet the society as a whole, like I mentioned above, women are not offered epidurals for example. A government which lacks in changing the culture for gender equality, who sends a male minister to a G7 meeting of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, that truly says it all about the future for women in Japan, a man in a position that should be for a woman, because men will never cease to relinquish any kind of power to women and are not interested in equality. 

It is the society here as a whole, the way that children are educated to me, seems to create bullies especially towards anyone different. My kids would be a quarter Japanese, more multicultural than me and it’s taken me years of maturing into who I am to be very comfortable with that, but sometimes even I don’t want to explain my whole life story so someone can categorize me into a culture or a demographic. 

How can I bring up a child into this education system in Japan, that turns children into little factory workers of future salary men and office ladies, the people in suits you see in the cities, working corporate jobs and the 9-5, even on the weekends in Japan. 

Another personal note to add, is that my partner is ready to have children, like I said above, he’d make a great father.

So do I have an answer if you ask me “Do you want to have kids?”. No I don’t have an answer and please just stop asking people who are childless in their 30s this question.