I was chopping an onion in the kitchen the other day when a thought came to me, sudden and unbidden. I turned to my partner. “If we had a kid,” I asked hypothetically, “where would we put it?”
My partner looked around and then pointed down the hallway to the living room. “Over there?” she replied.
I tried to imagine it. A small, screaming being, wedged somewhere between her guitar collection and the books we couldn’t fit in the bedroom. And then another question arose in its place. “What about work? How would we do that?” I pictured hiding the baby under the desk while I wrote Vogue articles, like in one of those anxiety dreams where nothing is quite right.
My partner said what she often says, which is nearly always correct: “We’d figure it out.”
We’re both women, so for us, having a baby wouldn’t just involve someone going off birth control (there would be admin). But that’s not really my concern (plenty of queer couples manage it). My concern is that, despite being fully grown and then some, I just won’t be adequately equipped. What if we can’t afford the nursery school fees? (I’ve heard they’re astronomical.) What if one of us has to give up work for longer than we intended to? Does the fact we’re not homeowners put us in a precarious position? And then there are the more irrational concerns: what if the baby comes out and doesn’t like me? What if I turn into a grouchy person because it’s too messy all the time (I don’t like things being in the wrong place), and then I become known as “grumpy mum” or something? What if, what if, what if.
In some ways, these worries feel absurd. My mum had me when she was a teenager. She was a single parent, and we never had much money. By the time she was my age, she had a hormonal teenager living in her house (can you imagine?). I grew up in London, where it’s not exactly cheap. And look, I turned out fine. More than fine: I love my life and treasured my upbringing. But maybe those were different times. We’re in the midst of a major cost-of-living crisis in the UK. The birthrate is at a record low, with more than a quarter of British millennials saying they can’t afford to have kids. Since the ’90s, house prices have risen from roughly four to eight times the average national income. None of my friends have kids, even the straight ones. They can’t afford it, or they don’t feel prepared. How would a baby fit into a sublet that doesn’t even allow pets?
