Tick, tick, goes the biological clock

"I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me they are wonderful things for other people to go on." - Jean Kerr

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"If you have children, at least people won’t keep asking you when you’re going to have children.

Women are always being asked when they’re going to have children. It’s a question they’re asked even more often than, ‘Can I help you, madam?’, when they’ve just come into a shop to make a mobile call somewhere quieter, or ‘Can’t you clip that fringe back? You’ve got a lovely face,’ by their nan.

For some reason, the world really wants to know when women are having children. It likes them to have planned this shit early. It wants them to be very clear and upfront about it – ‘Oh, I’d like a glass of Merlot, the clams, the steak – and a baby when I’m 32, please.’

It is oddly panicked by women who are being a bit relaxed and ‘whevs’ about it all: ‘But your body clock!’ it is apt to shout. ‘You need to be planning at least five years ahead! If you want a baby at 34, you need to be engaged by 29, minimum. Chop chop! Find a husband! Look on Ocado! Or you’ll end up like poor barren lonely Jennifer Aniston.’

And if a woman should say she doesn’t want to have children at all, the world is apt to go decidedly peculiar:

‘Ooooh, don’t speak too soon,’ it will say – as if knowing whether or not you’re the kind of person who desires to make a whole other human being in your guts, out of sex and food, then base the rest of your life around its welfare, is a breezy, ‘Hey – whevs’ decision. Like electing to have a picnic on an unexpectedly sunny day; or changing the background picture on your desktop.

‘When you meet the right man, you’ll change your mind, dear,’ the world will say, with an odd, aggressive smugness."

--- How to Be a Woman / Caitlin Moran


Of course, the vast majority of these cries from "the world" actually come from - other women.

Once again, the worst part about being a woman... is dealing with other women.