Bryony Gordon: Milestones that say you have failed as a woman

Birthday celebrations seem to be very different for men and women as we get older. Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

Today is my husband's birthday. He is 35. I offer this utterly unremarkable information because it is precisely that; nobody is particularly interested by his thirty-fiveness, nobody says to him, "Oh wow, you're going to be 35! How do you feel about that?"

His three and a half decades on this planet are worthy of nothing more than a "Happy Birthday" and a quiet meal in the new tapas bar around the corner, at which point I will say, "Well done you for being born and turning 35 almost entirely without incident."

Three weeks later, I will turn 35. And everyone keeps mentioning it. They say, "Ooooh, 35, tick-tock!" and "So, are you going to celebrate by giving your child a sister or a brother?", as if it is appropriate to ask someone if they are planning on having sex tonight.

The impression I get is: when I turn 35, there will be no reason to drink sherry and eat chorizo. Instead it would be much better if I spent the day in the dark, getting used to the sensation of tumbleweed blowing through my womb and ovaries.

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman. No, not sometimes. All the time. Nothing you do is ever enough; even if you gave birth while doing a handstand and typing out an accounts report, there'd still be someone telling you off on Twitter for making other women feel inferior.

Women are expected to be everything in order to please everyone: mothers, wives, executives, housekeepers, models, admin assistants, agony aunts, chefs, butchers, bakers, candle-stick makers. And to do it by the time we have reached 40, because after this we... what? Become irrelevant? Invisible? Or expire from exhaustion caused by trying to cram absolutely everything into a period of time that is, relatively, absolutely nothing? I need a lie- down just thinking about it.

At the weekend, a letter to (British Conservative Party politician) Nicky Morgan from consultant gynaecologist Prof Geeta Nargund was leaked to a newspaper. Prof Nargund wrote of the "fertility timebomb", adding that women should start trying for a baby before they reach the age of 30.

She urged the Minister for Education to make it compulsory for girls to be taught about their fertility. "I have witnessed all too often the shock and agony on the faces of women who realise they have left it too late to start a family," wrote the lead consultant for reproductive medicine at St George's Hospital, south London.

"For so many, this news comes as a genuine surprise and the sense of devastation and regret can be overwhelming. And so often the cry will be, 'Why did nobody warn me about this?'?"

Really? Because ever since I was... oooh, 21, I have been aware of having a biological clock, one with alarms set about every two minutes - alarms that cannot be snoozed.

By the time I turned 30 (single), I had resigned myself to being as barren as the Gobi desert. I was lucky to meet a nice man at 31 and have my daughter at 32, but I have no expectation of having another child - even though a piece in The Atlantic two years ago revealed that a large body of research on the correlation between age and childlessness was based on French birth records from the late 17th century through to the early 19th century.

And that research carried out in 2004 found the difference in fertility between a 28 and a 37-year-old was only four percentage points. In fact, the more I read that piece, the more I think that reports of fertility "dropping off a cliff" at 35 are not just grossly exaggerated but part of some patriarchal conspiracy to remind women that their main purpose is as a glorified womb.

Sadly, there are still people who cannot have children and for whom science has proved useless. I cannot imagine their pain and I am sure they would not want me to. I am sure, too, they would not want Prof Nargund to use their plight as a tool to highlight the "costly and largely unnecessary burden on the NHS" caused by IVF, or a stick with which to beat already pressurised woman.

Because for many, trying to conceive by the age of 30 is simply not an option, unless Prof Nargund intends for swathes of females to visit a nightclub in the hope of getting knocked up.

This milestone madness isn't something men ever have to get involved with, and not just because they can continue siring children into their nineties. It's also because we don't expect all men to have the same hopes and dreams. We don't expect them to have it all and we don't expect them to even want it all. We get that some might not want to have kids while some of them think of little else, just as we get that some want quiet lives wood-turning in the Wye Valley while others want to live it up in West End watering holes.

And yet there is, strangely, a universal blueprint for females: career, marriage, house, baby, career, another baby, and so on, and anyone who fails to adhere to this has somehow failed at being a woman.

The onus is always on the female, even after marriage and baby; note how often men refer to looking after their own children as "babysitting", and how it is almost always the mother who ends up having to sort out childcare.

Television personality, Kirstie Allsopp - who made similar comments to the professor's in an interview we did together last year - was pilloried, but we should give her credit for also mentioning that men need to be educated, too. "There is a huge inequality... And I think if you're a man of 25 and you're with a woman of 25 and you really love her, then you have a responsibility to say, 'Let's do it now.' But men need to know, men need to be taught in school that there is a responsibility, that if you love someone, decide if you want to have a child with that person or not."

As long as fertility and childcare are seen as nothing more than silly "wimmin's issues", then women will never have equality.

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