I think I know the exact moment I decided that motherhood wasn’t for me. Parent-teacher interview night, 1997. I watched as my mother exited my teacher’s classroom as Ms Novak, crossed the hall, and entered my half-sister’s with a different name.
How strange to think that my mum could be two people at once, and that neither of them had a first name. I didn’t know then that it was a defining moment. I wasn’t that precocious.
Years later, I would revisit this blip of a memory and layer fresh context over it. I had noted my missing maternal instinct and went looking for answers. I thought about one day losing my identity to some imaginary baby and immediately opted out.
“You’ll change your mind someday,” said plenty of people, like a threat, so I spent my 20s armed with prophylactics, waiting nervously for my biological clock to betray me and prove them right. Reporting now from my 30s, I’m yet to hear the trill of any such alarm. Are the batteries dead in this thing? Was I right all along? Credit: Robin Cowcher Maybe it’s because the whole experience gets a bad rap.
Stay-at-home parenting is lauded as challenging and rewarding in one breath, then dismissed as an easy ride in the next. When someone boards an aeroplane with an infant strapped to their chest, the rest of the passengers pre-emptively seethe. We hear about morning sickness and episiotomies, sleep cycling and toilet training, tantrums, quests for childcare more harrowing than The Hunger Games , th.