I spent most of my 20s and 30s waiting to want to be a mum. I waited until I was 23, staring at a pale blue line on a pregnancy test and knowing without question that I would have an abortion. I waited until my wedding night, passed out blind drunk on a bed strewn with rose petals at age 27. I waited until I turned 30 (come on, now, surely). I was 39 when my adorable nephew was born; my womb remained unmoved. But I only gave up searching for my missing maternal instinct in my early 40s, when I began to contemplate how my experience of menopause would be. At which point it dawned on me that I had absolutely zero regrets about not having had kids.
Which just wasn't , was it? Not only are women supposedly biologically hardwired to want to procreate, but children assigned female at birth are also socialised to aspire to motherhood from
