It might be early days for the dating
process but I'm already loosing hope. The fairy tale of meeting a prince, falling
in love, creating a home together, and starting a family might just not happen.
Mild internal panic is setting in. Maybe my expectations are too high.
Particularly as, I've left a tiny window of time before, unless I were Janet
Jackson, all my eggs will turn to omelets or I will get some interminable unexplained
illness where my Fallopian tubes explode. If I were a guy I'd go straight for
the solution, the short cut straight to the babies. After all, I don't really
want a life long partner. I'm struggling with the concept of a bag for life,
let alone a man for life. I can't even imagine hanging out in my own company,
let alone someone else attempting to; and I can imagine all sorts from dragons
wings made with tea towels and that the trampoline is a Starship (Auntie boot camp). The love of my life, no way does he exist,
but maybe the father of my children does.
If this desperate urge to find 'the one'
is actually a baby craving, and if every guy I meet on a date thinks that there
is no rush, maybe I could find a man who just wants to have kids?
Cue: Coparents.co.uk. What a revelation.
A whole website of men offering their
bodily fluids who I wouldn't even need to trick into getting me up the duff.
Completely above board, and if this is a website of people wanting to co-parent
then maybe there's also some men here who have grown wearisome of tinder hook
ups and are looking for the mother of their kids. Now that would be a promotion
from the 'Whatsapp sexting league' in which I've become very proficient. It’s time
for my first Daddy date.
Daddy D works in IT, has blue eyes and
is a few years older. He's a normal looking bloke who I am in no way sexually
attracted to. The meeting has the trappings of date. Two strangers meeting in
bar and assessing each other for purposes of procreation. It's eerily similar,
but because this wasn't date in the traditional sense, it meant we could have
real conversations. And it was an eye opener.
He wants to know about my family and
support networks, my financial stability, my timescale for starting a family
and my motivation for co-parenting. I'm being assessed. Daddy D is single and
is a sperm donor who has helped two other couples conceive a child. He has
never helped a single female, but he knows the process. In the U.K. Sperm
donors can be anonymous, which means it is not possible for mothers to trace
them and at a later date claim child support from the biological father. For a
man whose intention is to help people conceive, and who is successful on
numerous occasions, the kiddy bill could be pretty high. By donating
anonymously and or by formal routes, rather than a website they are more
legally protected and financially less vulnerable. He was working out if I
really could go it alone as a mother. And since he's been in contact since I
can only assume I've got a vote of confidence from a complete stranger. So
that's nice.
OvaCue and Clear Blue to the ready, I
can start monitoring my temperature and progesterone levels, and arrange a date
to collect my test tube. There's nothing stopping me…. apart from a small
thing. It's not even the conversation where I explain to my four year old,
'Mummy found daddy on a website'. I've been preparing myself for that
eventuality and thousands of LBGT couples have got the advice forums covered.
The problem is that I'm a feminist. Contrary to 90's Destiny's Child style
feminism, I think women and men should be equal and should not have to be
'independent'. Well not independently caring for, nurturing and growing the
generations of tomorrow. Since when did independence translate as 'doing all
the work’? When did guys start getting something for free? Women, in our plight
to demonstrate that we are equally capable, seem to have taken on a role where
we do more stuff for the same or less reward. I want to have children so I am
considering becoming a single mother, and I’m not alone in my peer group of
educated and self-sufficient women. Extrapolate my individual case across a
society, and we have women making sacrifices in terms of career progress, time
and money to sustain a population and workforce; and men having the status of
being fathers and having their biological need to pass on their genes met,
without having to take any financial or social responsibility. This style of
independence in no way creates equality. But I’m being over sensitive and my welding
of The Female Eunuch has gone too
far. I’m surely reading too much into my situation and being unfair in stating
that society seems to expect women to bare responsibility for future
generations. Taking being a single mother on the chin cannot be just expected
of a woman, can it?
As I stand on the tube, reading the
Evening Standard, deflated in my search to find a man who I think has the metal
to stand beside me, and support and love our family, I see an article called,
Proof That We Need Foreigners to Make the System Work, by Rashid Razaq. It’s an
article about how UK population can only be sustained by immigration, because
British women aren’t pulling their weight. Here’s an extract:
“Somebody
has to give birth to future taxpayers if we’re going to fund the care of all
those old folks. British-born women aren’t doing enough of it. It’s only thanks
to fecund foreigners that we’re even close to the 2.1 children per woman
replacement rate to maintain a stable population.”
[http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/proof-that-we-need-foreigners-to-make-the-system-work-rashid-razaq-a3410841.htm]
I am fuming. There it is in black and
white. I’m not being unfair or over sensitive. A publication that across its
paper, online and mobile offerings has a monthly readership of 11 million,
considers it OK to blame the problems caused by a dwindling population on WOMEN!
Not British men and women, just WOMEN: Selfish contraception addicted women. I’m
sorry guys, but if you want to use our wombs to do the most amazing thing
possible, create a new life, then I think you should be giving us some help! Quite
frankly the bit when we make a whole new person out of our own body with only a
little swimming cell from you guys, is pretty f@cking AWESOME. The least you
guys could do is love us and support us, and not expect us to do it ‘independently’.
If us women are expected to create the
taxpayers of tomorrow, and because on our CVs next to ‘Excellent Communicator, strong strategic vision, ability to successfully
deliver complex projects’, we also have ‘ability to make whole ENTIRE human’,
then maybe we should be paid more, or at least the equivalent!
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