There are lots of reasons why a woman might not have babies. Reluctant bodies, nature-defying ambitions…hating babies.

You might say one of the reasons why I might not have babies is the fact I am currently looking around the room looking for something to act as a hand puppet so I can check on a baby without going in the same room as it. I figured I could stick the improvised hand puppet round the door and get it to check that the baby’s alive on my behalf. That way if the kid screams it’s not because of me, it’s because of the commandeered cushion cover I’ve too hurriedly named Oliver Cromwell II on account of its clumpy face. This is one of many good reasons why I probably should not spawn. I’ve had it on reliable advice that it’s sort of good to be in the same room as a baby on most occasions.

My second stint of babysitting in as many months has me less panic-struck this time around, and more reflective. It comes off the back of a conversation last weekend with gal pals, where we – arrayed in age between 33 and 44 – discussed how we could not imagine giving up our lives to another being. It was a conversation weighted with a certain conviction given our ages (being well past the permissible indecisiveness of our 20s) and the fact that one of us would probably be medically advised not to try, one of us has made democratic use of the NHS’s accessible abortions, and one/three of us would rather just…have a dog.

We ranted about it all – mums, babies, responsibility – bolstered by the season’s first mulled cider. The freedom of a childless Saturday night.

We stopped when we realised we’d spent as long talking about mums as mums spend talking about their baby’s poo. One friend was as certain as she ever has been that hers is not a life suited to motherhood. One friend still felt she didn’t even have to think about it yet. And I… I joined in with equal feist, but with one notable niggle.

That niggle being – I cannot picture myself at 50 not having kids. I can’t imagine not having the greater part of my love invested in a child. But, in the common modern woman’s conundrum, I do not want to do the bit in-between just yet.

We have been told we can have it all. We cannot.
We have to choose, and are walking sand-timers all; the grains of our fruitfulness ebbing away from our southerly exits.

I used to get so broody in my early 20s that I would physically ache. I suppose it’s rather dim to only just have noted that these urges stopped after the death of my father. A parental suicide is as good a snuffing of procreational fantasies as any. It will take further consideration than this column, but perhaps in a rather textbook reaction I was protecting any child I might have from being hurt.

I have taught kids and loved them with ferocity. I would die for my nephew and niece.
And last week I avoided the stories about the rock singer who had committed unreportable acts on children. Like most people, I did not want to examine the human capacity to hurt another human, especially in its nascent development when it should be most protected.

It made me feel our chat down the pub was not just the tinny complaints of women too tardy or scared or selfish to be mothers, but a modern sort of responsibility. Our age is now more than aware of what we do psychologically to our children. Philip Larkin summed it up yonks ago with “They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do.” and we’ve been grateful that a poet put aside poetry to swear so honestly ever since.
You have to really give a crap to have a kid. Like, be really serious about it. And its ugly when it’s done casually, thoughtlessly, badly, cruelly. Really unforgivable.

Maybe tenderness for your race can be expressed by not further contributing to it.
Maybe fear is a kind of kindness.
Or maybe you could nip your life at every bud by thinking too much about it all.

Perhaps the fact it’s only women who are hurried to decide means we are now, with choice, all the more reluctant to make the wrong decisions. Deciding to not have a baby could only ultimately hurt ourselves – and ironically that is the kind of selflessness that makes a good mother.

Women have always had a lot to fret about. In the olden days it was all consternation over how to keep whites white when the stream was muddy, how to prove they weren’t a witch before loonies killed them, or how to fend off amorous Vikings flushed from a successful day’s pillaging.

Now we have a lot more to worry about. Like body hair. What a rigmarole for the modern gal. One day you’re 13, listening to Take That, and getting your mum to confirm that everything’s normal ‘down there’ and developing just like in those You And Your Body books. The next you’re 29, listening to Take That, up to your navel in Boots own hair removal cream and wondering why the instructions never said anything about The Almighty Screaming. In between those two points of course are a thousand misdemeanours along the road to finding what’s right for you. A thousand mis-plucked eyebrows, deodorant burns in armpit nicks, near-death Gillette leg gougings, and various other unmentionable endeavours in the name of being smooth as a scaffolding pipe.

Most women usually fall somewhere amid the following: making sure that their eyebrows don’t startle small children in the street, their armpits don’t give refuge to small nocturnal animals, their leg hair doesn’t get caught in escalators, and their nethers don’t inspire lusty woodcutters to come at them with tools.

It’s a pubic pallavah of varying proportions until you finally decide, definitively, what you can and can’t be bothered with. Some women brightly declare that they don’t care anymore – that they feel comfortable enough in themselves and in the love their partner has for them to just…let it be. Maybe they are suddenly bathed in the glow of revelation while reaching for a blunt soap-caked Venus or a rusty pair of tweezers. Maybe they let their bodies do their thing. Maybe they even grow to love what their bodies do and grow and look like.

I was inspired to write this column by a lady I saw this week. She was buying a big book about make-up techniques along with a little book about the style of Princess Kate. She had long, slender fingers, a pristine purple coat, and tottered on beige heels two sizes too big. Her legs put mine to shame and she was at least in her 70s. She had a stubborn girlish air that railed against time. She was probably very pretty once. But her chin was covered in long silver hairs in what I suppose can only be termed ‘a near-full beard’. I was shocked to see it given her careful attire. I collected myself, and pushed my thoughts to one side. My thoughts being: how could a woman be interested in ‘beauty’ yet not tend to basic facial pruning; why on earth didn’t she sort that out? Ugly thoughts born out of my own shallow prejudices.

Only later did I think, why the hell should she? Why should she feel uncomfortable with her body’s natural course? Why should she waste her twilight years being pointlessly insecure? Why can’t she enjoy make-up and glamorous coats and royal style while sporting a dishevelled goatee?

She may have had the faraway stare of someone who wasn’t really there anymore, she may have had a permanent benign smile of someone who’s slightly mental and just on the dotty edges of everyone else’s ‘sane’, nicely coiffed world, but she looked happy and totally unaware of what was aesthetically expected of her by a society that’s too often told how to look and what to worry about, and I realised I envied her. Her, and her warm little freedom beard.

I’ve always been a bit of a slow lass. Not slow in mental functions as such, (although that sometimes too), but slow at getting things done. I always knew I wouldn’t be able to fulfil my dream of running a sandwich bar for example; I had to face facts – I would make my customers late back after their lunch breaks because I spent too long spreading their butter into the corners equally. My arduous arrangement of lettuce would have them on a disciplinary before a week of patronage was out, and if they hung around for a toastie I’d be delivering it to them as a bedtime snack. The next day.

I’ve always taken a bit longer to do things. Ablutions in particular are a curiously slow affair. I’ve seen people whip in and out of the shower in 2 minutes and they haven’t overlooked a single crevice. A quick shower for me is 10 minutes. A normal one is definitely over 15. I genuinely don’t think I can do it any quicker. I have tried, but it results in me dropping soap, accidentally exfoliating my eye, or only shaving one leg. Part of me wants to film myself having a shower next to a big clock with an accompanying step-by-step commentary to share with selected friends to see how I can improve, but I think they’d definitely worry I was developing a rather niche exhibitionism problem.

Shoelaces. Slow. Making sure I have everything I need. Dead slow. Slow to anger, slow to eat (and growing slower fast), slow to see that some people aren’t worth bothering with. Slow to take the plunge, slow to cook. Slow reader, slow realiser, slow adopter of the new. Slow to say goodbye, slow to leave the pub.

But I think mainly – and I’m going to get all deep here – of all my slownesses, weeing is the one that annoys me the most. Man I’m slow. I could enter a cubicle at the same time as another woman (separate cubicles, usually) and I will still be pulling down my pants as she is zipping up and flushing. I sit there, skirt around my knees, wondering what’s wrong with me. She’s back at the table glass in hand while I’m unlocking the door and struggling (slowly) with the weirdy sensor taps that have no instructions or visible outlets.

I wonder what shapes the pace we go through life with. Whether it is quite literally the wiring in our brains, the unique set of impulses throttled down through nerves and chemicals and marionetting us to its own will, our pace reliant upon and prey to the origin of all our cerebral functions – or if it’s something we subconsciously choose. Do we as children start looking out at the world, in puzzling it over, somewhere decide in our souls that we will decide our own approach, our own response. One kid tears around as another counts the woodlice. Is it our choice?

I once broke up with someone who lived at a pace totally at odds with mine. He was fast fast fast and I was slow. Breaking away was like hopping off a souped-up carousel, dizzying and odd – but after readjusting I settled back into the pace I did not know I had abandoned. Everything seemed right again.

Being slow might be annoying sometimes, it might even mean you get less stuff done, (or it could mean you do your things more thoroughly, perhaps even better) but our natural pace is just one of the many things that make us who we are, and we should gently protect it while life bustles us about.

I am lying on my belly, camping out in our new lounge. We got the keys to the flat but because we’ve been very laissez-faire about the whole thing our removal man is not booked for a while, so til then we’re squatting like anarchist hippies. Except we have electricity and loo roll and an overwhelming mortgage shackling us to the bureaucratic strata of society.

Matt’s gone to work and I am writing this in an old vest and peeling blue nail varnish. I feel tatty but strangely new – and pretty darn edgy without any furniture to make me feel twee and domesticated. I might look to a passing eye like I could be typing out the new communist manifesto to distribute in the streets while a dreadlocked man called Bosh makes a bomb nearby out of washing up liquid on a handwoven rug from Peru, but I’m not. I’m keeping it light and friendly for the paper while simultaneously googling shower curtains that don’t have fish, dolphins or boats on them. (Are there any? Do they exist?)

I lie slightly. We are not completely without furniture. We do have a few fold-up garden chairs to see us through – we’re in our thirties for god’s sake; our coccyxes can’t take too much romantic loafing on hard floors – but the chairs creak ominously and I don’t want my first day in the new place to be marked by me breaking a family deckchair and feeling like a big old bigbutt. I figured the floor can take my weight better because it’s accustomed to heavy sofas and wardrobes, and I’m not quite a wardrobe so here I lie.

I’m looking out at trees, the topper most bit of canopy from the park opposite is like someone has removed our windows and replaced them with a pentaptych of a technicolour Turner painting. I like the fact I can sit here in whatever state I choose and not be seen. In a bleach-splotched towel, butt-naked and scratching my left boob, in a dress I haven’t got the guts to wear in public, in Matt’s old Iron Maiden T-shirt that makes me feel like I’m being dared by the devil to shout at kittens and old ladies. The only thing that will see me is the trees. And they have better things to whisper about than my love handles.

I’m only taking time to reflect quite so romantically because I have run out of cleaning to do. I had satisfied my OCDs within the first few hours of being here and then scratched around idly looking for limescale I could pick off. I’m only writing this because I was in danger of giving myself a cilit bang chemical peel.

We looked at a lot of flats on the route to this one. I fell in love with at least four others – I’m a floosy for rooms – but Matt remain untouched by them all. Until he walked in here. Then I saw something fall across his face that gave it all away. He’d stayed stoney-faced around lots of otherwise lovely properties, but something about this place lit him up like a lantern. He wanted to be here. And so did I. And, after months of solicitors conspiring against us with their unfathomably rude ineptitude, here we are, being here.

Space is so important isn’t it. Where we choose to be, and how it inspires us to be within it. I’m rather glad we’ve got these lush few days of squatting, of having no stuff, of living in emptiness. Our space and time stretched out like a fresh white page before us, new and blank for the choosing.