JESSIE STEPHENS: 'I'm 31, and I cannot stop thinking about my fertility.'

Listen to this story being read by Jessie Stephens, here.

I am 31 years and seven months old.

Just as those months mattered when I was four, and I needed to make clear that I was very nearly five, those months seem to matter all over again in my thirties. 

I was sure about less things entering my thirties than I was entering my twenties, but one thing I am certain of is that I would like children one day. It is difficult to explain the extent to which this feels like a fundamental need rather than a choice. I am terrified by how much I want a baby; how essential kids feel to my future. Even admitting it seems like too much of a risk, like if I dare say it out loud fate will play a cruel trick on me. 

There are women, of course, who are just as certain they do not want kids. Sometimes I envy that decision, the finality of it. But regardless of where you fall - Women Of A Certain Age are dragged out into the middle of nowhere, accompanied by a ticking time bomb, and confronted with a fork in the road. Once you hit your thirties, the whispering begins. Choose. We are, whether we like it or not, forced to make a choice. It is a choice we cannot undo. It is a choice we can feel rushed into. It is a choice men have (sometimes) their entire lives to make.

While I know I want children, I'm stuck in the awkward, liminal stage many of us find ourselves in. 

Just not yet. 

And the Just Not Yet Stage is underpinned by anxiety, terror, guilt, longing and anticipatory regret. What if I just spent my last fertile years flapping my hands about muttering "just not yet"?

As a millennial, I have absorbed, by osmosis, all the competing messages about fertility that have been spun across generations. 

Spend your twenties getting ahead, because your career stops when you have a baby. Or at the very least you have to press pause.

Your career doesn't end when you have a baby. Never give up your work. It is your freedom.

Your fertility falls off a cliff at 32.

Your fertility absolutely does not fall of a cliff at 32.

You don't want to be an 'old' mum.

You don't want to be a 'poor' mum.

It's easy to get pregnant, look at my friend Samantha.

It's hard to get pregnant, look at my friend Lucy. 

You're not ready.

But you're never ready!

There are so many interventions. People are having babies at 50.

The interventions don't always work. Barely anyone is having babies at 50.

You probably have endometriosis. Or PCOS. Both conditions can affect your fertility. 

But lots of women have endometriosis. And PCOS. They're having babies all the time! And the interventions! Don't forget the interventions.

But the interventions are expensive. And this is at a time when rent has never been higher and I can't afford lettuce and wages are stagnating. 

But is there anything more important than a baby? I'm genuinely not sure. For me, is there?

For my grandmother's generation, one simply married and then had as many babies as they could before they couldn't anymore. She birthed seven. For my mother's generation, the contraceptive pill and equal opportunity in the workplace meant you were granted another decade before you had to make up your mind. The baby boomers and the Generation Xers earned us space and support and freedom. 

The fertility pendulum swung in one direction, then in another, and now it's just repeatedly hitting me in the face. 

As I edge towards 32, my obsession with my imagined egg count is bordering on pathological. You're only born with a certain amount, I tell myself. And there goes another one. And another. Boom. Off they go. 

Perhaps next year I'll have a baby, I think as I lay in bed at night. Or after that upcoming holiday. Or once that project wraps up. 

One day. Just not yet. 

The men in my life get to play this game, really, until they die. They do not fear, like I do, being told by a medical professional that they just waited too long. 

While I spent my twenties feeling as though there was no difference between men and women - we were equal, but we were also, largely, the same - once I turned 30, that changed.

By virtue of having been born with a womb, I wear the mental load of project managing the creation of human life.

I can just about hear every woman who has scaled this mountain before me shouting "WELCOME, lovely to have you here". 

I suppose what I'm grappling with is the profound biological inequality that this life stage brings with it, compounded by actually birthing the baby, then potential breast feeding. 

While I wait, which is, in its own way, also a choice, I am plagued by a level of anxiety I never expected. 

It feels like my career is only just beginning to gain momentum, and suddenly (and it does feel sudden) I am faced with a question that feels more urgent by the day. 

Babies?

That anxiety is compounded by the knowledge that a baby is never promised to any of us, as much as we like to plan and save and design idyllic futures. 

As more IVF clinics pop up all over the country, and infertility is destigmatised on prime time television, and friends share stories of miscarriage and years of trying without success, I'm left utterly terrified. 

Fertility seems to be an exercise in perfect timing, but there's also the role of luck.

When the stakes are so high, the volume of information so suffocating, the window of time so short, and the prospect of infertility so ubiquitous, is it any wonder that fertility has become the boogeyman of the 30 something woman?

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