By Morven Crumlish. Love isn't flawless. Morven Crumlish's story, The Big the Beautiful Nanda Gray, is in Work: the Scotsman/Orange short story collection 2006, to be published in July (THE GUARDIAN, 11/05/06):
It just never gets old, does it, the debate about when women should have babies. It's a treat for everyone, encompassing both multipurpose misogyny and the glamorous spectacle of women mud-wrestling each other into submission over their personal biological choices. The too old/too young debate is similar to Heat magazine's obsession with obesity versus anorexia. There must be an optimum age and social status out there somewhere, but I'm not sure it can be accessed by anyone other than royalty and Jordan, a woman so fantastically impervious to criticism that she makes me wish I'd had a second child with Peter Andre.
I'm fascinated by our inability to recognise any flexibility in methods or timing of motherhood. You're selfish if you have a child when your biological clock is screaming out for one, and mercenary if you wait until you are financially stable. You're irresponsible if you have a child young and without a partner, and freakish if you reproduce past middle age. This is before your child has even taken a breath, before the gusty sighs of disapproval greet every subsequent child-rearing decision you will make.
Why can't there be different sorts of parents? And different sorts of children? Our culture revolves around this notion of freedom of choice, but as soon as you have a child you are expected to cram yourself into the restrictive corset of other people's opinions, with a news story coming out every few months that hauls on the laces a little tighter.
I did things the wrong way, having my daughter when I was 23 and on my own; and, while it hasn't been endless picnics and sunny smiles, we are both, seven years on, fairly chirpy about the experience. I have friends who waited until they were married, friends who were taken by surprise, I know people whose relationships have flourished after children, and others who tell me I am lucky to be on my own, not having to deal with shirts to iron and the oppressiveness of a now inescapable relationship.
I'm not a perfect mother: I'm crabby and impatient, and I shout a lot. I can't imagine ever being at a point in my life where I would think, "Oh yes, now I'm ready to bring an entirely new person into the world and be absolutely responsible for their happiness, health and every breath for ever and ever." You would have to be some kind of sociopathic android if you weren't terrified of the implications of parenthood. And however hard you try to do everything right, your children will probably find fault with you, somehow, and they will discover Philip Larkin, as though that line was written just for them.
Your best hope is that they will get over it. People do. Nobody has a perfect life, and, just think, if you are screwed up in a sufficiently imaginative way, your children can always use it as creative ballast. Noah Baumbach delivered an account of his parents' divorce in The Squid and the Whale, and had achieved sufficient distance from the experience to be able to find it funny. The script punches you, knuckles out, between the shoulder blades - you laugh as though you have been winded. There have recently been loving and forgiving memoirs written by children brought up on sheep farms, in cults, and even in Fife: writers who have accepted their own responsibility for being grown up, now.
There is a theory that a bit of dirt is good for a child's immune system. I like to argue that, similarly, a certain amount of unavoidably rubbish parenting is good for the character. When children know that you are human, they learn to be compassionate, responsible, independent. Above all, they learn that relationships can't be valued on some rigid scale of perfection.