There you are at thirty, your own London flat and a very good job, thinking that everything will turn out well in your personal life too if you just carry on as normal and stay true to yourself. Isn’t that just a bit romantic, thinking that one day ‘he’ will just walk into your office, you’ll get chatting, and things will go on happily from there? Well, that’s what happened to Mum, you say.
Thirty-six now, and when you mention your ‘plan’ you can see people starting to look a bit doubtful which is really annoying. You know what you’re doing, thanks. A couple of women friends, seeing how you are with your cats, say, ‘You should have a baby. You’d make a really good mother!’ You look on with distaste as they have children alone. They’re selfish, children need two parents, you say, and you have practical concerns. What if you lose your highly competitive job, how would you survive?
Here you are at thirty-eight; ‘it’ still hasn’t happened, the right man, marriage, family, but you say there’s still no need to worry about it, or put on any lipstick. You’re doing everything you can, using dating agencies and clairvoyants. They started after you spotted increasingly adorable looking baby clothes in a Mothercare shop near your office, and two colleagues who’d fancied you, who you didn’t want, one had wide hips, the other a big nose, both found wives on line, in China and Croatia, and started families. Dating agencies are where you pay lots of money to be insulted, not just by the ‘dates’ but by those who run them, who feel that you are already too old. They have their own worries, never enough men on the books and the ones they have want younger flesh. ‘Most of our gentlemen want to have children and they’ll think you are too old,’ one lady with glossy red lips tells you smilingly. ‘Not true of course, but that is how they think.’
Madame Margot of Camden is more reassuring. ‘There’s someone there for you too, Dear,’ she says looking at the Tarot. ‘A businessman. You’ll have lots of money, three children and be very happy.’ You believe that very strongly, but aged forty also consult Dame Nora of Neasden, who says that you’ll marry in five years’ time and have two children. You believe her too, especially as she rings later, saying quite excitedly, ‘I had a real presentiment about you, like a vision.’ Five yearsto wait seems a very long time but you trust her.The years come fast, and then they go. I ask you to think seriously, have these women made you feel better?
At forty-eight you have lost your job, all the women of your age in your office have been swept away and you cannot find any work. Now you live in a damp basement flat in a less fashionable part of town. Your fear of poverty was justified and I hear you congratulate yourself on making a sensible decision. I wish you could look a bit harder and find out what you really wanted all along, instead you go on longing for the things your mother had, at the same time rejecting the usual, the hum-drum, the putting up with, the compromises needed for a lasting relationship, the one you demanded for having a child. Your nights are infected by that recurring dream; you are outside in winter, holding your cat. You have to take it on a journey but there is no basket and you can’t hold on to it; at any moment it will leave your arms, jump down, run away and be lost forever.
Now you are in your fifties and know what that dream meant; that precious cat was your fertility.
There are other things that you fail to envisage; being older with no family. You refuse to see the future as a singleton without children, or equally importantly; grandchildren. You never ask how it will feel when everyone else seems to have them except you, in fact, you will find that they’re more important in 2022 than ever. Ever heard of ‘new technology?’ No, well you soon will, and you’ll need a grandchild to explain it to you. Your conundrum of obstinacy and desire is leading you into a late-life mess; you’ll soon find that you’re invisible to most people particularly men which will irk your residual vanity more than you’ll like. You’re going to notice increasing discourtesy from shop-assistants, waiters and bus drivers, something male friends say they don’t encounter. They will go on getting invited to dinner parties, you won’t. It’s not too late to try the dating agencies again, there are now some for much older people you know.
‘Your strength is in being alone, Dear,’Madame Margo says, on your final visit, aged sixty. It sounded like a terminal diagnosis and a slight contradiction to what she’s been telling you for the previous three decades, but you hand over £50 and decide, for once to look at unwelcome reality. Well, no, you ignore what she said because you still can’t grasp it.
Aged sixty-six her words still echo in my mind, waiting to be understood and accepted. Instead of all the mundanity that my mother and others accepted in order to fit in as normal people, i.e., parents, I always believed that I had some special destiny, a freedom to shape my own life, but I wasn’t always brave enough for my own ambitions. I agonised for too long over the price. There are still about ten years left to get everything done that I want, and my message to myself now is, put aside impossible dreams and Get on with it!
Jane Kelly