Past Imperfect: Tense

"So do you ever wish you'd had children, then?" An innocuous enough question, from a nice woman in my team, after we had just discovered that we are pretty much the same age and she has a fourteen-year-old daughter.

Useless to lecture her on the changing demographics of motherhood: useless to do anything, really, but answer honestly that, yes, I often do, but that it hasn't happened so far and seems unlikely to in the near future - and if it's not in the near future, it's probably never.

Even though to the outside world it might not look like it, to me in some ways it feels like it's because I have never been enough - pretty enough, nice enough, compliant enough. My rational self knows that this is rubbish: the rational self, however, doesn't get much of a look-in when you are ambushed by something this simple.

So I talked on about how much I was used to getting my own way, and how difficult it was to accommodate the needs of another adult, let alone a baby. But it wasn't a conversation I enjoyed. I could hear myself creating my persona afresh: it was never the right time, there are compensations, I have choices my mother never had.

But it's like Schroedinger's Cat. The only way you can ever prove those freedoms were worth having is by killing them dead. And if you never do, you have to accept that a significant part of the human race will pity you, which is pretty unbearable.

Shallow as I am, I would just like to record that though any emotion detected here is entirely genuine, I am very pleased with the title of this post. And quite possibly about to commit mass murder of the Japanese businessmen shouting and stamping up and down the corridor outside my hotel room.