Motherhood

It’s an important topic for me and my almost-not-20-something-anymore-but-as-yet-unmarried-and/or-childless girly mates (i.e. those of us still having a rockin good time – apologies to those of my friends who are blissfully happy Mummies and Daddies, and doing a very fine job of it) – my damn biological clock, until recently deathly silent, has suddenly begun to tick loudly enough to be distracting.

I have a whole plethora of platitudes designed to tame my maternal instincts for a few more years until ‘the time is right’ (or the man)...
“You don’t wanna have children young – you must have as much life experience as possible so you have that wisdom to pass on to your offspring”,
“Nobody needs more than 2 kids these days – you still have plenty of time to manage that”,
“Well if you had a kid you couldn’t be sitting here totally wankered in the middle of a football field in the middle of the day (see photo) with no shoes and no need to be anywhere else now, could you?”
And on it goes, over and over in my head trying to suppress the...
“In some cultures you’re an old maid by now – since about 5 years ago in fact” and
“You know, your body will never recover if you have children too late” and also… no I’m gonna stop now.

So you know how you’re walking down the street and you see a woman pushing a pram and you struggle to decide whether that woman is the Mother or the Grandmother of that child? That’s just not cool. As my friend T. so delicately puts it “It’s disgusting…who wants to make their entry into the world through a curtain of grey pubes?” (She’s spleenful – she works with dozens of middle class career women who have suddenly remembered what their wombs are for and run off to get the turkey baster treatment in their mid forties).

Hence, we invented the word 'Nanma' – it’s a smooshing together of Nana and Ma, or Mother and it aptly describes those new mothers on the, shall we say, mature side, about whom their can be some confusion as to whether the child they are toting about the place is infact their child, or their grandchild.