Nell Frizzell

“I feel weird,” I said, leaning into my friend’s shoulder. “I feel like she doesn’t belong to us anymore.”
She knew what I meant, of course. Both of us had, at different times, lived with Alice, acted out our happiest domestic moments with her, used her as a surrogate for romance, considered her as close as family. And now, she was somebody’s wife, due to be somebody’s mother. In the hierarchy of her heart, there would always be at least two people above us. Some lucky heartbeat, an about-to-be-person living in her womb, was going to have the greatest mother I could imagine. I was jealous of her baby, and jealous that she was having a baby. I was sad that our party had ended but suddenly aware of quite how much I wanted to have what she had. I wanted the total expression of somebody’s love and commitment to take hold in my own body and create something incredible.

Alice’s husband loved her so much that he wanted to bind his actual DNA to hers. He wanted to create a future life, an entire person, within her body. He wanted her to be tied to him, to rely on him, to be his family forever.

Becoming a parent is the only decision that comes with a biological deadline, the only one that cannot be reversed: it is therefore the one decision that throws all others into such sharp focus.

find new partners

Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, I tried desperately to appear casual and carefree

You can get a new job

I silenced myself, because I thought it made me more attractive.

we have placed the burden of whether to try for a baby almost entirely at women’s feet.

once you’re a parent, you’re a parent for life

would render me single forever.