Despite mawkishly worrying about my parents, I have always been comforted by easy travel to get home from London to Ireland. Now I can’t help but dwell on what I’m missing
I sometimes think about the fact that I’m pretty sure I don’t want children and wonder where the roots of my disinclination lie. I still have the ingrained pregnancy terror of the Catholic girls’ school, 14 years after I left it, and I’ve rarely felt financially stable enough to bring a whole new hungry mouth into the equation. But what you could kindly call my ambivalence about motherhood – or more accurately term repulsion – is really down to what I am like as a daughter. It isn’t that I was the most nightmarish disaster kid imaginable – though I was at times – but that I’ve always been such a morbid, mawkish child.
I’ve fixated on my parents’ eventual deaths since they were still more or less kids themselves, vibrant and good-looking and in their 30s. When I was 15, my dad tried to talk me out of a hysterical spiral I’d worked myself into, and when he asked what was wrong I cried: “You’re going to die!” like some two-bit soothsayer. Children already act as horrid little portals into the abyss of mortality, flourishing while their parents decline, so it seems especially excessive that I insisted on spelling this out so often.
