AI apps these days tempt you with what your future children might look like. Put you and your potential baby Daddy into the app and voila - view the children you dream of (or that might give you nightmares).

I wasn't about to pay for the app, but Chatty obliged well enough. There they were, the children that never were. I looked for my face, and for Jamies. Was there a glimpse of him in the crease of the eyes? Me in the smile? Ah, vanity.

And this is where it caught me off guard. Ah, my emotional heart.

Back when Jamie and I got together, he became a stepfather to a boy who was only 5 years old when he met him. I was young enough to have more children, and in my early 30's, we talked about it. I really, really didn't want to have another child, perhaps because I was being selfish and wanted to travel and just be free to be in love, and to work, and to live, and I had one beautiful child and why should I have another? Because I was a woman, and it was expected?

Jamie wasn't fussed. He told me that our love was our baby, probably the most reassuring thing he's ever said. We had much to nourish and nurture and create, but it wasn't going to be by creating a blend of him and I. By 33, I never looked back - the decision was made.

And then, this damn Ai. The children I never loved. Jamie's family line, continuing, where it ends with him and his sister childless, the branch withering, the DNA that has continued from the beginning of man to now just turning to dust. The daughter I never had. The chance to be a better mother, as if the first time was merely practice.

It fairly broke my emotional heart.

This feeling sits right next to the feeling of horror at having to be forced to bring another child into the world due to some biological imperative combined with a social dictate.

Which brings me to something broader.

'Do you want children? How many children do you have? Does your husband want children? Do you want another child?'

These are all questions I've learnt to avoid. I don't ask my daughter in law if she'll have another, a second grandchild for me. It's her decision, and I don't want her to feel pressured. Some woman have medical reasons for not having children, or simply don't want them - not every one has the maternal instinct. To ask these questions of woman plays in societal pressure for women to have value only by bearing children.

The manosphere and some religous groups would argue that it's biological determinism - women are meant to be mothers, to stay at home and raise children, that it's destiny, not choice. Giving women future options means more control of them in a world where men feel increasingly out of control. This belief arises from the traditional view that society must be hierachically ordered, as it always has been, with men at the top. There's also a kind of cultural panic - if women decide not to have children, what happens to the work force? Yet women are not a national resource. They have autonomy and choice. It's not their fault that economic instability is a sociocultural anxiety.

Let me say it again for those at the back.

It is not women's responsiblity to fix things by having children. Women should not have to stay at home for affordable healthcare. Motherhood is not obedience to God. Women do not have to fulfil a society given role as carers - they might be better at it because they're raised to be, and are trained and practiced at it, but men can equally fill this role.

I'm kinda mad that I even played this stupid game, like I was a teenager adding up numbers to see whether I was the perfect match with the cute boy in the back row. Maybe it was just a curious, whimsical moment that stirred up more in me than I thought.

When I die, I don't think it matters much that I didn't have more than one child. It doesn't even matter if you don't have children at all. It's more important raising the world's children as your own, to nurture people into becoming the best versions of themselves. Fuck the fierce biological need to given birth to your own - we should be giving birth to a better world, and that's not just a women's job.

I will mourn the children I never had, but I also don't regret not having them.

With Love,

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