Brooding on Broodiness
(7 MINUTE READ)
For easy listening to get you in the mood while you read this:
Carla Thomas: B-A-B-Y
Misty Miller: Broody
Screaming Trees: One way conversation
.Brooding on Broodiness
I won’t deny I’m a cooer. I’ll stare at a baby if it’s cute and laugh at it if it’s not.
Little tiny socks. Oof. Miniature trousies. Gah.
Yadda Yadda. I was twenty-one when I started writing this article and I’m twenty-two finishing it off. There could be a tick tock on my mind.
And why?
A foot. The foot of a lovely well-meaning woman I met just before Brazil beat England’s football team. I’ll add that it was a woman’s football match because that was the atmosphere. The future was there, and it smelt of Carling.
‘And how old is your daughter?’
The six-year age gap between me and my youngest sister has always felt quite big. But never that big.
“BA HA AHA HAHA” – I rarely handle awkwardness with grace – “HAHA I’M NOT BROODY YET AHA Ah ha… ha… yeah she’s my sister”
The dainty foot of the head of a sports accessibility charity, firmly in it.
That I want to have a little tribe of me-lookalikes is true most days of the week. But I was surprised at my own response to her footie-feminist-faux-pas. The two questions that crossed my mind in the following minutes were ‘do I need botox’ and ‘am I broody?’
It's a bit of a reflex joke – the ones you make and don’t think about, almost like a meme.
This article is going to be about broodiness, and some things I think about it. Strap in.
So am I broody?
I wonder if I’m just reacting to the content that’s on the airwaves.
Swedish entrepreneurs declaring that I AM SO HAPPY WITHOUT CHILDREN and my mum telling me she won’t be happy without them and Margaret Atwood breathing OFWILLY. Reproduction. Preg-Nanc-See. STERILE. down the back of my proverbial neck.
To add to it, I’m a ‘professional woman’. So that means maternity leave, paternity leave, leave her alone it’s her choice. Or is it a joint decision. Does the man get to say? Or abortions, rights, labour, what will happen to my labia and how do you raise something right.
Then, there’s the environmental abstentions, toxic contraception and even after that a vision of a brave new world. A bright future. A bloke experiencing side effects. And 3 is the magic number. In for a penny in for a pound right. Is it now or in five years or do I just get a dog?
And the parents. Our zygotal betrayal if we don’t. “The millennials and their Maltese miniature mutts mucking up the milestones we had all planned out”.
It was off the back of the Handmaid’s tale that I started taking an interest in the actual stats surrounding sprogs and parents, in the UK especially. Unfortunately, broodiness isn’t something that is considered in censes as part of the national agenda.
However, it probably is the actual reason that most people end up having babies. They just wake up one morning and feel the need to never feel that well rested again.
Some questionable articles I read in the lead up to my own one looked at how many people in the UK wanted kids.
Like those conversations with people who all agree by saying the same thing in different ways, you can hear ‘Real men are just as broody as women’ declared by monsieur Telegraph as Lady Daily Mail harks to the ‘Rise of the Broody Bloke’. Your pal New Scientist in the corner notes that ‘Falling in love makes men broody’.
When I say questionable, the one that caught my eye was done by vouchersurvey.com, most likely to find ways to sell more children’s clothes to male-identifying yuppies.
1,732 of the finest UK specimens were asked 'do you ever want to have children?' 88 per cent of the male respondents stating that they did, compared to 79 per cent of women.
Interestingly, all the previously mentioned articles were simply rehashing this same data and giving it their own spin.
I wonder what the response would have been if the question was ‘have you ever been broody?’ or ‘are you a broody person?’ The women would have been offended and the men would probably have said no.
The ‘broody men’ of the branded articles are named that way as the entertained response to an unexpected majority.
Broodiness in itself just isn’t all that measurable and it’s latently a pretty repulsive idea.
The mental image of a broody woman is one of the foulest combinations of poultry farming and parental aspirations. Some kind of neck jerking, orange, clucking helplessly nesting woman pecking her way through straw and plopping herself fecund and cock-eyed onto a pile of gooey eggs.
The broody man gets off marginally better. Gooey-eyed and the feature of national news.
Even so, my definitely-broody dad was so anxious about me being born that on a farmer’s advice he fed my mum cream every day for six months before I appeared, and then had heart palpitations himself for six months afterwards.
He was twenty-nine and a qualified medical professional.
Calcium-rich irony that.
So, when I stood in Middlesbrough football stadium and told that woman I wasn’t broody yet, it was more a hope than a fact.
Am I broody? I’d rather not be. I’d rather already have a 16-year-old daughter like the evil young stepmum figure in Hollywood. Kids with dolls aren’t called broody. Maybe broodiness is a ‘growing up’, birds and bees sort of an event. The wild extension of birds flying the nest, nesting and then sitting on their eggs.
Right now, if you ask someone – especially a 20 to 30-year-old woman - if they want children, you’re really asking where they have positioned themselves on some argumentative spectrum. Or, asking them how existentially fearful they are, which isn’t a great starting point for small talk.
And if you see two same-size people who look similar, just assume they’re sisters – or you might have to read another article just like this one.
Written by Anna
Novice Londoner, Novice Employee, Novice Writer, Happy to be here.