Edie’s impending and, as always, unexpected pregnancy has made me think again about my rocky relationship with Jake. My sister has one hundred per cent support from her husband, Lee—why should I be content to settle for anything less? I can admit to myself now that Jake was never as keen on trying for a family as I was, and that’s no basis on which to start out. On the other hand, I was heartily sick of having my bum constantly injected with hormones and I now realise that it’s within my own control to stop it all.

I suppose I felt such a desperate rush to procreate because I never wanted to end up as one of those forty-year-old career women who, in a late flurry, have a baby just before the hormones give up and then alienate everyone around them by acting as if they are the only person ever to have given birth. And I’m now the first to admit it was becoming a close-run thing. We have a very slender window of fertility between teen-mum and pensioner-parent. I’m thirty-four and not getting any younger. Plus, I wanted to stay at home and look after my children. I had no intention of turning into one of these harried-looking mothers who are trying to juggle a demanding career and equally demanding children and making a mess of both. I’ve no idea how Jake would have felt about that—but I could have a better stab at a guess now. Do men really want a little wife and mother at home these days? I don’t quite know what we’ve done to ourselves as a society, but all our roles seem topsy-turvy. Women may think they’ve achieved equality, but all it seems to mean is that we can swear, drink until we fall over, have sex indiscriminately, work all the hours God sends for less pay and have babies with anyone’s sperm we choose. And for what? What exactly have we achieved by this defeminisation of ourselves? Most men’s idea of a perfect woman these days seems to be a bloke with breasts. It is so much more simple when one of you has to go out and work in the fields and the other stays at home making chapattis, feeding the kids and the animals and doing the washing in the local stream. Each role is equally valid and vital to the good of the community and there’re no blurred lines of demarcation. Things have become a lot more complicated since we lost all that.