I’m 35 and according to science, if I got knocked up right now, it would be a geriatric pregnancy. Yep, you read that right: my body is grizzled and elderly, or at least would be treated as such if I were to fall pregnant.

You’d think at this age I’d know if I want to be a mum or not, but it’s a complicated question for plenty of reasons. I grew up singing that rhyme: “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby sitting in a carriage.” Coming from a traditional Vietnamese family just reinforced it: I’d meet a guy, we’d fall in love, we’d get married, we’d have kids. Simple.

I met the guy, we fell in love, we talked about our future with kids and a white picket fence – and we broke up when I was 25. I was thrust into a new reality, and I realised a few things: one, I’m not exclusively into men; two, I don’t care about marriage; and three, I have a choice that my own mother didn’t necessarily have. I don’t have to have children if I don’t want to.

There are so many beautiful things in the idea of having kids: teaching a little person all about the world; showing them my favourite things; treating them with kindness and respect so they’ll treat others that way, too. I have a niece and nephew, and seeing their tiny faces light up when they discover something new is a feeling I can’t put into words. Imagining sharing that with my own child feels like a special kind of magic.

And yet, the fear: climate change, genocide, money, genetic mental illness, a loss of time and freedom. I know enough about intergenerational trauma to try and break the pattern, but what if I fail? What if my kid doesn’t like me? What if they’re a brat and I don’t like them? What if I’m not good enough? What if, what if, what if?

I recently made a nosy poll on my Instagram stories to see what the people around me thought. I was surprised, but also not, by the results: overwhelmingly, my peers don’t want to have children, for a lot of the same reasons that make me hesitate. Some were on the fence and less than a third said yes, they do want kids. These conversations made me realise that things can change – what we want at one point in our lives might not be what we want later. That boyfriend from my 20s is married now, and he and his lovely wife have decided to be child-free.

Things can also change when your friends have kids. I have friends with kids whom I still see all the time, and we’ve adapted to the changes. There are others I’ve drifted from, like a close friend who told me, baby in her arms, that she couldn’t relate to child-free people anymore, and I felt myself disappear from her life.

We’re lucky to live in a time when options are available: if you have a uterus, you can do a test to see how many (if any) eggs you have before freezing them to buy more time. There’s a lot of fear-mongering about fertility after 35, but it’s actually a gradual decline, not an immediate nosedive. Technology exists to help you make a baby if you otherwise can’t. But there are challenges there, too: it’s pricey and not failproof.

These questions swim around my head constantly. My partner and I picture different versions of our future together: kids, no kids, 100 cats. Some days I think I’d love nothing more than to be a mother, and other days the rest of my life stretches out before me like a blank canvas to fill with anything I’d like, while loving the children of my friends and family as the world’s dorkiest auntie.

Everyone’s path is different, and I’m grateful to be able to choose mine. Instead of being governed by fear and uncertainty, I’m leaning in to acceptance of whatever will be – and I know I’ll find beauty in whatever life I end up following.

This rant was featured in frankie issue 121. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.