I have been called a ‘young mum’ several times in the last few weeks and each time it has really surprised me. I’m 28 (soon to be 29) and I wouldn’t define myself as being particularly young as I tend to think of young mums as being under the age of 21. Am I wrong? As people are leaving it later to have children, has the definition of a young mum changed?
I’ve been contemplating this recently and a straw poll of my friends reveals that not only am I considered to be quite young to have two children (albeit born at the same time), I apparently (at the age of 24) married very young. I can understand this slightly more than the ‘young mum’ thing. We were the first of our friends to get married, although several have followed our (seemingly) pioneering example and tied the knot in the last four years.
However, it felt exactly right for us to get married when we did. I didn’t marry dh so that we could have children, I married him because I loved him and wanted to celebrate with our friends and family. I’ve always found the notion of getting married with the intention of ‘trying’ (awful awful term) for a baby on the honeymoon rather quaint yet I know of several peers who have followed this old-fashioned template to the letter.
I genuinely don’t understand this. I didn’t get married to a sperm donor, I married someone I loved and wanted to spend my life with. We didn’t start ‘trying’ (yeuch!) for three and a half years after we got married and had a great time in the intervening period. In short, we ticked a lot of things off the metaphorical ‘list’ before we had the girls.
I don’t feel that I married too early and I don’t feel like a young mum. I would understand it a little more if I had married dh at the age of 16 and had a baby at 17. That isn’t a criticism of anyone who has married and had children at a young age – I know that I couldn’t have done it but it doesn’t mean that other people aren’t perfectly capable of doing it at this age.
In fact, I didn’t feel in any way ‘ready’ to have a baby until I was 27 and even now I don’t feel like a grown-up. Whenever I’ve done anything remotely adult, like drive a car, book a holiday, get married, get pregnant, get a job, go to university, I wait for the authorities to turn up and a scary man in a big coat to say “She’s not a grown-up – back to school with you young lady!” Maybe that’s what my friends and colleagues are referring to – I may be old enough in years to have a family, but maybe my mental age (anywhere between 7 and 12 depending on how I’m feeling) is letting me down?!
I digress. So to return to my original point, how do you define a young wife and mother? Apparently these days it’s anyone under the age of 30. I’m happy to go along with that...