Oh Baby(z)

Once I met with a lady who acted as a kind of mentor for the women in our church. She was around ten years older than me, and I desperately admired her. I found her slightly intimidating, despite how lovely she was, because she so obviously had her shit together. I was at a crossroads, because in my heart I desperately wanted to have a baby, but making that decision felt dauntingly huge (as it naturally does, and probably should do).

She asked me what my hopes and dreams were. What did I really want from life?

'I want to have a family with Chris,' I said. It was my absolute number one priority, and Chris felt the same. We'd decided on kids early in the relationship. If we were lucky enough to have them, we would. I wanted three, he wanted two, but neither of us felt particularly strongly about that. We'd figure out the actual number of children later, when we were grown-ups.

Anyway, back to the conversation. 'Yes,' she said, 'But what else?'

I gave her my second biggest dream. 'I'd love to write a book,' I said.

'Right,' she said. 'You need to do that first.'

What came was a blunt, but well-meaning lecture that came from a place of experience. You cannot pursue your dreams in the same way once you have children, she said. Your life will alter so dramatically that all of your own goals will, at least temporarily, go out of the window. Get everything you want to get done in life over with first. And then have children. It wasn't bad advice, necessarily. It just wasn't for me.

Because what she didn't know - and what I couldn't articulate until much later - was that I had a hole in my heart, for want of a less embarrassing phrase. I felt something that I can only really describe as an absence, as though I was waiting for someone. I had gone from wanting an unknown number of children 'one day', to a sudden feeling that I was about to miss something very important.

Around a year later, our daughter arrived. More than worth pushing back my book for. She was (and is) a dream. A couple of years later, that creeping feeling arrived again: an absence, and gradually increasing worry. I'd not long been diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, and I was facing the possibility that more children might not be on the cards for us. Sometimes people suggested to me - well-meaning, maybe - that I should just come to terms with it, and be happy that I got to have one child. Wasn't my one child enough? And I remember wanting to scream at them. It wasn't that I was ungrateful for my existing child, it was that I had this intense fear of potentially losing someone else. (Since then, I've got to know people with secondary infertility. It's a unique type of pain. The absolute least useful thing you can say to someone in this situation is 'be grateful that you got to have a child at all'.)

I spent a lot of that time feeling very lonely, and often furious, or in tears. People just didn't get it. I knew someone else was coming. He wasn't with us yet, but he was going to be, I was sure of it.

That someone is my son, now a funny, kind, and silly eight-year-old. Years on, I still feel so fortunate that it worked out that way, that I had the ability to carry them and bring them into the world when the time was right. Not every woman wants to have children, it's important that we all wrap our heads around that and let go of the stigma surrounding our choices. But not every woman who wants to have children gets them. I am, even on the worst days, so grateful.

I've always been motherly. I sometimes wonder how much of that was down to everything in my childhood being geared towards looking after stuff. Tamagotchis, Furbys, Pokemon. I dreamed of being a Pokemon breeder, rather than a trainer. I wanted to nurture things. Being the youngest child, for a long time, I didn't have anyone to direct my natural softness towards, and so I directed it that way.

And while not all of my gaming habits reflected this (I, too, liked to drown Sims and lock Lara Croft's scary butler in the fridge), I was the absolute prime target for the very first virtual life simulators. Once my friend Ruth introduced me to the original Catz game, I was hooked.

I won't talk too much about Petz. I've already written about these games and the impact they had on me. What I really wanted to talk about was the slightly less popular spin-off to the series: Babyz.

Babyz is a strange one. On the surface of it, it should work: it should appeal to all the girls who were trying to be cool, but still occasionally yearned for the fake cherry scent of Baby All Gone. A bit too old for physical dolls, in other words, but maybe not for virtual ones.

The set-up is this: you're in a house, and you have a baby to look after. You can play with them in the toy room, get them dressed in the bathroom, take them out on the slide in the garden, that kind of thing. Voice recognition software allowed you to speak into a microphone, so you could teach your Babyz new skills.

On replaying recently (which you can watch by skipping to the end of this post or by clicking here!), I couldn't help but escape the thought that Babyz is just a bit ... weird. They're essentially virtual pets: you can feed them, train them, bathe them and dress them up, just like in the Petz games. But they're humans. I don't know, there's just something uncanny about it. It almost made me feel a bit guilty, to be using them to play around with, and then switching off the program and leaving them in that eerily empty house all on their own. Although I do think my brain has been permanently altered by Doki Doki Literature Club.

Even as a kid, I remember reaching for Babyz less, partially because it just felt a bit odd. It turns out I'm not alone in feeling this way: this incredible column by Nnedi Okorafor contains a small moral panic about it. 'Babies are not pets. What message is being sent, especially to the young people who will buy this, when you have the option to "send them to grandma's house" when they're being difficult?' she writes. 'Maybe it's only a game but is it, really?'

Okarafor's fear makes me smile, looking back on it. Are there women who abandoned their real-life children because they once did so in a video game? I'm going to hazard a guess and say no. Having said that, there have been times when I've wanted my kids to go to see their grandparents just so I can have a break, so maybe that's the same thing, actually, maybe I've always had the sentence 'send them to grandma's house' hovering around in the back of my mind somewhere, like an emergency button. Hmm.

Anyway, the thing that lets Babyz down - and the other reason I didn't reach for it that much as a kid - is the fact that is actually quite boring. When you're playing it in 2025 and the voice recognition software doesn't work, you can't do half of the things you're meant to do: coo at the babies, teach them words, encourage them to walk. But even with voice recognition, the fact is that there just isn't much to do. Once the babies hit toddlerhood, you can't really do anything new with them. Other than send them to grandma's, I guess, when you get bored.

Sometimes I think about all the feminist takes I'd read back in my twenties about gender-restrictive toy marketing. Those were my baby feminist days, and I was prepared for a fight whenever my son tootled along pushing his cuddly Pikachu in a pink pushchair. Surely someone was going to pop out of the bushes and shout at me because he was attempting to bottle-feed his Pokemon, rather than running around playing football? As it turns out, the majority of people don't notice or care. And I'd never have married a man who felt that boys shouldn't show care or affection in the same way girls do, so it's a battle that I never had to face.

There are pressures that a boy faces as he grows up, to behave a certain way. That's becoming more and more evident as my son gets older. But I could have spent a lot less time worrying about toys, probably. Given that most kids will choose to play with a cardboard box a lot of the time, I expect I was overthinking it.

Thinking back to my own childhood, then. Did games like Babyz (and indeed, Petz) prime me for motherhood? Did it push me, as a girl, down the path of wanting to have children? Was it something that would have erupted in me anyway, or did my heavily gendered '90s childhood make a difference?

Honestly, I think I was wired that way to begin with. There's just something in me that likes looking after stuff, I think. Not all girls felt that way, and not all women feel that way, either, despite being bombarded with virtual caring responsibilities practically from birth. I'm very much inclined to think, despite my guilt about deleting it, that Babyz really was just a game. A weird, uncanny little game.

The truth is, the advice to be patient and wait to have children is good. It's a monumentally life-changing thing, and there are only so many times you can send them to grandma's house before you really start to feel like you're taking the piss. But for me, the motivation to become a writer had dwindled to nothing before the kids came. It was after they were born that I gained confidence in myself. Looking after them made me feel competent, like I was actually good at something for the first time in my adult life; it made me feel like I could do anything, actually. I wanted to chase my dreams for them, as well as myself. I wanted to make them proud of me. It was an unexpected bonus of doing things the wrong way around.

I know we measure time in units, but I no longer believe those units are made equal. Everyone told me time would pass quickly once the kids went to school, everything being measured in school terms rather than days; they didn't tell me that time would keep speeding up. The older they get, the faster it seems to go. It's like life is constantly accelerating. Like I'm running down a hill and the closer to the bottom I get, the more momentum I build, and my legs could go out from under me at any moment.

Sometimes, though, a moment will slow down so much that you can't help but feel the significance of it. Last year, at the school summer fair, I sat on the field holding my friend's new (beautiful) baby girl. I felt her warm weight in my arms. I watched the bunting flapping in the gentle breeze. Observed my children waiting in the queue for the bouncy castle. And I thought: one day, we won't be part of this school community anymore. If we had another baby, though, we'd go through this whole system again. For a moment I could picture it: another year's time, maybe, sitting on the grass, with my own baby in my arms, and my grown-up babies dipping in and out to play. Sleep-deprived, probably. Happy, absolutely. Poorer, definitely. But it was so intoxicating. I could do it all over again, I thought. I could push past the tiredness and love another little person. If they were as beautiful and brilliant as the first two, how could I not want another one? I poked at my own feelings about it. Really allowed myself to consider the idea, for the first time in years. People ask me sometimes, if I'd consider having another one, seeing as I love being a mum so much. How do you actually know when you're done?

But as lovely as it was to dream of it, I knew it wasn't right. Not just because of our finances, or because of my health, or because of the state of the world right now. I did not, and do not, have that aching gap in me, that sense that somebody doesn't exist, but should. And I know that's a very 'woo' statement to make, but I don't really feel the need to defend it. My life is beautiful and full of opportunities to love and care for people, but our baby days are definitely done and that feels right, but it also feels sad. You're constantly being reminded how fleeting life is just by the close proximity of people who grow really, really fast.

Parenthood throws conflicting emotions my way all the time. The best advice I've had recently from a friend is to 'just allow yourself to feel it all'. And so I'm trying. I'm trying to let the feelings happen, rather than fight them with distractions.

That day felt important, on some spiritual level, I guess. Nothing had changed on the surface of it, as I sat there in tears in the grass, but something fundamental had shifted. I could see, briefly, a window into another version of life, and it felt like a significant moment of growth to peek into it, just for a moment, and have the wisdom and confidence to let it go.

On a less emotional note, my journey to get Babyz to run in the first place was quite a thing. I filmed it, and edited it into a neat little video, which YouTube then brutally and senselessly compressed. If you want, you can watch me have a slow but inevitable breakdown while reminiscing about an almost-defunct '90s internet community, and my very first exposure to modding back when I was, like, twelve. Enjoy!

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