The question that changed my life: seven writers on the conundrum that transformed everything
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From choosing between a relationship and a baby to imagining a life without sex, how a simple question revolutionised seven lives. Hannah Booth. As I sat down with my therapist that day, making small talk as we felt our way into the session, there was nothing to suggest anything extraordinary was going to happen. But that’s the thing with therapy: things emerge when you least expect them.
We had been dancing around the same subject for a few weeks: I was 38, single, and my clock was ticking. That, we’d worked out, was the root of my current unhappiness. She had been quietly probing, testing my reactions, gently laying out options, scattering seeds of possibility. My mind had been buzzing with it, on and off, in the days between our weekly meets.
But, that day, there was a directness to her I’d not felt before. An impatience with my lack of urgency about my life, the time I had, the thing I wasn’t confronting head-on. She was worrying about my lack of worrying, and it grew as the session went on. And then she asked the question: “What’s more important to you right now – a relationship or a baby?”.
Like a gut punch, it kicked me out of my stupor. She was challenging me to flip the usual order of things – partner first, family second – because my circumstances demanded it. My desire for a child was so strong, but I hadn’t acknowledged it to myself, let alone spoken it out loud, because, without a partner, how was it possible? Her simple question made me voice my desire for the first time. And once that was out in the open, it made me consider the possibility of having a child on my own. In an instant, it became concrete, rather than abstract.
