Clucky.

Now Playing: In My Place by Coldplay (if you go, if you go, leave me down here on my own, then I'll wait for you)

After my Modern History essay we all stumbled out of the class to stretch our legs, massage our fingers and pray futilely we'll never spend another hour clenching sweat-slippery pens whilst trying to remember what happened in 1962 apart from the formation of the Rolling Stones. Despite that...I took one look at a baby and melted, and gleefully held him in my arms, ignoring the stabbing pains in my shoulder as I cooed at his sweet sleepy face and cute purrs of baby contentment.

My shoulder still hurts, but I don't care.

When I was little I was pretty small, because hospitals are a fast lane to sudden weight loss, so I was kept in the nursery at daycare when I was a toddler. I think my infatuation with babies started then. I have spent so much time playing with babies, rocking them to sleep, chasing my cousins with bottles of formula, holding them in the car, giving them bubble baths...it's exhausting, back breaking work, but I love it.

Baby talk is the cutest. I can spend hours and hours singing to babies, talking to them, reading to them. I think babies are the cutest when they're about a year, maybe two, years old - they have their own little personalities, it's adorable. I love having huge eyes on me, I love tiny little wrinkly hands clenched tightly around my fingers, I love soft kisses on my cheek and affectionate baby chatter as I tuck them in or read them a book.

In some ways I love everyone else in the same way. I've learned, perhaps too soon, how to love unconditionally. Altruism...sucks. Seriously. 

One of my relatively unknown talents is that I can normally make any little kid smile, just by smiling at them. It works! Every time I see a little kid in a pram, I can't help but smile, and when they smile back - and they always do, unless they're asleep - it's the cutest thing in the world.

I love how innocent children are. This year I saw innocence as a liability, a vulnerability, something too dangerous to keep with me for very long. I...have grown up a lot this year, and whilst it's all very exciting it's very sad to let go of your childhood, to let go of a time and place where you believed in fairytales and happily ever afters, trading simplicity for the sordid. I love how trusting children are, I can't help but smile at their gullbility, their sweet and simplisitic attitude towards life. I wish...I wish I was like that again.

I was one of those girls who was born a mother. It didn't matter how angry I was at boys, how often my heart broke and all my happily ever after dreams crumbled in my hands or how angsty my (admittedly, very brief) period of 'boy germs' were; I always knew that my destiny was to be a mother, to get married and start a family, and, feminist or no feminist, successful career woman or not, I know I will be inconsolable if that doesn't work out.

Women live in a time and place where we are caught in a void; it is wholly unacceptable to be the driven, career minded woman with no room in her life for men and babies, but it's also equally unacceptable to want to nurture house and home. We've always lived in a world where women who enjoy sex and intimacy are shunned and persecuted; but now we also live in a world where the word 'frigid' exists, too, to further discriminate against women. The balance is, I think, harder than is appreciated by the male dominated world of politics, academia and the corporate ladder; all of us girls have done the math over and over in our heads, but we all know that the numbers don't work in our favour; something's got to give, and whatever choices we make will be condemned by someone or another. I want to chase my dreams; I want to go to university, have a sparkling career, write books and be famous. But I also want to fall in love, fall in love with someone willing to give me what I have always given and received nothing in return for, I want to get married and I want to have that domestic, homey bliss. Both ambitions are my worst-kept secrets, because I know most people will look down on one or the other or both, and I know I can't have everything. But is it really so bad to want success and accomplishment and a sweet baby cooing in my arms and a ring on my finger? It is exceptionally hard, as a young woman still trying to find her feet, to find the balance between increasingly differing expectations - from myself, from my friends and family, and from society as a whole.  I don't know what I want, who I want to be. I don't know if I can live up to expectations when they are so contradictory and confusing and not at all clear cut. And I know that, no matter what I choose in my life, both personal and professional, there will always be one bigot or another that will accuse me of being less of a woman.

This year is the year when we're meant to forget that we are living, breathing human beings; to forget that we are emotional, vulnerable, sexual people, to forget that we think and feel and dream and crave...anything and everything. I feel like I am forced to deny myself, deny who I am, how I feel and what I want; I feel guilty when I indulge myself, allow myself too many moments of being too human. I can't turn it off. I know how important this year is, but I also know that, in the grand scheme of things, everything is important, even the things we try so hard to supress and turn a blind eye to. I can't explain away the way I feel; more importantly, I can't put it off until later. It's all happening, now. I'll only be sixteen once, I'll only fall in love for the first time once, heartbreaks happen in the here and now; and they'll happen later, too, but I can't save the worst till last. I can't put any part of my life on hold, for now, at least. I know it will happen sooner or later; I'll have to choose to prioritise either my professional or personal life. But for now, I won't put anything on hold.