Asking my womb a question with no easy answers

There are days when I talk to my womb.

- Jan Lee

Now, before you label me crazy, hear me out. As a child-free single woman in her 30s (early 30s, but who's counting?), motherhood is the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

At the risk of oversharing in the national broadsheet, I have been blessed with a fairly regular cycle, and that means I have a monthly reminder of two simple facts: My body is able to bear children. I am not bearing any.

So, yes, sometimes I talk to my womb. I place my hand over my belly and ask the organ in me designed to nurture new life: Will I ever use you? And if I don't, will I regret it?

It is a question with a biological deadline pressing closer to me day by day. Yet, I honestly don't know the answer.

Some women know. I have a friend who always knew she wanted to be a mother. She wanted to form her own family unit and experience the special, all-encompassing love between mother and child. She has a three-year-old daughter with her husband, one of our junior college classmates.

I even know of women, without partners, who want it so badly that they went through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) using sperm donors.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have another close friend who, on her first date with her now-husband, told him she did not want children and said if he did, that would be a deal breaker.

When she married said husband in 2024, she asked that the customary tea served during the tea ceremony at their wedding not include lotus seeds or "lianzi", which symbolise fertility.