Tick Tock Tick Tock. This small yet precise measure has incredible impact on so many.

For some, it is the marching of time. For others, a looming deadline. Incredibly, there are people for whom this opens doors of hope. For others, it is the pregnant pause before the arrival of spectacular occurrences.

Tick Tock. I am five years old, standing at the bottom of the stairs of my grandparents’ house with my sister, staring at the beautiful grandfather clock. We are small. The world is full of promise and dreams do come true. Boo boos are fixed with a Bandaid. The house smells of lemons and freshly-made scones and the sounds are always of laughter. And then we grew up. The clock has stopped at the time my grandfather died, and it has never ticked  - or tocked – again.

But my clock has. It ticks on and on, faster than it did before. I guess, we are growing up – or dare I say it, we are growing older. Yet the picture-perfect family that we all imagined we would have seems elusive.

Saying out loud that you’d maybe, kind of, perhaps like to have a child if all things fell into place and it was something that everyone agreed to, would be a good idea. But, you know, it’s just kind of a passing thought. In actual fact, you feel like you could rip your own heart with longing to plait little blonde locks and tie a neat pink bow around the ends. But this is often viewed as the beginning of the end.

You’re becoming one of THOSE women ... those women who’s clock’s are ticking.

But it’s an interesting dilemma, as we exist in a world where we are encouraged (applauded) to know our goals, achieve them and even over-achieve them!

We have KPIs to keep us on track and we pride ourselves in our single-minded pursuit of ticking off promotion after promotion, sale after sale, success upon success. But have we put aside our personal success? Or, perhaps more pointedly, our succession?

In my circle of friends, it is a very personal question. Some openly cry for the children they’ve never had – others assure them that it is extremely overrated. Just ask them –they’ve had four! Still others worry that their only child will be lonely in a big world without siblings. It seems that the clock ticks for all of us.  And we ask ourselves how we’ve spent our potential child-raising years. We have to balance our views on how we thought our lives would be and how they actually are.

The clock doesn’t stop. Whatever decisions we have made, we live with them and life does keep going on. But if you can do something for women in this particular time of “clock ticking”, just listen to them.

Let them grieve. Let them hope for a miracle. But just let them be free to feel what they need to feel without judgement. Because, I bet you, they still feel like a kid inside, and
can’t quite believe the time has flown by.

Take care of each other. Till next month.

Abby xxx