I now have two children myself, though I came close to not having any at all, and of course that would have been fine. I don’t know how much her “advice” played into my decision, though I imagine on some level the emotional resonance of what she said twisted my arm, twice. I was aware that my largely happy childhood would be no guarantee of the same for my own children, not least because our preferences always differed vastly – my mother only really wanted to be a mother. If I were to have children, I wanted a whole family. Also, I have had kids at a very different time, with the destruction of our planet so much clearer and our world so much less stable.