But for the vast majority of our history, humans didn’t understand the number zero. It’s not innate in us. We had to invent it. And we have to keep teaching it to the next generation.
Other animals, like monkeys, have evolved to understand the rudimentary concept of nothing. And scientists just reported that even tiny bee brains can compute zero. But it’s only humans that have seized zero and forged it into a tool.
There are hundreds more, lost in the bush, never missed; drowned, washed into one of our three great oceans; murdered, buried in shallow graves thousands of kilometres from anywhere. Time settles over this brittle, brilliant continent, reclaiming us. Floodwaters drop and dust storms disperse; cotton farms are reclaimed by scrub, and Herefords left to wander beside the rabbits, foxes and other mistakes.
Perhaps the single greatest leap forward for women in the last 50 years has been the way legislation and medical advances have meant – for those of us living in more enlightened parts of the affluent west, at least – that motherhood is no longer almost inevitable but one of many possible courses for a life. This freedom has come with a cost, as the conservative press likes to remind us daily: while women are putting off childbirth in favour of professional success, finding the right partner or merely scrabbling together enough resources to make sure parenthood is not punitive, we will eventually slam up against the immovable deadline of our biology, with all the agony, regret and soul-searching that entails, if we dare to “leave it too late”.
Guardian journalist Emma Brockes and Canadian novelist Sheila Heti both found themselves in their late 30s weighing up the pros and cons of motherhood. Both, it must be noted, approach the issue from a position of considerable privilege, which they recognise: both white, middle-class professionals with no serious fertility problems, they have the luxury of considering the more abstract ethical questions around whether or not to have a child, and the potential ramifications for their own lives and the people who love them. It’s also important to note that these are not books about parenthood. They are specifically about the question of becoming a mother; it is impossible to imagine a man writing the equivalent of either book, not simply because the biological imperative against a ticking clock is less stark, but because fatherhood is not seen – culturally, psychologically, emotionally – to consume and usurp a man’s identity in the same way.