Pamela Flood: I was vilified by strangers for having a baby at 45
As Pamela Flood returns to our TV screens, she tells of the vilification she suffered for being a ‘geriatric mum’...
IT’S difficult to decide when the best time is to have a baby. And so when Pamela Flood found out she was expecting at the age of 45, she was overjoyed. But what she wasn’t expecting was the vitriol from other people that she would face on a day-to-day basis on social media.
Pamela had her third child Gracie just over a year ago and says she is still shocked at the levels some people will stoop to in a bid to attack a person whose life choices they don’t agree with.
‘I have a friend whose mum was 50 when she had him,’ Pamela explains over coffee. ‘That was back in the day and nobody batted an eyelid. Women had babies until the biological clock said, “I am done”.’
Pamela also has Harrison, five, and threeyear-old Elsie with her restaurateur husband Ronan Ryan and feels it doesn’t matter what age you become a mother ‘as long as you are healthy and in a good frame of mind and the baby is wanted.’
‘I think people are spending time on their careers first,’ she says. ‘Like can you imagine being in your early twenties now? You have just finished college and what are you going to do?
‘You can’t afford a house. So you need to focus on your career to help save a few bob to buy a house. So having babies is not on anyone’s clock.’
Pamela says she was ‘Queen Immature’ in her twenties, so much so that children were definitely not on the agenda.
‘My MO was to have as much fun as I could possibly have and working was a means to an end,’ she says. ‘So I could go on holidays and have nights out and go to nice restaurants with my friends and that was my life. Babies did not come into that picture at all. I wasn’t broody or clucky. It was only when I got to my midthirties that I went, “Ah family and babies’’ and I thought it would be nice. It was five years after that before I had them. You have to be in the right situation.’
By speaking about her decision to be a mum later in life, Pamela left herself open to vile online trolls.
‘I suppose I was a little bit the poster person for geriatric mums’, she says.
‘I would like to think that despite all the s **** y stuff that went on, I was contacted by a lot of people saying that they were hoping to be an older mum. It hadn’t happened for them but I had given them hope.
‘Really lovely words from so many women across the country and older women who had become mothers for the first time, maybe they were 43 having their first and it was really lovely stuff.
‘Of course they are not the ones shouting loudly on social media. With respect, they are the ones contacting you privately to say something nice. The sheer volume of nasty comments on social media was unreal.’
Far from ignoring what was being said about her, Pamela couldn’t help but read the bile that was being spewed about a moment that was supposed to be one of the happiest in her life.
‘I read every one of them,’ she admits. ‘I couldn’t help myself. I don’t think it was a bad thing to stand up and say that you can be healthy and happy and able to have a child at my stage in life. I was shocked at the negative reaction to be honest.’
Pamela is open and honest about those dark days but says she refused to let vile trolls impact on her life choices.
‘A generation ago women were having babies right into their forties and nobody thought twice about it,’ she says.
‘People have this strange idea that everything has to be boxed off at a certain age now. Finish college; go to work; get married; buy a house and have babies. Have it all done by 35. Life isn’t like that.
‘You can make all those lovely plans but that is not true to life. If that does happen and it works for you then great. I am glad that it worked out the way it did for me. I am glad that I had my babies when I was older and I was really properly ready — I would want to be at 39 — and it was good for me. Obviously not for other people but it worked for me.’
But she is still puzzled as to why her own life choices sparked such a huge reaction.
‘I would never put something up on social media that I wouldn’t be okay with my kids to read,’ she says. ‘It is incredible to me that people can be so toxic and they put it up there for all the world to see. Do you really want people to think that way about you? I think it reflects worse on them and they just look nasty.
‘They don’t see the person they are attacking as someone who is a real human being. They just see a face.’
Pamela sips her cappuccino and takes a breath. She is not one to dwell on the past and, as much as this will annoy the haters, she has already moved on. She still maintains a healthy online profile, but chooses to make it work for her and her business.
‘I think social media is a wonderful tool and brilliant as long as the right people are using it’, she says.
‘It has been amazing for us and the business. It is kind of like controlling your own PR and you can advertise about your business as much as you like.
‘Now you have to live up to it, but nobody is going to have the passion for your business that you have.’
Pamela and her husband Ronan have been establishing their own family business away from public life. Pamela also runs her own website, pamelaflood.ie, as well as assisting with the family business restaurant Counter Culture, which is located on Dublin’s Mercer Street. She and husband Ronan opened it in 2015. It was their first professional venture since they were badly hit by the recession.
‘Things are good now’, she says. ‘They haven’t been good for a few years. The recession was bad and hard for everybody not just me. It is ten years since it started.
‘It has been a tough ten years for the country but green shoots and all that and things are better now,’
Pamela is tall and slim with an athlete’s lithe physique, all the while managing to maintain that beauty queen smile. Her porcelain features do not equate to her 46 years and she is full of energy and brimming with chat.
As well as the popular restaurant Pamela and Ronan’s enterprise has spilled into corporate catering and a new line of ready-made healthy meals delivered to your door that is taking the GAA world by storm.
‘We are opening another Good To Go (the meal prep business) in Kilkenny really soon, we just signed for a lease on a premises’, she says. ‘We were feeding the Tipperary and Kilkenny hurling and football teams with the meal prep.
‘That has branched out now and the Wexford team is taking it as well and it is moving quickly. So we have all these fit and healthy young guys tweeting about it and I think our business will grow on the back of that.’
Learning from the hard times is important, Pamela insists.
‘If you don’t learn from them then you have missed an opportunity. At some point you have to draw a line under things and move on and start a new project,’ she says.
‘It is a team effort and Ronan is unquestionably the driving force but his wonderful manager Sean has been with us for years.
‘They are driving the business and Ronan is so passionate and has an incredible work ethic. He is always planning and researching — hats off to him.’
After ten years off our screens, the former Miss Ireland is finally returning to television with food as her primary focus.
A couple of years ago she was due to film a maverick new programme called Geriatric Mothers for TV3 but filming was put on hiatus when the commissioning programme director Lynda McQuaid left the station.
‘I was shocked at the negative reaction’ ‘It’s incredible that people can be so toxic’
Pamela is still keen to make the documentary as she discovered Irish women have their babies later in life than any other European country.
‘No country even comes close to us and I think there is a lot to that subject,’ she says.
‘You are a geriatric mum from 35 and that is just bonkers.’
Now she is returning to RTÉ with a new series aptly called Healthy Appetite, featuring top Irish chefs who are tasked with making a healthy version of their signature dishes.
‘I have been missing for a while now’, she says with a smile. ‘It is ten years since I last made a programme which was Marry Me which I did straight after Off The Rails.
‘It wasn’t like I woke up every day and thought I needed to get back to telly. Life has been very busy with three babies and setting up our business a few years ago. It has been full on and it is not like I had too much time on my hands.
‘But it was always in the back of my mind that I would have liked to go back some time.
‘When I did Off The Rails it was a peach of a job and I loved it, but I was single and had no kids and it was nearly all my excitement wrapped up in one gig.’
But times have changed and so have Pamela’s priorities.
‘I enjoyed being back on camera and the whole process as much as I ever did but it is not my reason for living any more,’ she says.
‘The kids come first and then the family business. It really is the icing on the cake so to speak.
‘But I am in the lovely position that if no more comes of it, I had a blast and a great time and so be it. I am not dependent on TV any more and that is a nice place to be.’
That said, Pamela will no doubt be getting more offers of TV work.
‘If someone wants you for a gig they will find you,’ she smiles.
Healthy Appetite begins on RTÉ One at 8.30pm on Wednesday.