The hardest thing about becoming a Mum in my 50s? Losing my husband
She’s the psychotherapist who had twins at 54 with her academic husband. Now, 21 years on, she reveals how she’s overcome social prejudice, exhaustion and the tragedy that left her a single mum
THE hardest thing about becoming a mother in your 50s, says Eleanore Armstrong-Perlman, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, who had twins when she was 54, isn’t the cost or the exhaustion.
It isn’t the process of getting pregnant, with its cycles of hope and heartache. It isn’t even the feeling that what you’re doing sets you apart from other people.
Eleanore became ‘Britain’s oldest mother to have a testtube baby’ when her twins were born on June 3, 1997, and so had to cope with being in the news spotlight as well as trying to breastfeed.
No. The hardest thing for Eleanore about becoming a mother at 54 was that her husband, Morris Perlman, a lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE), the father of her children and the centre of her life, died just two weeks after the boys’ third birthday. He was 62.
‘It was a tragedy,’ she says. ‘We were happier than we’d ever been. And then, that life was gone.’
We meet in her large and busy house. At 75 she is mentally agile, energetic and outgoing — she coped after her husband’s death by having lots of friends. She likes gardening and going to the theatre and still works.
Her son, Ben, 21, lives nearby. (His twin declined to take part in this article).
Eleanore met Morris through a friend in 1968. when she was 25 and he was 30. On the surface, they were very different. She was Scottish, feminist, with wild red hair; he, Polish Jewish, a free-market libertarian, dark and neat. She knew she was hooked when a disagreement about politics turned into a full-scale argument. ‘He could cope with me at full strength,’ she says.
They married in 1974. He said from the outset that he didn’t want children. He had a traumatic childhood in Nazioccupied Krakow, where he was hidden by a Catholic family after his mother was pushed off a bus and died and his father was sent to Auschwitz.
She accepted the deal. ‘It was too late to leave him and he was the only person I ever wanted to marry. I was very much in love with him.’
Besides, at that stage, Eleanore did not want a baby. But it was there, a dormant desire, which became a tangible longing. ‘I began to feel my life was full but shallow. I wanted a family. I should have been more up-front. But in some ways I was too proud.’
To her, asking felt too much like begging. Nor did she want to ‘cheat’ — drop her contraceptives without telling him.
So she focused on her career. By then she was in her early 40s and had a successful practice, and was writing papers and sitting on committees.
‘But I started to feel false,’ she recalls. ‘I should have spoken to Morris. What I did was get depressed. I went into analysis and my analyst said: “You want a baby.” I said: “My husband doesn’t want one.” She said: “You never asked.”’ So she made what felt at the time like the hardest decision: she asked him. ‘He was horrified I hadn’t said anything. He presumed I was perfectly happy. He said: “It was true when I married you that I couldn’t have had children, but I changed. I would have had children for you.” ’
Eleanore was 44, but still 12 years off the menopause. But Morris suggested they also try fertility clinics.
This was 1987, barely ten years after Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’ was born. The techique of using frozen embryos was virtually unheard of, having only been developed in 1984.
Professor Ian Craft, director of the London Gynaecology & Fertility Centre, agreed to treat them. An IVF pioneer, he argued that older women should not be barred from fertility treatment and set the limit at 55, when a woman could still conceive naturally.
They opted to use Eleanore’s eggs and Morris’s sperm and began the first cycle when she was around 45. It failed, as did the subsequent two.
‘It was hard-going, a rollercoaster; counting eggs, taking the medication, how many survive,’ she says. ‘When it didn’t work it was heartbreaking. After the third attempt we decided we were banging our heads against a wall.’
By 1991, when Eleanore was 48 and Morris 54, the couple were planning retirement. ‘We were going to live in Bath, we wanted a garden,’ she says.
They embarked on a new routine: weekdays in London; weekends in Bath. ‘I became a fervent gardener and read a lot about alternative fulfilment,’ she says. ‘I carried on with living, being busy: chair of the Guild of Psychotherapists, blah blah.’
And then, when she was 52,
8 million babies have been born from IVF since the first in 1978
she bumped into a friend. ‘She introduced me to her adopted Chinese baby daughter. I realised all the stuff about fulfilment and gardens was rubbish. I had found a way of surviving, but it wasn’t real.’
They decided, once again, to try Professor Craft. ‘I was now much more conscious of my age,’ she says. But by now Professor Craft had helped Britain’s oldest mother, Pauline Lyon, who gave birth to a baby daughter in 1995, a month before her 52nd birthday. Eleanore was already 52. ‘He [Professor Craft] said: “Don’t use your own eggs. At this age it’s a total waste of time.” ’
Today, the idea of making a baby with a stranger’s eggs is common, but it wasn’t then. What’s more, anyone who donated was anonymous. Now, a child is can trace a donor when they turn 18.
‘All I know is she was British, good at sport and had three children,’ says Eleanore of her donor.
The cycle resulted in a pregnancy, but it was short-lived. ‘We went around to friends for dinner and when I went to the loo I was bleeding. I was devastated.’
They marked the loss by planting a star magnolia in the garden.
The couple went back to Professor Craft. ‘He said: “At least it proves you can get pregnant”.’
They used the same donor mother again. An ultrasound a few weeks later confirmed triplets. ‘We were shocked. But a few days later I started bleeding.’ A scan showed she was still carrying twins.
‘When I told friends, the most common response was: “I’m gobsmacked, just gobsmacked!” ’
She had an elective Caesarian at 37 weeks. Right up until the last moment, a tiny part of her didn’t entirely believe there would be anything there. ‘They just put these blobs inside you. You think, how can that be a baby?’
Tiny, fierce cries filled the room. Benjamin weighed 3½ lb; his twin, 4 lb. Eleanore and Morris grinned. ‘We were overjoyed to have these beautiful small boys.’
The next day an article appeared in the national press. ‘Test-tube mum gives birth to twins at 54.’
‘Suddenly I was being offered amazing sums of money and being surrounded by flowers and teddy bears. They had to put up blinds because paparazzi were trying to take photographs and my consultant said he was being stalked.’
They retreated, first to their university flat — ‘I was as high as a kite, sitting in the middle of the night with breast pumps, listening to jazz on Radio 3’ — and then to Bath. Morris took a year’s sabbatical and turned out to be an utterly devoted dad. ‘He never let them cry for more than a minute.’
In those first months they entered a kind of honeymoon period. They carried the boys in slings and lived off boiled eggs.
‘We were totally exhausted, but happy. You have more patience as an older mother. We weren’t frustrated at staying in.’
One day, when the boys were two, Eleanore told Morris to see a doctor. ‘He had a nagging cough and he was far too thin.’
He was referred for an X-ray. ‘The GP rang me and said in one of those too-kind voices that are the sound of doom: “He needs a biopsy,” ’ she recalls.
It was lung cancer. He had six months from diagnosis to death.
Eleanore had always believed in her ability to cope, but as he lay on his deathbed, she said: ‘I’m worried I won’t have the energy to manage. He said: “Oh my God, Eleanore, don’t be ridiculous. You’ll always have the energy.” ’
HE DIED on June 19, 2000. ‘Now that sick daddy has gone, is healthy daddy coming back?’ one of her three-yearold sons asked.
Eleanore was grief-stricken and alone. ‘I was concerned about who else would be there for them,’ she says of the twins. Morris’s family were in Canada; Eleanore’s in Scotland. She saw her parents two or three times a year.
‘I built up a network of female friends so the kids had somebody they could turn to. As a single parent you need somebody else.’
Her boys are now 21. ‘Ben would like to have children before I die. He says it often.’
Her strongest wish is to maintain her independence. ‘I am financially secure. There is no way I am going to be a burden.’
The boys are a source of pride and comfort. For years she thought she’d be childless in her 70s. Instead, ‘I produced two very decent young people.’