Last-chance baby
My younger man made it happen
Any parent will recognise the moment: you’re in a public place when your small child makes a shouty announcement that leaves you wincing. It’s happened to me any number of times, although the most recent occasion proved more personally embarrassing than most.
Bellowed across a busy playground, my four-year-old Connie confidently declared – for reasons unknown – that her mummy was “35”.
Cue a mass swivelling of heads and a collective look which indisputably read: “Blimey. She must have had a hard life.” And it’s true. I don’t look 35, much as I’d like to, mainly because I’ve got another 10 years on the clock.
Not, though, as far as Connie is concerned, because ever since she was old enough to inquire, my husband Duncan has – bless him – made a point of telling her that we are exactly the same age.
In truth, when she came into the world I was 41 while he was – and naturally remains – a whole decade younger. By then, three miscarriages in, I had begun to fear my age was against me and that we would never have the baby I had come to long for.
The one thing that consoled me, after a battery of tests that showed nothing palpably wrong other than my rapidly diminishing egg count, was my sense that in some way, having a partner 10 years younger swung the odds in our favour.
It was based on nothing remotely scientific, more a need to grasp at any available straw.
So four years on, it’s funny to see my hunch confirmed: this week, a new study led by Harvard Medical School shows that for women aged 35-40, your chances of having a baby are vastly improved if you are trying to conceive with a younger man, while the odds plummet if your partner is the same age or older.
Certainly, I seem to be the happy proof of that, not that any of it was remotely planned.
In fact, the last thing I wanted was a younger man as a long-term partner – traditionally preferring the allure of the older chap. So while I fancied Duncan instantly when we met at a friend’s birthday party in March 2005 (he 23, me 33), I assumed that the romance that followed on from that night was a fling rather than a ‘‘thing’’.
Yet three months together became six months became 12 and there we were – undeniably in love and shacked up to boot. The age gap did worry me, at least in the early days. While we got on, there were occasional periods of existential crisis, largely provoked by spending an evening with Duncan’s then-large gang of single male mates, who seemed incessantly ‘‘on the pull’’.
At some point surely, I reasoned, he would wake up and realise that I was holding him back? To this, Duncan always had the same answer – that any problems existed purely in my head and nowhere else. By the time we married in December 2007 any doubts had evaporated: I knew I’d met my life partner.
The baby issue was trickier. I’d never felt the call of my biology – in fact I had always been pretty adamant that I didn’t want to become a mother. The problem was that my husband wanted to become a father, and while time was on his side, if he wanted a baby with me, we would have to get on with it.
Some anguished conversations followed before, three years after we married and with my 38th birthday just gone, we compromised – if you can call it that – on having, or trying, for one.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple: three miscarriages in two years followed before the pregnancy that would, eventually, lead to Connie’s joyful arrival in May 2013. Three
‘I can strive to be a sexy sixtysomething showing the young ’uns how it’s done’
miscarriages is the point where doctors start to think that your lost babies might be down to a specific problem rather than just statistical bad luck, although the miscarriage specialist to whom we were referred seemed convinced it was the latter.
It seems she was right: tests revealed no anomalies, merely that my egg count was as low as you might expect for a woman who had just turned 40. However, what I didn’t know, as I self-pityingly downed white wine in the fortnight that followed the results, convinced my fertility chips were up, was that Connie was already fermenting in my womb.
Now here she is, a force of nature who has brought me and my husband closer than ever – and also left me more grateful than ever for his relative youth in the face of the fatigue that parenting a small child can bring.
While there’s certainly little difference in our parenting styles, which I think comes down to our personalities rather than miles on the clock, his energy buoys me up, and I feel glad for Connie that at least one of her parents is not going to be celebrating their 50th birthday while stood at the primary school gates.
Duncan’s age, meanwhile, keeps me plugged into a network not just 10 but in some cases 15 years younger. Some of them are now parents themselves, which is of course a great leveller: early-30s or mid-40s, it doesn’t matter, knackered is knackered.
There are downsides: I am probably the oldest parent doing nursery drop-off and sometimes, when confronted with a crew of lithe thirtysomething mums dressed in yoga pants, I yearn for fewer miles on my own clock, even though the new friends I have made through Connie reassure me they never think of me as anything other than one of their contemporaries (and if they’re lying, I appreciate the sentiment).
Then there’s the fact that if I had been a few years younger when we had Connie, we would undeniably have tried for another baby.
As it was, I felt so blessed with the easy pregnancy and beautiful baby Mother Nature had eventually seen fit to give us, that it felt like tempting fate to ask for another at an age when complications are far more common.
This will always be a source of sadness – honestly, if I had known how much I would love being a mum I would have had about 70 kids – but I also know that in the face of the heartache of infertility I have witnessed elsewhere, I’m blessed to have what I have.
The other unmistakable reality is that while I felt I came into my own in my thirties, the forties – or certainly the latter half – can feel like a fast track to nowhere good.
As the menopause beckons, I fear for my continued allure in a world which feverishly worships at the altar of youth, particularly given the fact that my husband could easily be dating someone who was in her mid-twenties and no one would bat an eyelid. “If you run off with a pair of twentysomething Scandinavian twins,” I have announced to Duncan on more than one occasion, “then I will simply have to get fat, grow a moustache and go and live in a croft.” It’s a joke, but the humour masks a very real fear: please don’t dump me for a beach body hottie.
I fervently hope he doesn’t. Instead, I can only strive for this: to be a sexy sixtysomething showing the young ’uns how it is done.
Including Connie, the beautiful gift I was given at 41 by her 10-years-younger dad.