Infertility
A mother & daughter’s story
You’ve childproofed your new conservatory, even though you’ve been empty of nest for a decade. Perhaps you’ve been thinking that family events have become a bit dry because there are no little ones to entertain everyone. Maybe a Facebook post of a newborn had you inexplicably welling up. You didn’t know you wanted your kids to have kids: now “grandbroodiness” has well and truly hit.
As a 35-year-old in the midst of fertility struggles, I realised that it wasn’t just my own ticking clock feeding my desire for a child. Our parents were also secretly pining for the pitter-patter of tiny footsteps on their own parquet flooring. Well, for around two days a week, at least.
My mum, Lucy, 58, says she’s been getting increasingly grandbroody for the last 18 months. “I’ve always known that I’d like to have a grandchild, but I wasn’t terribly worried about it until the last year.”
This goes hand in hand with the fact that my husband Charlie and I have been trying for a baby for three years, but getting medical attention for the last year or so. After being diagnosed with unexplained infertility, we’ve now begun the emotionally and physically gruelling process of our one and only round of IVF on the NHS.
“I’m not stressed,” Mum reassures me. “You’ve not even finished the IVF yet. I’ve got to be there for you, because you’re the one who’s going through it – but I’m excited you’re finally getting the help you need.”
Charlie’s mum, Mary, 68, has been hearing the grandfertility alarm bells for even longer than I have. “Since friends’ children or nieces and nephews started having babies,” she admits. “I felt like, ‘It’ll be my turn soon’.” As with most emotional outpourings, the dads are a little more reticent. “I’m interested in having grandkids, but I’m certainly not broody for it!” says my father-in-law Roger, 66, laughing. My dad Patrick, 58, meanwhile has been quietly hoping it would happen since we got married in 2014.
Although the four of them have never put audible pressure on us, as the eldest siblings in both families, the unspoken weight of expectation has not gone unnoticed by myself and Charlie. But there is pressure on them too: peer pressure. I was shocked to hear that women in their sixties, were, like me, experiencing the dreaded infertility pity. Conception competition is alive and well across the generations, and when grandchildren aren’t forthcoming, it can make things awkward.
“Friends of mine whose daughters are expecting have found it hard to talk to me,” says Mary. Probably not helped by the fact I’ve literally written a book, Trying, about struggling to conceive. “They’ll say things to other friends like, ‘I don’t like to say too much because she doesn’t have a grandchild to look forward to.’ Sometimes when I see a friend on Facebook who’s had their seventh grandchild, for a split second, there is jealousy or envy. ‘Seven!’, I think, ‘Just give us one!’.”
Our parents aren’t the only ones worried about missing the boat. A recent international league table has found that a fifth of British women are childless in their early 40s – a figure exceeded only by Spain and Austria. The rate of childlessness among UK women is increasing sharply and is up by almost 50 per cent since the mid-nineties, something experts put down to a generational struggle to balance career progression, getting on the property ladder and finding a committed relationship with the ticking of their biological clock.
Charlie, a writer and editor, and I figured we had all those ducks in a row when we married at 31 and bought a house in the north London suburbs, perfect for the children we assumed would be imminent. But things didn’t go according to plan, and no doubt our parents’ longing is compounded by our own.
It’s a wonder anyone would feel grandbroody at all, considering the expectations at play. A report last year showed grandparents are the most used form of childcare in the UK, ahead of nurseries and preschools. You only have to watch
Motherland to see the terse relations between frazzled mum and put-upon grandmother, expected to pick up the slack. But this is a generation who are healthier and more financially secure than ever before. “Grandparents play a much bigger role in children’s lives now,” says Mum. “Back in the day, when you were 60, you were past it, just the granny in the corner. But most of us want to help out.”
Not least since today’s new mothers are likely to be back at work within a year. “When we had Charlie, Mary was a full-time mum,” says Roger. “Grandparents can be more useful now.” It’s the idea of grandchildren providing a ‘next phase’ that chimes with them all. Mary has been putting off retirement, but having a grandchild would make it a “whole new chapter of my life”, while my mum stresses, “it’s not that I can’t fill my days – there are not enough hours ever – but I do feel that we’ve got space in our lives for that little person now.” Dad agrees. “It marks a different sense of purpose – something else to live for and look forward to.” Because there comes a point – as with us in our mid-30s – where you just feel ‘ready’. And as Dad points out: “I don’t want to put this extension on and then we can’t use it!”
There’s a biological clock at play in this second wave of broodiness, just as there is at our stage. “You don’t want to be too old to enjoy your grandchild,” says Mary. My dad, who like Roger, recently underwent knee replacement surgery – both, I sense, partly in subconscious preparation – seems to have new vigour to look after himself in a different way: “It’s not about being healthy, it’s more about being mobile so you can do stuff with them.”
A chance to do things differently from the first time round, I wonder, and spend the time they had perhaps spent at the office when their own children were small? “It would be nice to not have so many distractions,” agrees my dad. “To spend quality time with them. Get them into some hobbies and watch them grow.”
The relationships I was lucky enough to build with my inspirational “Nanny Big Hair”, Molly, who passed away when I was 17, as well as my dad’s witty mum, Lil, 78, has made me realise I’m not just broody to have a child for me and Charlie – but for our parents, too. I want our children to get to spend as much time as possible getting to know their grandparents.
“I look forward to when I get to watch my grandchildren grow up. To be there for them, talk to them,” says my mum, misty-eyed. “You hope to pass your life experience to your kids and grandchildren,” agrees Dad. “It seems such a waste if that lifetime of experience goes away with you. It’s a passing down of memories.”
But the best part, if our IVF works and their grandbroodiness is satisfied, they’ll get to give them back…
‘Our parents were also secretly pining for the pitterpatter of tiny footsteps’