‘At 45, I grieved the idea of motherhood. Then, by pure fluke, I was pregnant’
Five days before I turned 46, I gave birth to my first child: a small, solemnfaced boy with enormous eyes, and ears like tiny coracles. For weeks I could not name him; to reduce this feeling to a single word seemed impossible.
Any birth feels something like magic, but to become a mother at this age has felt astonishing; a dove drawn from my sleeve, the ace of hearts pulled from behind my ear. But it has come, too, with a certain intricacy. Older motherhood is not the most straightforward experience, and it elicits reactions that may be variously amazed or appalled or at the very least complicated.
All through the long months of pregnancy and the early weeks of my son’s life, I felt I stood under a cloud of suspicion, as if his arrival must be attributable to some act of sorcery or science. In my case, some of this is understandable – three years ago, I wrote about solo IVF after years of miscarriage – and so it was logical that many might conclude this was still my story; that I had persevered alone in the world of fertility treatment until I finally triumphed.
When I have told people that in fact I conceived naturally, with my partner, their surprise has been palpable – after all, the odds of natural conception after the age of 45 are less than 5%. The implication has been that I have performed a feat of 11th-hour heroics; like Indiana Jones, rolling under the closing door to reclaim his hat at the very last moment.
“Menopause baby!” some have supposed. And while there is much anecdotal evidence of women getting pregnant shortly before they stop ovulating, in this instance, I was not in or near perimenopause. I was quite simply pregnant.
Still, there has been a sense that there is something about my pregnancy that I have had to explain. In conversation with midwives, consultants, friends, strangers, it has been hard not to reference my age first – to make a joke about my antiquity, to acknowledge the sheer improbability of the whole scenario before they do.
In many ways it has been a strange tributary in the conversation most women have throughout their lives: why you don’t have children, why you do. Fertility is a part of a woman’s life that exists beyond herself, that is forever subject to public speculation and interrogation. “Questions,” as Rebecca Solnit put it, “that push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it.”
It has been stranger still to cross from one side to the other, as if handed, like a baton, between the divergent and the herd. At this stage in my life, I do not seem to fit entirely in either; I have missed the mothering years of my peers, and now I have absconded from my child-free fellowship.
At the start of last year I was some way into a conversation with myself about motherhood. After two rounds of IVF I had decided not to pursue a third. I had considered adoption. I had thought about donor eggs. I had even been offered, through an act of profound generosity and chance, another couple’s embryos.
But I was weary. I was aware of the joy that lay in the life I already had. I could not countenance further failure, another miscarriage, or the gruelling effects of more fertility treatment. I had nephews and godchildren, I had a life that was full and creative, that allowed for travel and spontaneity. “I think I’m done,” I told one of my friends, in the early weeks of the year. A few days later, I discovered I was pregnant.
I am wary of the false hope this kind of fertility story might give: woman gives up trying to have a baby, then duly falls pregnant – as if the very act of wanting something is the very thing that might prevent it. I do not want this to seem like a cautionary tale of female desire. Nor was there any great trick – I cannot attribute my pregnancy to a particular vitamin supplement, acupuncturist, health regime. I have no advice. It was luck, pure fluke.
It was also not without complexity. I was of course elated to be pregnant, but I had spent a good two years grieving the idea of motherhood and imagining a different kind of life for myself. Now I was doubling back, revisiting the hopes of my younger self.
It was a heavy pregnancy. Multiple miscarriages had imprinted upon me a kind of dread. And of course I was older now, the odds therefore greater that something would be awry with me or my baby: foetal abnormality, gestational diabetes. As the days passed, I did not wonder if something would go
wrong, I simply wondered when.
“Which fruit are we now?” one of my friends would ask each week – for some reason, foetal growth is often measured in approximate likeness to fruit and vegetable size, poppy seed through to pumpkin, via blueberry, apple, leek. It was a jovial conversation, though beneath it ran trepidation. Only once we were beyond the size of a papaya did I buy anything for the baby: a small, rustcoloured rattle in the shape of a bear that I kept in its packaging. Unwrapping it somehow felt like tempting the gods.
My age, and the fact that the baby was small, meant that we were invited for extra hospital scans. I dreaded these appointments. Every ultrasound felt not so much an opportunity to see my growing child, but a chance to learn something catastrophic. One afternoon late in my pregnancy, I lay on the sonographer’s bed and listened to a woman in the next room crying inconsolably. On the screen, my baby bucked and reared. I held my breath.
I could not voice these fears to anyone. I was trying hard to be invincible. I worked, I travelled, I ran a festival stage at seven months pregnant, I continued attending hot yoga classes until the day before I gave birth. But at night, my head ran with strange dreams, of flights missed, vases shattered – dark, sour visions.
Three years ago, when I wrote about IVF, repeated miscarriage and terrible relationships, I realised that in so doing I had made myself part of a distinct social set: sad, lost, childless. People greeted me with a head-tilt and a tone of almost unbearable sympathy.
This changed once I was pregnant. I felt a sudden rush of warmth from the world. I was no longer one of the sad ones, the career-focused, the selfish or the tragic. I was not exiled to the outskirts of the village. Instead I found myself welcomed back in, friendships rekindled, those I felt had dropped me once they became parents suddenly inviting me round for tea. I was, at last, one of them.
Most of my close friends were delighted to learn of my imminent motherhood. Others admitted their concerns about how it might affect our relationship after so many years of my freewheeling; I would not be available to drop everything and go to a gig, to join them at the pub, to be available when they needed me the way I had been for many years.
Sometimes their doubts seeped into mine. In the early months of my pregnancy, remarks others had made to me over the years resurfaced: the friend who deemed me “too independent to be a mother” and thought that I would come to resent my child; the partner who, when I was pregnant with twins, told me that I “had not created a life conducive to motherhood”; the podiatrist who for some reason looked at my feet one day and told me I was “not maternal”. I feared perhaps these people had seen me more clearly than I saw myself.
I thought, too, of how others had greeted my failed IVF. “No man will be interested in you now you can’t have children,” one friend told me that summer. “You should think of your work as your babies,” said another. And of course I thought often of how people have specific opinions about older mothers – how foolish it is, how self-indulgent, how embarrassed the child will be to have an ancient crone of a mother at the school gates (we might note that such concern is rarely applied to older fathers).
Many talked about how much harder motherhood is when you’re older, how exhausted I would be. In fact this was such a common thread that I have been surprised by how much energy I have had; yes, the first few weeks of motherhood have been tiring, but not insurmountably; feeding my son at 4am, I have often thought how more than 20 years of deadlines, late-night gigs, festivals and overseas assignments have prepared me rather well for this moment. That in fact at this age I am a vastly better mother than I would’ve been in my 20s or 30s. I have done more, seen more, spent time getting to know and to like myself. I have a strength now that I did not have when I was younger.
Those I hesitated to tell about my pregnancy were the women who had chalked up similar experiences of miscarriage and failed fertility treatment, who had found themselves uncertain about motherhood or were adamant that it was not their path.
I had become closer to these women in recent years. I loved the quality and tenor of our friendship. I felt they had taken me in at my lowest ebb, and shown me how wide the world still was, how life could be lived differently, that there was a power in the unconventional. Now I felt I had deserted them. “I am still one of you,” I wanted to tell them. “I have not joined the other side.”
***
My son was born shortly after 9am on a late October day. In the delivery room we were playing Bill Callahan’s One Fine Morning, and when he was lifted from me, he rose into the air with the line: “And the mountains bowed down, like a ballet of the heart.” I could not speak. I could only look at his small face and exhale.
Those who have become parents will often tell those who have not that you do not know love until you have a child. This is not true. “People lock on to motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfil your capacity to love,” Solnit wrote. “But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”
I think about this a lot. How much love there is within us. How the love that I have for my son is deep and expansive and wild, but also familiar. It is both as simple and as majestic as the new morning rising.
The stranger realisation for me has been in allowing myself to be loved. Love, to me, has always felt painfully exposing; when others have loved me, I have felt undeserving, and somehow looked away. Now, when my son looks at me with all the love in his tiny body, I hold his gaze.
With this has come a reassessment of the past few years. How much I had been looking away. How disconnected I had made myself. How perhaps it was not so much that friends had disappeared into parenthood, but that I had withdrawn from their orbit. That I was just terribly sad.
A few years ago, not long after my last miscarriage, I took an early morning drive across the California desert to see an Ugo Rondinone sculpture named Seven Magic Mountains. It’s a magnificent thing, a monument of boulder and DayGlo paint in the middle of pretty much nowhere. The only way I can explain the impulse to see it back then is that in one of the greyest times of my life I was seeking the resuscitation of colour.
As I drove, I listened to One Fine Morning. Over and over, again and again. It’s the final track on Callahan’s album Apocalypse, and its lyrics seem to consider all of the songs that came before it: songs of drovering and wilderness and riding for the feeling; of man and nature and shifting perception. “It’s a release song,” Callahan once told American Songwriter magazine. “One Fine Morning is the blossoming, it’s when the seed finally sprouts and begins to overflow into the air.”
If I were to describe motherhood, it would be something like this. A release, an apocalypse, an overflowing into the air. It has been for me, a beautiful kind of dismantling. And how privileged I feel to meet it at this age. To stand at the point where the divergent meets the herd and look both ways.
I do not seem to fit: I’ve missed the mothering years of my peers, and now absconded from my child-free fellowship