Cancer, confusion and homework... confessions of Scot land’s oldest mum
Two children under ten, a family life that would terrify most women her age and teen tantrums to look forward to... at 70. (Just don’t dare ask about grandchildren)
THE kitchen of Juliet Le Page’s cheerful Edinburgh home shows all the ‘lived in’ signs of busy family life – from school jotters scattered over the table to cardboard shapes strewn across the worktops. Dotted around the walls are evidence of eight-year- old Rafe and little sister Julia’s artistic handiwork.
The children dutifully tidy up while Mrs Le Page bustles around, hunting down sauce- pans, flicking on the kettle, rummaging around for i ngredients for husband Richard’s tea, while mentally planning jaunts to Cubs and Rainbows, music lessons, sport sessions and French classes.
The children have finished their reading, writing and arithmetic for the day.
Just like them, she’s been doing her sums too. In four years, just as Rafe starts secondary school, she’ll be 60. And around the time daughter Julia morphs from sweet girl who loves her cuddly toys to typical surly teen permanently attached to her mobile phone, Mrs Le Page will be staring at her 70th birthday.
Add to the equation a brush with breast cancer and a troubling condition that requires daily medication to help her fight bouts of breathlessness, and suddenly the years she was sure didn’t matter much when she embarked on a l ate but determined bid to be a mother seem to be adding up at an alarming rate.
‘Maybe I was a little naïve,’ she reflects, thinking of six years ago and the day after her 50th birthday when Julia Kitty Rose’s arrival instantly made Mrs Le Page Scotland’s oldest new mother at the time.
‘But you don’t really think too much about it before you have children.
‘Then you have them and these other things, like how old you’ll be when they grow up and how to deal with their needs and those of aging relatives at the same time, it suddenly becomes so obvious.
‘Perhaps I was very naïve not to have known all of that and how it would affect things.’
More likely that Mrs Le Page, now 56, was so utterly focused on mother- hood that everything else took second place. Certainly there are no regrets: Rafe and Julia, six, are at the heart of her universe.
Instead her sums add up to a sad realisation – and perhaps a gentle reminder to others who opt to delay the arrival of children – that their young lives will reach a glorious peak, just as she slides into dotage.
‘ The average age f or someone to have their first child is 30,’ she continues. ‘So if Rafe and Julia wait until that age to have a baby… I will be nearly 80.’
Indeed should they follow in her exact footsteps, Juliet would combine the joy of becoming a grandmother with blowing out 100 candles and opening a birthday telegram from a geriatric King William and Queen Catherine.
To be fair, Mrs Le Page, in figure hugging jeans, comfy warm top and with light blonde hair framing delicate features, is far from the same vintage as German pensioner Annegret Raunigk. The 65-year-old was already the mother of 13, including a daughter who arrived when she was 55, when she gave birth last week to quads. Conceived thanks to artificial insemination and donor eggs and sperm, there will be a massive 44-year gap between the four new arrivals and their oldest sister Antje.
Pensioner age and with new babies to care for, teacher Frau Raunigk’s response to critics who fear the boundaries of motherhood are being stretched further than a pair of elasticated maternity trousers is blunt. ‘Live and let live,’ she shrugs.
Having given birth at an age when her contemporaries are more interested i n scanning chemist shop shelves for anti-wrinkle creams than packs of newborn’s nappies, Mrs Le Page is reluctant to join the German’s many critics.
After all, she has been on the receiving end of a few raised eyebrows and unfortunate comments herself – such as the GP who mistook her for her daughter’s grandmother.
‘I was looking very ropy that day,’ Mrs Le Page laughs, bustling around the kitchen of her home in Trinity, a north Edinburgh suburb.
‘The doctor said something about Julia being my granddaughter. I replied, “Actually, she’s my daughter”. The doctor was probably more mortified than me.’
Rafe and Julia scuttle to their rooms. They share the same almond eyes and rosebud lips as their father. Both have read time and again their favourite story book, Our Family, a cosy tale of assisted conception and egg donation illustrated with colourful drawings of stick men and women with large baby bumps.
They know, without any hint of confusion, that they do not share the same biological mum.
‘They really just accept it,’ says Mrs Le Page.
Both are the result of donated eggs from different women, Rafe following IVF in Edinburgh and Julia in Barcelona. The bill for going to Spain for the procedure was around £13,000
‘Their lives will peak as she slides into dotage’
because by then Mrs Le Page was simply too old for Scottish clinics to consider.
That alone may well serve as a stark reminder to many women that delaying motherhood for too long comes with many costs attached – financial as well as personal.
Not that Mrs Le Page planned things this way. Like many of the desperate couples she sees at Fertility Focus, the Edinburgh clinic where she works as a fertility consultant, leaving it too late often ‘just happens’.
She retrained in fertility techniques soon after Rafe was born. When she was younger, her job as a chartered physiotherapist had funded a comfy lifestyle of travel and eating out.
A first marriage at 21 to a much older man who already had children, and no desire for more, came to a natural end. Her next relationship drifted with no mention of children.
‘We were together 12 years but never discussed children. We had two cats,’ she giggles. ‘They died, I was devastated. Soon after that the relationship died too.’
Mrs Le Page was 43 and doing compliancy work in an Edinburgh lawyer’s office when Richard, classically dark, tall, handsome and with a beaming smile, walked in and updated her status from ‘single, no plans for motherhood’ into instant broodiness.
It was, she recalls with a smile, like a switch marked ‘mum’ being flicked in a part of her brain she never really knew existed.
Luckily Mr Le Page, ten years her junior, felt the same way. And as they fell in love, the only trouble was figuring out how to deal with a mutual yearning to be parents.
‘I remember seeing him for the first time and thinking he was someone I would like to have children with,’ she smiles. ‘I was just struck by the thought right out of the blue.
‘I’d never had that thought before. I thought there must be more to life than what I was getting.’
Mrs Le Page’s fertility clock wasn’t just ticking though. Fit, healthy and looking younger than her years on the outside, inside her chances of conceiving naturally were grinding to a halt.
The only option was egg donation – a concept that her husband initially struggled to fully embrace.
‘He found it difficult at first,’ admits Mrs Le Page. ‘Both men and women want their child to be the biological creation of both of them. We had counselling for a year.
‘It didn’t help when my mother said it was OK for Richard’s parents as the baby would be part of him. Now she says she can’t believe she said such a thing.’
Mrs Le Page’s age went against her as she tried to persuade Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s Assisted Conception Unit to take them on. Only her offer to find an egg donor, not just for her but also for another couple on the waiting list, helped swing the balance.
By September 2005, Rafe was on the way and her husband’s initial concerns disappeared the moment he set eyes on him.
Immensely proud of his wife and swept off his feet by his new son, he was the first to suggest they try for another. Mrs Le Page knew if that was going to happen, it had to be soon.
Julia was born the day after Mrs Le Page’s 50th birthday, unusual at the time but increasingly less so: r ecent f i gures f r om National Records of Scotland show that in the past ten years there have been 42 children born to mothers aged over 50, including seven last year, the second highest figure on record.
That has raised concerns women are deliberately delaying family for career and lifestyle reasons, even though their age puts them at higher risk of miscarriage, troubled pregnancies and can leave their babies open to various genetic blips.
But as she watches Rafe disappear off to play Minecraft – ‘I’ve not a clue what it’s about,’ she laughs – Mrs Le Page insists she cannot criticise anyone for the path that leads to finally feeling the overwhelming maternal tug of desperately wanting to hold your own child. ‘There are so many reasons why someone may become an older mum.
‘But I do think there needs to be a debate about what age is too old and countries need to come together to decide on an upper limit.
‘Parents need proper counselling so they understand all the implications.’ Such as being sandwiched between a packed social diary of after- school clubs and events while f retting over her own 93-year- old mother many miles away in York – the reason the next family holiday will be spent with her husband and children together in Aberfoyle, Stirlingshire, and Mrs Le Page in the English city.
And, most important of all, what happens if one of them is no longer around… Her daughter was one year old when Juliet found a tiny pea-size lump on her left breast, quickly confirmed as breast cancer.
‘I lost my hair, it fell out in clumps in the shower... disgusting,’ she shudders. ‘At the back of my mind I was thinking that Richard is younger than me, if anything happens, he will be there.’
Mrs Le Page battled through chemotherapy and hair loss while juggling with caring for a toddler and a baby.
She recovered from that illness, but now there’s another problem.
‘I have a respiratory condition,’ she explains. ‘Chronic obstructive airways disease – I take inhalers and medicine and it’s fine but it’s there.’
With no known cure, the condition causes breathlessness and gets worse over time.
It means Mrs Le Page now works harder than ever to hold back the years. Caffeine and sugar are out, trips to ‘bums, tums and thighs’ and herbal teas are in.
‘None of us knows what’s ahead,’ she insists. ‘It’s all about getting the right support and information – whatever age you are.
‘But you do have to fully think about how those children are going to deal with things as they grow up.
‘Everyone, including me, says, “This is what I want, what we really want”. To be honest, I don’t think I ever sat down and thought “but what are the implications for the children?”.
‘All that, unfortunately, comes after the birth.’
‘The doctor was more mortified than I was’