Dangers of that desperate urge for one last baby
THe moment I sat my husband down to tell him we might be having a fifth child i s etched on my memory. I was 43.
Our youngest was three-and-a-half and had just started sleeping through the night. I should have been relishing the extra rest, but I’d been hit by a desperate desire for another baby.
I can only describe it as a hormonal sledgehammer — ‘the last dying of the light’ my older, perimenopausal friend had called it. ‘We all get it.’
I had tentatively voiced the idea to my husband Tom a year earlier, and been greeted with: ‘Never, never, never!’
Now, with a hunted look in his eyes, he said sadly: ‘ I’m just so tired. We haven’t had a proper conversation since 2004 [the date our first child was born].’
Assuming my ageing body, battered and worn down by bearing four children in six years, was not capable of hatching yet another chick, I’d taken a relaxed attitude to birth control.
For my first two children, conceived in my early 30s, I’d done all sorts of fertility monitoring with thermometers and ovulation sticks. But here I was facing the possible consequences of a missed period having not ‘tried’ at all.
With four children we barely had time for a hug, let alone baby-making.
Four is enough, I told myself, especially at my age. The hallway is already littered with multiple book bags, trainers, wires and chargers; the kitchen always boasts the spoils of one cupboard upended by our perpetually hungry children. As for the utility room . . . well, it’s my life.
Once passably groomed and attired, I’m now more likely to be found in it, dishevelled, buried under mounds of laundry, surrounded by baskets of pants and jeans and school socks. I’m in that godforsaken room so much I might as well sleep in there, which I could easily do given how many sheets it stores.
There’s simply no room in the chaos of our family life for a fifth child.
And yet . . . and yet it was as if my body knew it was in the lastchance saloon.
I’ve never worried about grey hair or wrinkles (no time!). But when you spend six years in your 30s either pregnant or nursing, the notion of that part of who you are — the very thing that has defined you for so long — being claimed by the menopause is hard to accept.
I’d see babies in their prams while queuing in the bank and rush to clasp their little fingers. I remember once having to explain to a woman with a newborn at the swimming pool, who clearly thought I was childless, that I was a mother of four.
I don’t think I’m alone. For many women, the pending loss of fertility is tough.
If you enjoy pregnancy and having a big family (which you must if you keep on going), your eye is always on the clock, as Jools Oliver’s must have been before she announced baby number five recently. There’s always the internal dialogue: ‘How old am I? How much time have I got left? Can I have one more?’
Jools Oliver, expecting her fifth at 41 having started in her 20s, got the equation right. But I wasn’t 41 with my youngest six years old and at school. I was 43 with my youngest aged three.
The car was big enough, the house was big enough, the family finances were probably not big enough, but somehow we were muddling through. But what would a fifth child do to us as a couple? We barely saw each other in any quality sense as it was.
The majority of weekends were carved up by our different responsibilities to each child.
It was only because the youngest was finally sleeping through the night that we were able to watch TV box sets and have a glass of wine after 9pm without being interrupted.
AmOTHer of six whose marriage hadn’t lasted once told me the children had driven her and her husband to live parallel lives. The demands of six small people meant they were never alone. This could so easily happen to us.
And what about the other children? What if there was something wrong with the baby and I couldn’t give enough time to the other four?
All six of us could now have Sunday lunch or supper together. Saturdays were, and still are, ‘cinema night’, when we all watch a film and eat popcorn. These things have been set in stone, even then with the age range of three to nine (and now when it’s five to 12).
But still, nature, and her hormones, are difficult to argue with. So I don’t think I’ve ever felt more deeply conflicted than when, at 43, I skipped a period.
If I was pregnant, it was a win because my body wanted it; but also a lose in terms of the fear of what lay ahead and whether we’d manage. But if I wasn’t? That was a definite loss, but a win in terms of what was better for us all, at least practically. So I took a pregnancy test and Tom stayed in the bathroom with me as we waited for the result. I had a real feeling this was my last chance, that my life would change regardless of the result. It required acceptance either way.
I looked down at the stick and, as I saw the second blue line crawling across the little window, I burst into tears, just like I had after so many other negative tests I’d taken over the years. Only this time it was with relief.
In that moment I realised that a fifth child would have finished me physically (I don’t have a nanny and couldn’t afford one).
Tom looked as relieved as I’d ever seen him, like he’d dodged a bullet. There would be no return to nappies; no return to sleeplessness; no l etting an infant cry themselves back to sleep because we were just too tired to buckle and give in.
Now I’m so glad we’ve only got our four. It’s a good even number and they are close enough in age to still be a gang. A fifth would have been out on a limb a bit.
We’ve recovered even more from those years in the baby trenches. Our 12-year-old is very happily settled at secondary school, the youngest is almost six and at school.
But we’re both 45 now. ‘We’re in a new phase,’ Tom says, ‘with just enough recognisable signs of when our lives were our own.’
This weekend we’re even going away for 24 hours alone. I could never have left a two-year-old in a mix of five. Who’d take that on? Not even our parents.
There has been one development, though: we’re thinking of getting a second dog.