The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
WHO ARE YOU CALLING GERIATRIC?
Irritating aspects of conceiving later in life by a 40-something mum
Ihad a baby last year when I was 40 years old. Officially, that makes me a ‘geriatric mother’. Honestly, I hate any type of label, unless it is on the inner-sole of my shoes, but if I must be given one, couldn’t I be ‘yummy mummy’ instead?
While yummy mummy instantly brings to mind lithe young women jogging with designer buggies while swigging from Evian bottles, geriatric mother conjures up some hoary, wizened old prune pushing a pram with one hand while wheezing into an oxygen tank with the other.
I may be past prime childbearing age, but I don’t plan on buzzing up to the school gates on my mobility scooter with my pension jangling in my front pocket. (Don’t get me wrong, I love elderly people. I love their wisdom, their grit and their gallows humour. But I don’t quite put myself in that category yet.)
The trouble is, pregnancy and motherhood seem to be all about youthful women at their most wholesomely peachy, glowing with health and radiance. Who wants to think of themselves as a crinkly crone?
‘Elderly primigravida’ – the other term used for first-time mothers who, like me, are older than 35 – isn’t much less offensive, either. It makes one sound like a prehistoric primate.
My baby girl is ten months old now, so you might think I would have had time to calm down, or that the lack of sleep and mental exhaustion might have drained the fury out of me. But no. If anything, as time goes by, I am more irritated and outraged than ever – not just for me, but for all my over-35, experienced and worldly-wise sisters out there who also might find this perturbing.
The fact is, while the dismissive and depressing geriatric mother label was annoying, for me it was the final insult. The scaremongering and shaming about being an older mother had started even before I got pregnant.
At the age of 35, I was child-free by choice (a term I much prefer to ‘childless’). A lot of my friends – and my younger brother’s and sister’s friends – were having babies. The fact that I didn’t have children just didn’t jive with some folks. Not my friends and family, but random people who couldn’t seem to get their heads around my choice. ‘You’ll change your mind,’ they would say, nodding sagely. ‘You don’t want to be an old spinster,’ others would add.
Well, actually, being a spinster can be rather great. The term might be used in a derogatory way these days, much like ‘old maid’, but until the 17th century it referred to unmarried women who spun thread for a living. Yes, the early-modern version of a career woman. Queen Elizabeth I, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale and Emily Brontë were all
proud spinsters. In spite of having a few proposals over the years, marriage had never been something I aspired to. Having a baby, however, was something I didn’t want to rule out.
But, my goodness, I began to worry about my eggs – you know, ladies, those precious things you’ve been ‘losing’ since you were a baby. Like my pack of four dogs shedding their fur all over my furniture, apparently I have been going around casually shedding my eggs since the moment I was born. But unlike my dogs, whose fur grows back without fail, women don’t have an unlimited supply of eggs. We’re constantly reminded that our biological clocks are ticking away like a doom-laden countdown.
Even if you live in a bothy on Bodmin Moor, you will be aware that by your mid-30s the quality of your eggs becomes, well, dodgier. Thus, I imagined my poor, tired ovaries gearing up for their last gasp. My moth- eaten, tattered tomb-womb forever unemployed, now slowly being forced into retirement. And, of course, my past-their-best, despondently dwindling cache of eggs.
But the idea perpetrated by the media that an invisible deadline was looming is extremely grating. Not just for me, but for all women. You barely have time to breathe before another doctor or survey or study shouts out a warning about your eggs or your fertility, or both. Is it just me, or does the age at which our fertility starts ‘dropping off a cliff ’ seem to be getting lower?
I never felt my womb quiver every time I saw a pram. Babies never made me go gaga. Dogs? Yes. I will pursue an adorable dog down the street and ask its human guardian if I can meet it. Puppies I can coo over until the cows come home. But human babies? Not so much. Besides, I have never subscribed to the convention that just because a woman has a womb, it follows that she should have a baby.
By my mid-30s, I was living in London, financially stable, and I had a lovely boyfriend who was keen to settle down and have children. But I wasn’t, and the ever-present scaremongering just made me feel angry and depressed. I didn’t leave having a baby because my career as a motoring journalist was more important; I didn’t leave it because I wanted to wait until I was financially stable, or because I didn’t have a nice man in my life. I just didn’t have the desire to have a baby.
I consider myself an intuitive and spiritual person so, in the end, I decided to leave it up to the universe as to whether it was meant to happen for me or not. I knew it was a risk, and that at my great age I might not be able to conceive anyway, but if it turned out belatedly that I did want to be a mother and that I could offer a small person a great life, then I could always adopt.
But I was beginning to get swept away by the baby panic. So I did what any sensible person would do – I split up with my boyfriend and moved to the other side of the world. Bye-bye, fertility fascists.
Let me tell you, if you are single, 35-plus and child-free by choice, there is no better place to be than California. Nobody gives a hoot. Nobody gives you pitying looks or thinks you are strange if you are childless, nor do they even ask.
For five years it was lovely, but then the old adage proved to be true. When you least expect it, true love comes knocking and I found myself a tall, handsome man. For the first time, I was overwhelmed by the urge to procreate – and swiftly conceived. I know that I was lucky and I am extremely grateful, but it wasn’t until I got pregnant that I realised just how pernicious the brainwashing really is. It didn’t help that I decided
Would the young mums-to-be stare at me and snigger?
to move back to the UK for a year to be near my family. Don’t get me wrong, I love England, but I let the constant scaremongering cast a shadow over what should have been such a happy time. The hectoring of the media made me feel selfish, as though at my age I didn’t deserve to be pregnant.
Of course, with all those pregnancy hormones coursing through my body, I was at my most vulnerable and therefore susceptible to the opinions of others, experts and non-experts alike. As those who have gone through pregnancy will recognise, my emotions at that time were all over the place. I am a thin-skinned, sensitive person who feels things very deeply anyway. But pregnant Emma? Run for the hills! When I wasn’t raging round the house like a demented banshee (I stamped on a bag of groceries my boyfriend brought back from the supermarket because it didn’t contain anything I liked), I was weeping uncontrollably.
I felt as though I had so much to prove. I dreaded sitting in the waiting room at my first GP appointment and seeing all the glowing, unlined, eager faces of the young mums-to-be. Would they stare at me and snigger and point? And then, when I actually got there, I almost wanted to drop to the floor and do some one-armed push-ups at the front of the waiting room to prove I still had it.
I was on red alert throughout my pregnancy. I spent hours online researching the perils and pitfalls of being an older mother. It was clear I would give birth to a baby with one eye and 15 fingers and it would be all because of my substandard eggs.
I have never felt more vulnerable or more afraid. If I was a member of an indigenous tribe in the rainforest, far away from the media and experts – and even non-experts – and where it is normal to be the age of a grandmother and pregnant, I would have enjoyed my pregnancy. I would have been happy to let nature dictate the outcome. Here, on the other hand, if something untoward were to have happened, even if it was nothing to do with my age, I would have had a hard time not blaming myself.
However, on 24 April last year, all that worry and all those months of torturing myself (and my boyfriend – sorry, honey!) melted away with the obstetrician’s magical words, ‘You have a healthy baby girl.’ I named her Olive.
In April last year, all those months of torturing myself melted away