Joining the Sisterhood

ALMOST DONE: One week before the birth.

It’s now been seven weeks since I gave birth to our baby girl. Given that I’ve always made my way through life’s most challenging experiences by writing about them, I had a fantasy that I would keep blogging right through the birth, perhaps even more often than I had been before. I would take some time out during labor to blog. Or, at the very least, I’d capture something about this, one of the most intense experiences of my life, by writing something within the first 24 hours after the birth. One of my favorite journalism professors taught me that the best time to write your story is…as soon as you walk in the door. You start writing when you’re fresh from the field, with everything crisp and colorful in your mind.

And after all, this is 2012. I had my laptop tucked into my hospital bag, and I could have blogged from my iPhone. The delivery room is perhaps a place where one needs to disconnect with the immediate world, but after giving birth, the maternity ward is wireless. There is no reason why I couldn’t, shouldn’t blog.

But the reality of being a mother of a newborn baby burst my bubble, breaking apart the unrealistic expectations I had for myself. I should have known that the arrival of a second baby is no less all-encompassing and energy-absorbing than the first one, and that thoughts of blogging would quickly slip into the “nice but not necessary” category.

Much more than this, I think one of the reasons I was reluctant to write was that I wasn’t sure what I felt comfortable sharing. I’d already written in the past that I, along with many women in Primigravida’s target demographic, had an unplanned/emergency C-section in my first birth. In a previous post I tried to explore why this has become such a prevalent phenomena among mothers in my age bracket. While I’d rather not get into a replay of that first birth, I’ll recap by saying that it was a traumatic experience I didn’t want to repeat. To avoid a déjà vu, it seemed I’d best schedule the C-section ahead of time and save myself the drama and disappointment when the “inevitable” happened and I was told I’d need another surgical delivery.

In short, I spent my entire second pregnancy trying to decide if I should try for a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After C-section) and at one point was convinced it wasn’t worth the risk – including a 0.5 percent chance of uterine rupture, which can be fatal for mother or baby. I spoke at length to friends who’d successfully had VBACs, friends who’d tried for a VBAC and wound up requiring another C-section (some of them at peace with this outcome and many others not), and friends who’d opted for a scheduled C the second time around.

Somehow, after hours of research, conversations with several doulas and midwives and doctors – one of whom advised me to just schedule a C-section based on the fact that at my age I probably wouldn’t be contemplating many more pregnancies anyway – I became convinced that trying for a VBAC was the wiser choice. To not at least try for a natural birth would be something of a cop-out, according to the midwife I wound up hiring as my birth coach.

When I told her at our initial meeting that I wasn’t even sure I wanted a VBAC, given the added risks, she looked at me like I’d just offered our toddler crack cocaine. “How would you feel in 20 years if you didn’t at least try?!” she challenged. In 20 years I doubt the thought will cross my mind, and by then I’ll have more important parental muck-ups to worry about other than how I brought my children into the world.

But still, if I could avoid major abdominal surgery, shouldn’t I? Repeat C-sections are not ideal and carry their own risks. I came up with a dozen or so other reasons why it was worth a shot, but the most prominent of all was the thought of a shorter recovery. I dreaded being forbidden from picking up our 18-month-old son because of the surgery. This thought alone felt compelling enough to give the VBAC a go.

And so it went, somehow. I gave birth “the way it should be” as my massage therapist put it when she tried to ease my aching body two weeks later. Her words made me cringe. Just as I’d despised the implied failure the first time around – particularly from women who tut-tutted about the high C-section rate and bragged about their bevy of beautiful home births – I feel uncomfortable with the kudos this time. A friend of mine due around the same time as me, also trying for a VBAC, said she wanted to do it so could “join the sisterhood.” As if a Caesarean birth means we don’t really earn entrance to some international sisterhood of women who gave birth the old-fashioned way. Or that birthing vaginally (ideally with no pain relief) makes you a stronger woman or a better mother. I’m not so sure. On second thought, I’m sure that’s nonsense.

I almost bought into the same self-denigrating scheme because my daughter’s birth required vacuum assistance, and my birth coach implied it was all my fault – my pushing wasn’t good enough. Sure, I’d had my VBAC and earned my stripes, but I still had plenty of pain afterwards. Moreover, I still had some of the same feelings of inadequacy that plagued me after the C-section.

The last hour of the birth was miserable, but the first hour of my daughter's life was magical.

But there were amazing things about the birth. Foremost among them was that I got to hold the baby just after she was born and nurse her – a dream I’d had last time but hadn’t been able to fulfill. I was put under full anesthetic in my son’s birth and only got to hold him for the first time about four hours later, groggy and upset. This time, since the ward upstairs didn’t have a room ready for me yet, my husband, the baby and I got to spend the next 2.5 hours exactly where I’d given birth – hanging out, getting to know each other, and trying to absorb the shock and awe of it all. Those moments were magical.

Four days later, I was in so much pain I wondered why I didn’t just have the damn C-section. But seven weeks later, I can acknowledge that the recovery process was indeed much smoother and more rapid.

Baby Z's first picnic

I still feel like I didn’t get to join that other, more exclusive sisterhood – the one for women who have amazing, empowering, beautiful birth experiences. I bless its members, but to pretend that I truly deserve membership among them would be a lie. I read with envy the birth story of a friend who gave birth about a week after I did in a birthing center in New York. She felt no fear, and in the final stages of the birth she felt no pain, even though she’d had no epidural or other drugs. For those of us whose experiences are so radically different, our task is to accept what was – and to focus on the miracle and the honor of getting to bring a new life into the world.

What’s more, the real sisterhood of mothers worth belonging to includes those who became mothers in other ways – by adoption, via marriage to someone who already had children, through surrogacy.  As my wise friend Sandra pointed out to me recently, getting too hung up on the kind of birth you have is a mistake similar to putting all of your energy into the wedding – rather than the marriage. It’s what comes after the big event that truly counts.

My Secret Pregnancy

by Rachel Canar

Pregnant, but at 12 weeks, it's still an easy-to-keep secret.

Initially, of course, you aren’t supposed to tell anyone. I understand that this must be especially true of older pregnant women.

Given the statistics on miscarriages for women over 40 – that one in three pregnancies will end in miscarriage within the first 12 weeks – you don’t want to tell anyone about your pregnancy that you wouldn’t also want to talk to about your miscarriage.

While I agree that miscarriage does feel like something very private, the total vacuum silence around the subject seems to be way overblown. Once you are talking about it and you find out that pretty much all women have had the experience, it is a wonder that you have never once heard about it before. In fact, I didn’t even know that my grandmother had a miscarriage until we discussed my recent blog. That’s right. I wasn’t even told about her experience when I had one myself.

And I didn’t want to tell anyone about it when it actually happened to me either.

I actually didn’t have any initial intention to share so much. Writing for Primigravida, I felt more comfortable to bring up what I imagined to be shared experiences. Then, once it was written, I didn’t intend to publish it myself, or post it to Facebook.

But then my partner Hagai said to me, what is the point of writing it if you don’t want people to read it? So I shrugged and posted it. And now everyone knows.

People just kept telling me afterwards how brave I was to share so much.

Honestly, the hardest part for me to share was not the miscarriage, the horrible side effects of birth control pills, or the incredible difficulty of marriage with or without infertility – these things seem like common knowledge and not particularly linked to me.

At 30 weeks, the secret is out.

The hardest thing to go public with was my pregnancy. I really didn’t want to tell anyone.

First I had all those good reasons. Many people even recommend not telling anyone until after the Down Syndrome tests come back at 16 weeks since, again, women over 40 – who have a 1 in 50 chance of having a Down Syndrome baby – may not want to share such a difficult decision process so publicly.

But then even after we crossed that hurdle, I still didn’t want to go public.

I have so many single girl friends over 35 with whom I spend endless hours discussing the likelihood of their actually having children. To break the news of my pregnancy to a friend or acquaintance who is deeply depressed about the prospect of not having children just seemed insensitive and icky.

But this still wasn’t the worst thing. I know that their sadness doesn’t preclude them from being happy for others, just as I was happy for my friends that got pregnant when I was failing.

The worst part was the embarrassment of telling all of my fellow childless friends with whom I had spent countless hours ranting against breeding. How was I supposed to tell my fellow anti-breeding club members that I had betrayed the cause? My anthem was “there are too many children and not enough parents.” Even during our time in fertility treatments, I would still have these conversations and was fantasizing about adoption the whole time. I held up examples of wonderful women who never reproduced, including several members of my own family. I read and circulated articles about the intrinsic value of a women’s own life without having children, championed adoption, foster care, Big Brother Big Sister programs and alternative family models.

I still believe all of those things, but I am also now a pregnant woman over 40.

As I enter my 8^th month, there is no secret about it – everyone who sees me knows.

ALMOST DUE: Books with belly.

But I am still struggling with my change in status. Honestly, I have lived a long time as an adult without children, and was comfortable with who I am, how I got here, and where I was headed. Today, all that hard won self-knowledge seems irrelevant. I no longer recognize my body let alone my life. I fear losing my relationships with my friends who don’t have children but still not connecting with other parents.

I was recently at a gathering of five couples and their combined ten children. Hovering outside my body, overwhelmed by the din, I wondered, is this my life now?

Maybe I wanted to keep it a secret for so long because I wanted to keep my life as familiar as possible for as long as possible. Those days are over.

My baby is now announcing loudly to me and anyone who can see her dancing ripples across my belly, I am about to be a mother.

So my secret is out. Now I’m waiting to see if I can remain who I was and still be the mother I hope to become. I will let you know how it goes.

Rachel Canar is working on a baby and a book. 

“You look marvelous!” Or, a time to revel in living large.

You might have funny discolorations in your skin. You look like you just swallowed a basketball and raided the bakery. You have no makeup on, your hair is unkempt, and you have the look of someone who just woke up groggy from a long nap. But people will run into you and gush that you’re beautiful. And on some level you are. Hey, you’re pregnant – and there’s a beauty in that which isn’t based on Vogue magazine standards.

And yet, it bears saying, something strange happens when you’re pregnant. Suddenly, your body is public domain, and people feel free to act and comment accordingly. As I head into the home stretch with less than three weeks until my due date, people seem to feel more comfortable than ever in commenting on the state of my body.

Thankfully, it’s all good – to the point where I’m convinced it’s exaggerated and meant to flatter. “You look fabulous,” friends coo. (Well, let’s not get carried away.) “Your hair looks great.” (Yes, it appears that raging female hormones have restored my hair to the thickness I had 15 years ago, but I’m sure it’s temporary.) “Your face isn’t big and puffy at all,” one friend wondered yesterday. “In fact, you look like you lost weight.”

And then there are the comments that I think are meant as compliments, but have a way of making me flinch. “I saw you from the back and couldn’t even tell!” (Gee, so I can stop worrying about my butt also looking pregnant?) “You look kinda slim but with a nice round belly.” (Slim? Really, save me the exaggerations.) “You’re not even waddling.” And my favorite: “You were much bigger last time, no? I mean, last time at this point you were huuuge.”

It could be that I’m having a slightly less puffy pregnancy experience, or that this baby will be a little smaller than our son was – girls often are. Or maybe it’s a seasonal thing. Towards the end of my last pregnancy there were a few days when the thermometer in Jerusalem neared 115 degrees, which meant 102-degree days were the norm. My hands and feet swelled up to the point where a friend remarked, with empathy: “Those don’t really look like they’d be your feet. Does it hurt?” (Yes, it did.) My feet looked like the belonged on the body of an old lady – or even a fat baby. The swelling reminded me of how my foot looked when I’d broken a bone a few years back – no metatarsals in sight.

In comparison, it’s nice reaching the home stretch of pregnancy in wintertime. Not the winter of New York, where I grew up, and where a friend slipped on the ice and broke her wrist while pregnant, but the relatively mild winter of Jerusalem. Here, on recent nights with the weather hovering at 4C (39F), the temperatures make for polite chit-chat about what an unusually cold winter we’re having. A scarf is a nice thing to have, but with my warm pregnancy hands, I don’t think I’ve put on gloves more than once the whole winter. We didn’t even get the snow that was predicted this past weekend, and that would have been the first time in four years.

This means that I my spend days in marvelously comfortable pregnancy jeans or black pants and black t-shirts, capped with a long, colorful sweater. It’s a lot more flattering of a look than the size XL white sundress I often wore in the record-breaking heat of August 2010. When it’s that damn hot and you’re that pregnant, a billowing muumuu that hardly touches your skin seems the only thing you want to wear.

But frankly, there are moments when I find this preoccupation with the state of my body to be disconcerting. Unless you’re my doctor or my midwife – who has explicitly told me to watch my sugar and carbs this month to avoid letting the baby get too big and thus inhibit the natural birth I’m hoping for – the state of my size is probably not your business. Not long ago, my friend Nechama Malkiel crystallized what was troubling about the comments on her pregnant body. In a piece she posted on Facebook a while back, she wrote:

I have two problems with these comments.

1) They create an atmosphere of judgment that I am constantly subjected to – many people seem to think that because I am incubating a human being, my body has become public property and deserving of scrutiny. This is personally hurtful and makes me feel self-conscious.

2) These comments convey a societal preference for certain body types that is analogous to the one that non-pregnant women are classified by – to be a pregnant woman who gains little weight and/or who loses it quickly is seen as superior to being one who gains a lot of weight and/or takes a long time to regain her pre-pregnancy body, if she is ever able to (or even wants to) do so.

She concluded:

Why am I writing this and posting it on Facebook? I have two goals. One is that we pause before we consider commenting on our friends’ and family members’ pregnant and post-pregnant bodies (particularly mine). The second is that we, as a society, reevaluate the underlying messages we are giving women about pregnant and post-pregnant body image. I do not believe that we should impose a “one thin size fits all” standard to women who are gestating or have given birth. I look forward to a time when women of all shapes and sizes can bask in the beauty of their new, fabulous bodies.

Right on, sister. Of course, truly excessive weight gain is never good for mother or baby. But in neither my case nor hers were we in that category.

Of course, it might be that it’s just hard for me to take a compliment. As a teenager, I never fully believed it when someone said I looked good. I struggled with my weight, and every pound gained or lost affected my mood. I either felt I had to negate every flattering comment in the interest of seeming modest, or I simply didn’t believe that what people said was sincere; they were just trying to make me feel good. Maybe I’m still suffering from that same skepticism. All these years later, those struggles largely behind me, I vacillate. There are moments I feel proud, blessed and lucky to be so full-bodied and ready to bring a new life into the world – and moments in which the aforementioned social conditioning makes me think what they’re really saying is, “isn’t it fun to see you looking so fat.”

This is perhaps the one time in a woman’s life where she is truly welcome to take up all the space she needs and revel in being large. Fecund. Powerful. In the few weeks I have left of pregnancy, I’m going to try to enjoy that. Because hey, You look marvelous.

How to Sell the Tabloids

by Rachel Selby, Guest blogger

There’s a lot of folk wisdom surrounding the whole Older Mother phenomenon. My favorite example was an article in The Daily Mail (a British tabloid) whereby a first-time mum in her 40s gave all the reasons why it was actually better to have your children later in life – better educated, more mature, more settled, financially secure, more patient, done her thing and got it out of her system, etc., etc.

A few years later the same woman – I can’t even remember her name – managed to sell another article by doing an about-face and admitting she got it all wrong. Now the mother of a lively young child, she felt she didn’t have the energy she once had. All her friends were starting to enjoy their second age of freedom while she was stuck at home. She had little in common with the mothers at the school gate, etc., etc.

You’ve got to admire her cheek. She managed to make money out of first-hand experience on both sides of the argument.

My own experience seems to defy much of the folk wisdom on both sides. And of course being an older mother is never an isolated factor. In my case much of my experience is due to also being single and living in a different country to all my family, having emigrated from London to Israel in my mid-20s. Other older mothers may have other older children, step-children, health issues, older husbands, or ailing parents. The possibilities for a complicated lifestyle are endless. And they can apply to younger mothers just as well.

I didn’t choose to have my first child at the age of 46, it just happened. I actually chose to have about six children fathered by an extremely wealthy husband and all in my 20s. Would that becoming a mother were as easy as shopping for furniture. Read more…

“Persevere and You Will Conquer”

by Josie Glausiusz

In the autumn of 2010, when I was pregnant with twins, my dear husband Larry bought me a copy of “Breastfeeding Your Baby,” by Sheila Kitzinger. The book, originally published in 1989, is filled with pictures of half-dressed, Earth Mothery women with long flowing hair, large bosoms and serene expressions, peacefully nursing one baby, or twins together, or a young baby and an older child at the same time.  I’m not sure why, but I just couldn’t read that book. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed even one baby, let alone twins. A friend of mine had told me that her baby on her breast had felt “like a piranha latched onto her chest,” and somehow the image stuck in my head.

Rena and Aryeh turned one on Boxing Day in December.

My twin babies are now one year old, and I’m still breastfeeding both of them together in the mornings, one on each breast. It’s one of the most nurturing and comforting feelings I have ever known.

That I was able to succeed in nursing these two babies is a testament to perseverance, because when they were born, eight weeks early, they weren’t even able to suck. I was in my thirtieth week of pregnancy when I developed preeclampsia, perilously high blood pressure that occurs more commonly in older mothers with twin pregnancies. I spent a week in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital before going into labor early on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, and giving birth by emergency Caesarian to two tiny babies, a girl and a boy, at 31-and-a-half weeks’ gestation. I had but a moment to register their arrival before they were whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). I spent the next 26 hours in the recovery room, doped up on pain drugs and anti-seizure medication, and it wasn’t until the following evening that I saw my babies again.

Josie with Rena (r.) and Aryeh (known in the hospital as "Brave Boy") when they were 11 days old.

When I looked at my little daughter Rena in her incubator, I cried. She was so small and thin—just two pounds seven ounces—that she had no cheeks. But she was strong, breathing without assistance, with a powerful set of lungs. My son Aryeh was bigger at 3 pounds 12 ounces, but neither of them had developed their sucking reflex. They were fed intravenously at first, through a catheter in the umbilical cord, and also with tiny quantities of pumped breast milk delivered directly into their stomachs with a clear plastic flexible “gavage” feeding tube inserted into their nose or mouth. Read more…

Shiny, happy people

The other day, we arrived at a celebratory gathering apparently looking spiffy: husband, toddler, bump and me. A single female friend shook her head and acknowledged some disbelief at our cheery appearance. “Is this really possible?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t know if things are really as great as they look, but you guys make it look really easy.”

Suddenly I felt icky, like I’d been fooling everybody. Apparently, by showing up for social events and looking like shiny happy people, I’d been giving friends and acquaintances who are childless or child-free the erroneous impression that this was easy. Or that even when it’s hard, we’re managing to do a great job.

I’m not so sure.

This friend hasn’t seen me on a weekday, especially on one of those weekdays when my husband is out working late and play-time, dinner-time, bath-time and bed-time are all mine…or should I say, all Eli’s, all the time. On one of these recent late afternoons, I was flagging and dying for the nap that is the God-given right of any woman late in her pregnancy. I thought I would lay down on the couch to rest for five or ten minutes while I let Eli play with his toys, which he generally finds riveting. After all, I’ve seen hubby manage to do it so many times.

Delicious, curious, and occasionally mischievous.

Eli begged to differ. He came over with a board book and clopped me on the bridge of my nose, narrowly missing my eye. It wasn’t the first time he’d hit me with a toy or book, but it was one of the more painful. “No!” I yelled, which prompted a peal of laughter in response. I scooped him up, deposited him in his play area with a firmer grip than usual, and went into the bathroom. And cried.

In minutes I felt better. When I went back to him he didn’t seem to be remotely aware that I’d been angry with him, and gave me his usually sweet, delicious smile and a juicy kiss – his latest discovery. Of course I know that my son is at the age where he doesn’t get that he’s causing hurt when he bangs you with an object. And it’s his God-given right to throw food on the floor, to refuse to eat something he loved until last week, to be cranky for no apparent reason, to poop in the bathtub if the spirit moves him, and naturally, to make the house look like a cyclone hit it. (And all these years I’d been thinking that people whose homes looked like this were lazy!)

Read more…

We Don’t Know Anything

by Rachel Canar

My late-in-life pregnancy is not just weird for other people. It is pretty weird for me.

I did not grow up my whole life knowing that I would have children. In fact, I wasn’t even sure that I would get married. I was not like Carrie Bradshaw, who somehow woke up on her 39th birthday and remembered she forgot to have children. I spent many hours in my early 30s in serious reflection and came to the realization that given my body’s fertility window, and the fact that I wasn’t even in love with anyone at the time – let alone that I didn’t have a boyfriend –  I was probably not going to give birth to my own children.

Mr. Right arrives, and realizes that he wants kids after all.

I had always been infatuated with the idea of adoption, and I settled into the knowledge that when I was ready for a family, I would adopt. After all, our world has too many children and not enough parents.

So when I shocked myself, my family and my friends and got married at the age of 40, I wasn’t feeling in a special rush to try and have kids. If it happened it happened, but I had some concerns that a baby right away could ruin our new marriage. My man had promised me before we got married that he didn’t want kids anyway. He lied.

Or changed his mind. Once we got married, he became completely baby crazy. We stopped using contraception, and I got pregnant just after our honeymoon. Unfortunately, 10 weeks later, I miscarried. It was a painful experience, but not one that left us feeling defeated. We had proved that we could get pregnant and it was bound to happen again.

But then it didn’t. We started trying harder. We took my temperature and used a device with which I could inspect my spit every morning to monitor my fertility. Yet the months went by with nothing and our doctor recommended fertility treatments.

For me, fertility treatments were the promise of a nightmare. I had always had problems with hormone imbalances that radically affected my mood. I suffer from extreme cramps during my period, and had consistently been proscribed birth control pills to alleviate the pain. Unfortunately, every time I took pills, it sent me into a tailspin of suicidal depression.

So when I started the treatments, we knew what to expect. I went mad. I was sick, and sad, and felt like I was going crazy, all to no avail. We actually had one of the weirdest possible outcomes of IVF. After monitoring me for the entire month and watching my follicles grow to bursting, presumably with many eggs, the doctor was stunned to a jaw-dropping silence that he found no eggs at all when they went in to surgically retrieve them. This type of syndrome is exceedingly rare and happens in only 2 percent of women, most of them over 40.

The catatonic depression that this launched was so bad I don’t even want to write about it. I hated myself, my body, the world, and most of all, my husband, who got me to this place of despair darker than Mordor.

Before you start hating him too, our relationship actually came out the other side of this tunnel with a complete Hope for the Flowers transformation. We were stronger, more trusting, and more about each other. I finally really felt ready for us to have a family and my husband was ready to look into adoption, but we still didn’t know how it would happen. We definitely weren’t doing any more fertility treatments.

All through this entire process, I had been working in a stressful job. Holding a senior position at a major Israeli civil rights organization, I was responsible for raising the 2 million dollars a year that kept the program running and the paychecks coming for the more than 20 employees. Moreover, my marriage had precipitated a move that resulted in my commuting in hellish traffic for three to four hours a day. I was working about 50 hours a week, and counting the commuting time, more than 60. Even the time when I wasn’t technically working, was spent worrying or otherwise thinking about work. In an effort to reduce the pressure, I had started working from home twice a week, but my stress levels remained unbelievably high. My salary was pretty good, and I was guaranteed at least three months of maternity leave with full pay. My co-workers were my family and they were completely supportive of my wanting to have kids.

In October of 2010, I came to know – and this is an entire story in itself – that I would never have a family while I held this job. While I loved my work and it made my life meaningful, it did not allow me the space emotionally or physically to create anything new. Ironically, I had always thought that only with professional success could I feel secure enough start a family.

I informed my boss in December of 2010 that I would be leaving my job in July of 2011.

My last day at work was July 28th, 2011. The date of my last period was August 15, 2011. In other words, I got pregnant my first cycle after I quit my job.

To clarify, this pregnancy was not planned. There were no treatments, no counting, and honestly, we are married so you can assume we weren’t having sex that often.

When I went in to my doctor in the end of September and he confirmed the pregnancy with an ultrasound, he looked like he was going to cry.

I won’t lie. It feels pretty weird to be pregnant at 42. I know it is common, even popular – I just never truly thought that this would be my life. But as my husband points out, I never thought I would be married either. Things change. Get used to it.

In our last ultrasound and battery of tests at 18 weeks, when we had finally cleared the hurdles of so many of the worst fears, our doctor confided to us that he tells our story to everyone: doctors, patients, and friends. He said, “We think we know so much, but your pregnancy has shown me that we don’t know anything.”

And we are all wiser for it.

Rachel Canar is working on a baby and a book. 

“You’re really starting late!”

When you’re pregnant for the second time in a year and-a-half, people say the darndest things…and feel free to ask the most intrusive questions. They want to know how far apart the kids will be (18 months), whether you planned it (well, we definitely wanted to have a second child and didn’t use birth control), and whether you had fertility treatments (no.) All of these questions, but the latter in particular, seem to intrigue the masses when you’re in the “elderly primigravida” demographic, which includes anyone who becomes a first-time mother over the age of 35.

From the start, the reactions to my second pregnancy have been amusing. “Knew you’d be having them close together!” a friend who started motherhood a decade earlier than I wrote on my facebook page. “Irish twins!” others pronounced, introducing me to a term I wasn’t familiar with, and which a friend from Ireland didn’t think was so amusing, making me wonder if it wasn’t a bit of a slur. One local woman who started having kids in her late 30s and also had two very close together relayed that she was asked by someone, with a bit of a disparaging tone, “What are you, religious?” To which she replied, “No, just old.” (I hope the questioner walked away feeling ashamed of herself.)

Sometimes the reactions amuse me (“Wow, you guys are gettin’ busy!”) and other times they frighten me (“Well, it’s going to be miserable for a while.”)  One of my closest friends has had three beautiful kids after the age of 38, and she’s a great support. (“You know, once you’re dealing with a kid in diapers, you may as well just be in that stage and have one or two more.”) And dozens of people have offered stories about how close they were with a sibling because of being so close in age.

In the past week or so, however, I found myself taken aback by the somewhat blatant reactions of several women of an older generation.  One neighbor noticed my growing belly and reported that her daughter, who had a child at the same time I had Eli, was pregnant again, just like me. “Well,” the neighbor sighed, “she’s making up for lost time.” I asked, and learned that her daughter was only 33. I quickly offered that I was 41. “Oh,” she gasped. “You’re really starting late!”

A day or two later, I saw a fellow journalist and friend, aged 28, whose mother happened to be visiting. The mother wondered aloud why this successful young woman didn’t give up her high-flying, foreign correspondent’s lifestyle and teach college journalism courses as I do…so much more conducive to settling down and producing grandchildren. In other words, she all but said, why don’t you be more like Ilene? When I interrupted to clarify that I was past 40, the mother’s jaw dropped. She was sure I was ten years younger.

Now, I find this as flattering as the next girl. But I think the real double-take is due to the fact that the last generation’s mindset has still not adjusted to a woman’s fertility not being washed up by the time she hits 30.

Even people I respect have said things that floored me. A specialist in women’s health approached me to say that if I didn’t want this to happen next time, she could tell me how to prevent it. (As if I lacked information about birth control! Had that been the case, I wouldn’t have remained pregnancy-free until the age of 39.) And then there was one of my enlightened, never-touch-a-cup-of-coffee, yogi friends, who gently informed me that “from a Chinese medicine perspective, you really should wait a year to give the body time to heal before getting pregnant again.”

For some reason, that comment is probably the only one that has truly given me pause. I’m not the type to live according to what’s good for my chi or to drink copious amounts of green tea, but I wondered if she had a point. Had my body fully recovered? Was I truly ready? I can’t judge anything by ancient Chinese standards – funny that today’s China hardly allows a woman to have more than one child anyway – but I can say that I felt energetic and healthy enough, thankfully, to contemplate another baby. Another confession: We’re blessed with a baby who’s been sleeping through the night, except if he’s ill, since he was six months old. I say this because sleep deprivation is perhaps the most debilitating aspect of new parenthood, and had it continued for us the way it does for some parents, I’m not so sure we’d have been ready to jump in again. Also, while the conventional wisdom says you should wait at least a year to 18 months before trying to conceive again after a C-section, my own doctor said his research showed that this “wait” is unnecessary in most cases, including mine, and gave me the green light. (For more see here.)

I could get into my fears about how energetic I’ll feel in ten years, when my children will still need a “young” mother. But when I start worrying about things far off in the future, which I tend to do just before bedtime, my husband always says, “Come back. Stay here.” So here I am, 28 weeks pregnant, and thinking about “family planning.” It is a wonderful term invented in the last century as a tool of social health policy. Real families, however, are built with some mysterious mix of planning, love and happenstance.

Why I haven’t been blogging more often

Since early July, I’ve been avoiding writing on this blog about a subject that has most been on my mind.

In July I found out that I’m pregnant again. Today I hit 22 weeks, which means I’m more than halfway there. If all goes well, please God, sometime in early March I’m due to have another baby, 18 months after Eli’s birth.

Though my husband and I are thrilled to be having another child, there are many reasons why I’ve been reluctant to write about it. First, there’s the hurdle of the difficult first-trimester, when extreme exhaustion and nausea are at their peak, but you’re not supposed to inform the immediate world because it’s “too early” and the risk of miscarriage is high. (The vast majority of miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.)  Second, I’m a slightly superstitious character. (In which case, is it okay to announce you’re pregnant at all?)

But third – and this is a biggie – almost as soon as I got pregnant, and especially after I heard the fetus’ heartbeat at around eight weeks, I found myself wondering if I would do “it” this time. It is an amniocentesis, that famous test where the doctor sticks a needle as large as Libya through your belly and into your womb, to withdraw amniotic fluid and examine it for genetic abnormalities.

Pardon me while I poke a hole in your precious pre-natal world and check that you don't have any chromosomal abnormalities.

I went through the same dilemma about whether to do an amnio exactly a year and-a-half ago. It was 39 at the time, and any woman over 35 is encouraged to do the test. In Israel, the doctors virtually insist on it – so much so that they make it free. But the more that my husband and I thought about it, the more we felt the that risks were not justifiable. More specifically, the point of the test is to check for Down’s Syndrome. The chances of a woman at 40 having a child with this chromosomal deviation is about 1 in a 112, as opposed to about 1 in 910 at age 30, or 1 in 1,520 at age 20.

Presumably, the whole point of the test is to consider aborting the fetus, should it be found to have Down’s. Terminating the pregnancy – a euphemistic term – didn’t seem like something either of us could fathom. So why do the test, which also carries a small risk of miscarriage? We did some serious soul-searching before deciding that the risk wasn’t worth it, and that the battery of other, non-invasive tests had shown – albeit with only 94 percent certainty – that our baby-to-be looked perfectly normal.

This time around, I was a year-and-a-half older, meaning the risk had gone up. Two doctors we had seen had strongly recommended doing the amnio, dismissing the miscarriage risk as miniscule. By now I had spoken to more than a dozen women friends who’d done the test, most of them adding that it was no big deal and that they were glad they did it. Finally, there was the fact that having a baby was no longer just a romantic ideal, a dream we had. It was now reality, and my husband suggested I consider closely what it would mean to have a child with Down’s Syndrome.

And so I worried. About doing the test, about not doing the test. Finally, I bit the bullet and did it. I was convinced that it would hurt no more than the prick of a needle during a blood test. Instead, the procedure was surprisingly painful. But what was really torturous was the two weeks following the test. What would I do if the results came back as positive for Down’s Syndrome? I had already seen my baby (yeah, I know I’m supposed to say fetus) bouncing around in utero on the ultrasound screen, and I’d already succumbed to curiosity and learned that she is a well, a she. I’d seen her tiny fingers. I was dreaming of names. I was moved at the thought of having a daughter and envisioned the many complexities of mother-daughter relationships I might face over the next 40 years.

And I concluded that whatever the test results, I was keeping this baby, as long as the universe was amenable to her staying in my belly until next March. How could I do otherwise? Or was I going crazy?

One night, when I couldn’t sleep at 2 a.m., my husband suggested I gently rub circles around my rounding abdomen. He provided a mantra, and I took it up: “My fetus is happy and healthy, and so am I.”

Yes, it sounds corny and Californian, but it helped. And maybe it worked. The results came in two days later, letting us know that things are perfectly fine. And so I am allowed to feel relieved and stop worrying – until the next test.

There are other reasons why I’ve been quiet until now – though anyone who sees me regularly long has been aware that I’m pregnant, because as with many second pregnancies, I started “showing” much earlier this time. Most significant of these reasons is my feeling of longing on behalf of friends near and far who are trying to conceive. There is probably no way to convey the extent to which I wish I could be pregnant alongside them. I realize that being pregnant again is a blessing. I wish I could spread it around as easily as the children in my son’s playgroups spread their germs, which is to say, widely and quickly.