Primigravida

Getting what I deserve

In a recent blog post, I mentioned the challenges of trying to bring up baby alongside boisterous toddler. After griping about the latter throwing blocks at the former – these days the greater issue is headlocks of love and other toddler-on-baby moves that look startlingly similar to wrestling positions – perhaps I got what I deserve.

Big Bro E loves to grab baby Z’s face from behind and squeeze vigorously – not sure she enjoys it quite as much.

One reader wrote in to say, in a word, that’s why it’s a good idea to be mindful of spacing one’s children successfully, as she did. But that reader, it turned out, had her first child at 25, and was done by age 32. Bless, as they say in the UK. I’m glad it worked out for her that way.

Life for us primigravidas is different. A woman who starts a family with a first birth somewhere near 40 is not going sit around and wait until her child seems old enough to handle being a big brother or sister, or (where relevant) until she and her partner feel truly “ready” for another baby. Most of us conceiving children in this age bracket, whether naturally or through assisted reproductive technology (ART), know that our fertility is finite. No one knows exactly where or when it ends, and we’re likely to be pressured by doctors, as many of my friends have, to get on with it now if they hope to have another child or two.

One friend with fertility challenges, though still in her mid-30s, has been told by her doctors to start a new round of IVF, just five months after the birth of her first baby. Another friend all but forced herself to have a second baby before she felt ready, simply because she knew time was running short. Similarly, my husband and I were quick to try to conceive after having our first child because we thought it could take a long time to get pregnant again. I had convinced myself that my first pregnancy was a fluke and would be near-impossible to repeat.

In my best moments, I feel blessed to have two gorgeous children who are just a year and 5 months apart. In other moments, I feel overwhelmed at the challenges: keeping them happy and fed and warm, preventing them from hurting each other, and stopping them from feeling that they must compete for my love – though I suppose that happens at any age.

Of the primigravidas in the target demographic of this blog, I’ve met a preponderance of women who have children very close in age – that is to say, much closer than they would have preferred, had they started earlier – and women who have twins conceived via IVF.

I write about this trend neither to criticize it nor to laud it, but rather, simply to take notice of it. This is what motherhood looks like for the growing ranks of women like us. It means that more of us are coping with twins, or with children so close in age that it is, as I sometimes put it, a bit like having twins, except one has the ability to harm the other – or to smother her with well-meaning hugs. People sometimes call this situation “Irish twins,” though I suspect the term is a bit politically incorrect. So I’ll just call it what it is. Since last February, I’ve had two kids in diapers. Two kids who often demand and compete for my undivided attention. Two kids with different needs that are hard to fulfill simultaneously. (Currently, one needs to be rocked and held in the dark at exactly the moment that the other needs to be read an engaging story.) Two kids who cannot be left alone to play in the living room for more than two minutes while I cook dinner in the kitchen.

A sweet moment of playing together nicely: the littl’uns cooking together in their new kitchen, care of their American aunts and uncles.

BUT WHO REALLY CARES? Only me and a bunch of women (and men) in the same situation. What I’m coming to realize is the extent to which I must stop expecting the world to sympathize with the struggles this entails. Especially, that is, a certain obnoxious flight attendant on British Airways, who during a leg of our recent trip home acted heartlessly throughout, all but yelling “schnell, schnell” as we tried to gather our things and our babies and get off the plane. I just wanted for her or her colleagues to offer a hand at pulling a piece of carry-on luggage down the aisle or to understand that when your toddler is fast sleep and needs to be carried just like the baby, it’s pretty damn hard to also carry your many accoutrements necessary for an 8-hour flight, plus winter coats, etc. Perhaps she didn’t know that strapping on your baby and negotiating three other bags takes a few minutes.

As part of this experience, I realized how attached we are to our double stroller cum luggage cart. Dear flight attendants, if you’re going to deprive us of it at the boarding gate, at least help us to and from our seats and be nice about it, the same you would as the little old lady who needs wheelchair assistance.

Of course, parenting is not a handicap. But having more than one mini-person in your charge does add so many complications that I sometimes wish people would see it that way. We move more slowly, we need the elevator, we’re dependent on our wheels. Please, I feel like saying, can’t you see I’ve got two kids in diapers? Can’t you please rearrange the universe to make it easier for me?

Again, I’m probably getting exactly what I deserve. Once upon a time, I was the person who had no clue why people with small kids needed to stop having a normal life. I was the woman who occasionally snaked off to see if she could get her seat on the plane changed (‘sure, that baby’s cute, but I need to sleep/work/read/etc.’) And more than once, I probably looked at an overwhelmed, exasperated mother of multiple children and thought, ‘well, don’t have ‘em if you can’t take care of‘em.’ I distinctly remember seeing a wayward child on a plane and thinking, ‘Sheesh, can’t you control your child?’ Control. Were it that easy! Seems almost as quaint a notion – as old-fashioned family planning.

Is “later” parenthood really different?

The other day, I agreed to participate in a study of women who became mothers at or around 40. Apparently, given the advances in fertility treatments and the acceptability of later motherhood, this is a demographic on the rise – one interesting enough to attract researchers.

This one, Jennie Doberne, is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia and is looking at the social impact in Israel of “later motherhood.” Israel, she says, is particularly interesting because of what she calls in her research description, “pronatalism.” Or, as she puts it in her research summary, “the national pronatalist effort is eroding previous biological constraints on maternity and enabling older women to become mothers.”

In other words, what’s the impact of living in a country where the government will pay for IVF and other treatments up until the age of 45?

Even though we didn’t use fertility treatments to get pregnant, I fit into the demographic, and so I agreed to be interviewed. Which in and of itself was an odd experience: I’m so used to being on the other end of things. As a journalist, I ask the questions, not answer them.

Within minutes of Jennie’s arrival at our house for her usual one-on-one interview, my husband was throwing out answers from the kitchen – and soon asked if he could join in the conversation. When we both agreed, he nearly leapt onto the couch. He’s been as keen to start fatherhood as I was motherhood. And although he’s a year older than me, no one seems to express special interest in what it’s like to engage in “later fatherhood.”

One question stood out towards the end of the interview. Is there something different about becoming parents later? I suddenly thought of the unsolicited advice that an acquaintance who had started motherhood at 40 gave me. “Remember,” she said, “what we lack in energy, we make up for in patience.” Slowly, I’m realizing there is wisdom in her words. A full day with my seven-month-old son – if no one else happens to be around to help –  can exhaust me, though I imagine a 25-year-old mom would say the same. In general, I have loads of energy. But how will I feel in five or ten years? I do think I’m more patient, and more present to the job of being a parent, than I would have been if I’d started having children at say, 28 or 30, when I was still carving out a name for myself professionally. Read more…

Does she or doesn’t she? Or, how I got here.

Oh, go ahead, just ask already.

When you give birth at 40 for the first time, the question on many people’s minds is whether you got pregnant with the help of fertility treatments.

Those who don’t know me often assume I’d been trying for ages, because they think having a first baby at 40 is “late.” And those who do know we got married just two years ago might wonder as well.

So, just to put my own experience out there, because I don’t see the point in a blog that doesn’t, I suppose you can say I got lucky – but it wasn’t quite as easy as that. We returned from a long weekend on our first anniversary and learned I was pregnant – exactly one year after we’d begun trying to conceive.

Six months after trying to get pregnant, I hit 39 and marched myself into a fertility clinic for the usual workup: blood tests, the monitoring of my ovulation and hormone levels, a sperm count for my husband. Six months isn’t long, but I was impatient – and worried.

Everything looked fine, but I still wasn’t getting pregnant, and the ticking of my biological clock was deafening. “You’d better hurry up,” one of my aunties said a month after the wedding, “you don’t have much time.” (Hey, thanks, I didn’t realize!) I saw a naturopath to assess my diet. I gave up most caffeine. And I tolerated a lot of unsolicited advice.

“Don’t eat garlic.” “Stay away from ginger.” “Avoid all dairy products based on cow’s milk.” “Give up sugar and white flour.” “Just don’t think about it.” “Don’t stress.” The list was endless, and occasionally, ridiculous. Read more…

Elderly Primigravida

Women in an advanced state of elderly primigravida

Cheryl tilted her head to the side and squinted, as she often does when she’s curious about something.

“Do you feel intimidated by young mothers?”

I hesitated. “What do you mean? You mean, like, the 22-year-olds who are also having kids and are probably going to have five or six more?”

Cheryl, my acupuncturist’s wife and receptionist, nodded eagerly.

“Well, I have heard from friends that when my kid gets to kindergarten,” I said, “I’ll start noticing how much younger most of the mothers are and I’ll bond with the older ones.”

When Cheryl posed this question, I was nine months pregnant, garnering comments like “You’re sure it’s not twins?” and coming in for treatments in attempt to induce me to go into labor.

Three months earlier, when I’d run into said friends, well into their 40s, they made the prediction that soon I’d be in the “old mommies club” like them. Their suggestion that I was going to be an old mommy irked me. At the time, I was not yet 40 and still holding on to my 30s, even if only by a thread.

Considering the unusual trajectory that my life had taken, I felt I wasn’t starting late, but was pulling into the first-time mommy station right on time. I’d spent the second half of my 20s in a relationship with the wrong guy, and had survived a rocky marriage and divorce, all of which occurred before my 30th birthday. I spent the first half of my thirties traipsing around warzones including Iraq and Afghanistan, enjoying my career as a foreign correspondent. Relationships were on the back burner, save the occasional romances that inevitably didn’t work out – probably because I wasn’t quite ready to settle down. It wasn’t until I hit 35 that I got real again about finding the right man. It wasn’t until age 37 that I met him, 38 when we got married, 39 when I got pregnant, and presto, I found myself giving birth at the age of 40.

FORTY USED TO seem incredibly old to have a child. My own mother was born when her mother was 40. But my grandmother  had already had two children who were by then 11 and 14, and my  mother’s conception came as a “surprise.” A late-in-life child, was how my mother described herself when I was growing up. She viewed her childhood as having been shaped by parents who first and foremost seemed old. But the hallmarks of them being “old” really had very little to do with their age, and much more to do with their archaic status in my mother’s eyes: they were from the “old country,” spoke Yiddish alongside their broken English, and  never drove a car.

By comparison, having a child at 40 today seems not only completely normal, but even ideal. I’ve had my adventures, I’ve established myself professionally, I’ve been there and done that. I’ve lost track of how many women I know who have had a first child at or after 40, and some have gone on to have one or two more.

The medical establishment begs to differ. On my release papers from the hospital in September, which I recently read with great interest, one of their main findings is “elderly primigravida.” That’s doctorese for a woman having her first pregnancy and/or birth after the age of 35. Apparently, in physicians’ terms, I ought to be retiring, not gestating.

It’s not just the doctors who took note when I was asked, for the trillionth time since becoming pregnant, how old I am and which pregnancy this is. When I read a late-90s version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, one Q&A (meant to mimic the typical questions we preggo-people have) began like this: “I’m 38 and pregnant for the first – and presumably last – time.” The message: At or near 40, you’re already washed  up. (The latest version of the book, unsurprisingly, dropped this very dated question.)

This isn’t to deny the very real difficulties that arise around fertility and pregnancy for those of us who’ve been menstruating for a good 20 years before even trying to conceive. The statistics show that there is a drop-off in viable egg production after 40 and an increase in birth defects. But those are just averages, and we, in contrast, are real women. Human beings. People who want to be parents.

This blog will be dedicated to motherhood after 40. There appears to be a need for it.  When I googled around for “motherhood” and “40,” all I could find were the websites of people trying to sell me their fertility enhancement systems, and a disturbing website put out by Focus on the Family that lists all the dangers of giving birth “later.” Presumably James Dobson, whose fundamentalist writings have been known to get my blood pressure percolating before, doesn’t like the proliferation women like me. That is, women who put off having children because they wanted to do a few things in life before becoming mothers. Women like me, who had trouble finding a suitable partner for many years, and in some cases, made the courageous decision to enter motherhood as a single parent, with the hope of finding love and companionship later down the line. Or not.

In this blog, I plan to thoroughly bash FOF’s ideas, examine the ups and downs of starting motherhood in what society labels “later” in life, share a few amusing observations, and just put some of this wild, life-changing experience into words, because that’s what I know how to do.

And no, I am not intimidated.