I Had My First Youngster at 45. Right here’s What I Realized.
The first time a stranger mistook me for my own child’s grandmother, I was at an airport taking my 2 year old on a connecting flight. I bought a bottle of water; the baby had a tantrum. I put them on the floor to make them screech and took my time shopping. The clerk gave me an angry smile and said, “Grandchildren are a handful, that’s for sure. I have four myself! “
I smiled and said, “Yeah, a real handful!” Then I picked up my daughter who arched her back and screamed, “No!” Over and over as we walked out. I’m pretty sure the clerk’s misunderstanding about my relationship with my child will repeat itself for the rest of my life. This is one of the consequences of having my first child at 45 and my second at 49.
At 30 you can be a grandma, but saying that I have young children makes me appear younger. Since I’ve never been a younger mother, I can’t say what’s different about being an older mother. I can say that it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I seriously considered having children. I’ve had the privilege of easily accessing birth control and abortion when I needed it. This childless time enabled me to concentrate on what I wanted to do at the time: doing my doctorate, traveling, living together and touring as a musician.
My original plans to have children with my girlfriend at the time were thwarted by breast cancer at 35. Getting a form of cancer that doesn’t hurt unless it’s removed has different effects than other, more sudden, and exciting encounters with death. It made what felt impossible worse – that I would live long enough to successfully raise children in loving relationships.
Depending on my partner’s health insurance policy at the time, my approach to mortality was riddled with compromise; I could stay with her, keep the insurance, disregard her affairs with other people, drink myself to sleep, and pretend I had a healing night’s sleep. Instead of having to live every moment with a clear zest for life, I was a lackluster cancer fighter.
My alcohol addiction increased when friends and family tried to get out of my deep depression. My drunkenness was an unspoken demand: recognize my suffering! Do you see me! But no one could see my cancer, and my physical debilitation and alcohol consumption were read as moral failures. I had radiation treatment on a malignant breast and an estrogen-suppressing drug for five years to reduce the chance of it coming back. At one point, when I was 40, I was in remission and stopped drinking.
My children are the result of a partnership I never thought I would be so happy with with a man whose commitment to family matches my own. On our third date, when I was 41, we decided to have kids. The reality is that even between the ages of 41 and 42, a woman’s chances of reproducing drop sharply and her egg supply is likely to be low.
We started our fertility project optimistically with intrauterine insemination, which saves the sperm from going to the fallopian tubes. After that failed, we quickly set off for in vitro fertilization in the hope that I would be the wonder person whose eggs only needed a little prick. I learned that I’m not a miracle person: after two rounds of IVF, we decided to pay a young woman for her eggs, a process that has been gently referred to as “donation”.
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As a 54-year-old mother of two young children, I am more patient and tolerant of both my own weaknesses and the shortcomings of others than I was when I was young – a useful quality both as a parent and as a person. I now care much less about what others think of me, but I do care a lot about my family’s needs and opinions. I am more concerned with regular health and wellbeing practices; I have very little time to myself, but that time is very well invested.
How others rate my aptitude for parenting is really their concern based on their own prejudices. If you see my decision to become an elderly mother as unfair to my children, who will eventually (like all of us) become orphaned, all you have to do is look at the experiences of people whose parents are due to fundamental differences of opinion, addictions or tragic circumstances. How we lose and gain families is never common.
Motherhood created an unexpected connection for me with younger women with children. As a college professor who also works at public high schools, I am in regular contact with younger mothers. I try to use my role as a teacher to help them appreciate the work they do as mothers and to let them know that I am and see that work. Perhaps this identification is something like what the saleswoman felt when she treated me kindly at the airport.
Sometimes, when I tell this story, friends notice that I should have been angry about the clerk’s acceptance. “How rude!” They say. At other times, my friends will assure me that I don’t look like a grandmother at all. But what does a grandmother actually look like?
I understood the incident at the airport as a result of my unique path: I am misunderstood and my experience is accepted, unseen, unknown. This path includes the opportunity to experience deep empathy and connection. For her part, the seller’s comments suggested to the other people in the store (who were likely feeling uncomfortable or irritated by my daughter’s outbreak) that it is difficult to care for a crying child and that a crying child is not uncommon. She signaled that she knew that this was a challenge for everyone and that she saw my work. Grandmother or not, I’ve been seen.
This essay was adapted from Old Mom published in the May / June 2019 issue of Women’s Review of Books. A version of this will appear in “Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40,” which will be published by Dottir Press on September 21.
