For Old Moms Everywhere

When I became pregnant with our third child, I was 41. I was a bit surprised to find myself knocked up, as we hadn’t made any special effort to have another baby. We were surely open to it however, and both my husband and I received the news with joy.

Immediately thereafter, a feeling set in. I was going to be 60 when this kid graduated from high school. The next two decades flashed forth. I felt old.

Feeling old, it turns out, is quite easy to come by. Especially in the realm of fertility. The warnings start cropping up past the 30 mark, and by the time we get to 35, there's even a special, sanctioned medical term: geriatric pregnancy, or its newer friend: advanced maternal age.

The specific and dire nature of the warnings makes them difficult to see past. For example: "...the risk for miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, stillbirth, and chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome all increase with age as well. 'At 35 years of age the risk of having a baby with chromosomal abnormalities is 1 in 204, at 37 years 1 in 130, at 39 1 in 81, and going as high as 1 in 39 at 42 years of maternal age'..."[https://www.parents.com/getting-pregnant/age/pregnancy-after-35/geriatric-pregnancy/] Dread fills the air.

So here I am, facing these 1 in 39 odds of having something go incorrigibly wrong. Old AND possibly defective. How did I end up here?

My friend Mark reminded me after I delivered my first child at age 34 that when I was 16, I had intended to be a mom at 26. Oh yeah, I laughed at my younger self. I started business school at 26. There was no way. I graduated at 28 into a recession, and really only found my professional way at 32, when my hypothetical first child would have been 6. I consider myself lucky that I even met my future spouse before 34 and before becoming "mom." Could things have gone any other way?

Of course they could have! But the way it went in real life is that my first child was born when I was 34 and my second arrived when I was 39. My husband and I had in the past speculated about how nice it would be to have three daughters, and the ambient question of whether we'd ever get there loomed large as I turned 40. "Fertility decreases by as much as 95% in women between 40 and 45 years of age." I wondered whether my last call had already come and gone.

Feeling defective and old, I decided to seek an expert opinion. While in Seoul, I stopped by a women's clinic for my annual pap smear. After the exam, I asked with some apprehension, "Do you think it's too late to have a third?"

"Why not?" my doctor asked back. "You are healthy, with good vitals and fluid levels. I just delivered a 46-year-old baby last week."

"Oh," I said as I started wondering whether the imaginary third might actually become real. "But it'll probably take a while right?"

"No not necessarily," she said. "You just never know. I wouldn't wait too long though."

I left feeling 34 again. The magic of conception could be mine again, I thought. I felt thankful that I wasn't in a country where "geriatric" would be used to describe a pregnant me. The doom of a disappearing window of conception narrowly leading to a pregnancy fraught with risk was supplanted by the lightness of possibility. I felt open to allowing motherhood to finding me a third time.

I could end the story here, because the salient part is the hope restored. The statistics pertaining to my maternal odds did not change in the 20 or so minutes I was at the OBGYN. They trend as they do with age, and ever shall. What changed is my tolerance for that trend. I would not permit the trend to set forth my expectations or actions.

I found myself pregnant mere weeks after that visit. Having changed nothing beyond my attitude, I felt happy and slightly stunned by the quick timing.

Openness didn't cause the quickness, and the timing may have been long or short regardless. Still, I am struck by the role of openness in how I hold this narrative. The odds of joy are long. The odds of success are long. They always are, in all matters of conception and life. We cannot predict the timing, much less control it. And still we can forge forth, with watchful openness for what we wish were so. We can choose to be youthful in our approach, regardless of long age and short odds.

In so choosing, we may be rewarded with what we, deep down, hoped for all along.