Having a baby at 44 has made me more grateful and a super laid back mum

2022-07-24

Cary J Hansson had her first children, a twin boy and girl, aged 35. She wasn't expecting to be back in the labour suite nearly a decade later. But her late baby was the biggest blessing…

"I was 44 when my son came barrelling through the doors of the last chance saloon. It was a geriatric pregnancy if ever there was one. Although that term doesn’t sit well when we think of a blooming lovely Gwen Stefani, Iman or Halle Berry who had their last babies at 44, 45 and 47 respectively.

But we’ve come a long way since a pregnant 47-year-old Arlene Phillips was told by her doctor that she should be a grandmother, not an expectant mother. Back in 1990 Arlene was a trailblazer and, yes, her doctor really said that! Astonishing when you consider that women have been having babies in their forties for as long as they’ve been having babies.

Nowadays our child-bearing years are more condensed. We’ve got careers and Netflix. Who wants to be simultaneously dealing with a hot flush and a dirty nappy when you could be pouring a martini and watching Bridgerton?

So, I want to make it clear – having a baby in my mid-forties was not on my to-do list. As the mother of nine-year-old twins, I’d been there, done that. He’ll be the glue that holds your family together, my wise friend said when I told her. And although at the time I wasn’t convinced, 11 years on I can say with conviction that she was right. In ways I couldn’t have anticipated, my late-life baby really was a blessing in disguise.

Firstly, I truly believe that the changes midlife brings have served to make motherhood a more enjoyable and less stressful experience. I’m simply further along the road than the other mothers. I know how much time there is for a poor maths test to get lost and then forgotten. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, I’ve often heard myself say to a mother who’s probably 15 years my junior.

Another explanation, I’m convinced, is because of the hormonal changes midlife brings. As I’ve been able to settle myself in that comfortable menopausal armchair of, “I really don’t care,” it has become easy to sift the wheat from the chaff, to work out what is important in life and let the rest go.

So, call me lazy or negligent, but at 55 I find I have no time for pairing socks. If my son wants them matched he must do it himself. It’s not a hard task, but the liberating effect of freeing myself from this repetitive exercise has been profound.

World Book Day may have come and gone without me noticing. I don’t sit on parental committees and I’ve never got involved in present-collecting at term end. Is that selfish? Maybe, but with recent medical research indicating that the shifting hormones of menopause result in a brain less geared toward pleasing others and more focused on single issues, I may have a valid excuse.

The flipside is that I understand in a way other mothers have yet to learn, how brief it all is. For how could they know? How
can any of us understand how quickly our children grow until the day arrives and they’re looming over us, their feet huge and hairy on our coffee tables, the fluting tune of their voices long gone and their bedrooms… well, let’s not go there.

So, wheat and chaff… Yes, I also now understand how important it is not to rush the dawdle home from school, because if this baby has taught me anything it is how fast time moves. Every first is also a last and I don’t want to forget, in the way I have with his older siblings, how his tiny hand feels in mine.

I know, I make it all sound like a Disney movie. So, before you all throw away your contraception, let me say state for the record, that late-life motherhood hasn’t been without its challenges.

My eyesight, for example, isn’t what it once was. I remember once tearing through the house searching for a pair of reading glasses as my son screamed, my anxiety levels sky-rocketed and the bottle of Calpol, with its tiny dosage instructions, sat unused on the counter. And then there was the business of getting down to his level – in other words, the floor. I’d do it in stages, holding on to a table and creaking like a shipwreck. Getting back up took so long, he’d often toddled off to play with knives before I was standing.

But that wouldn’t happen nowadays, and here is where I’ll let you into the real secret of late-life motherhood – yoga. More than a decade on and I’m finally getting some strength and flexibility back in my post-baby/post-menopausal body.

It’s taken a while, but then again, I don’t have a chef or a chauffeur, a housekeeper, nanny or cleaner. I don’t even have a tumble drier! So when I see glamorous, slim celebrities posing with their babies, I want to slap a red warning sticker over the image. It’s not easy at any age, let alone in later life. The dragging tiredness through my son’s early years has been a sobering reminder of the fact that this was, indeed, a geriatric pregnancy.

As for those celebrities who become mothers in their fifties? Let’s get real, shall we? I wish they would. My son wasn’t a miracle, but he was rare enough and to imply that a child can be naturally conceived at such a late age is a cruel trick to play on other women.

But perhaps the most valued silver lining to all this, has been the beautiful bond created between my older children and their sibling. This is the glue my friend spoke of. They’ve been involved from the beginning. Watching and walking him, playing with and cuddling him, and now, chauffeuring him. All of which has made them more considerate people, none of which I foresaw. It is this I am so grateful for, that I’ve been able to watch them learn to love and care for someone so much more vulnerable than themselves.

Finally, my late-life baby has kept me young. Talking to other mothers, I really do have no idea of the age gap. I can dance to Gangnam Style and floss with the best of them. I’m fluent in Minecraft terms and familiar with YouTube pop sensations. My only worry is that one day someone will take down that picture in my attic and expose me as the interloper my age suggests I should be."

Cary J Hansson is the author of A Midlife Holiday, available at caryjhansson.com/a-midlife-holiday

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