I adopted at 46 – my children don't care what age I am
When I was trying (and failing) to get pregnant, one of my mum’s friends said, ‘You don’t want to leave it too late. You don’t want to be an old mum’.
She had no idea how long my husband and I had been struggling to conceive – it had been several years by that point. Or that I was terrified she was right.
My age had never really bothered me before. But being told I was getting too old, and seeing the chances of getting pregnant diminish with every month that passed, made me obsessed with my age.
I’d scour the internet, looking for stories of people who got pregnant in their 40s. Whenever a celebrity shared the news they were expecting, I checked their age. I’d feel a renewed sense of hope if they were older than me.
If it could happen for them, then it could happen for me.
Fast forward a few years to 2012. It took an initial appointment with a fertility doctor where I managed to lose my knickers (we eventually found them under the chair) for my husband and I to know treatment wasn’t for us.
We felt like we were numbers on a conveyor belt and that at some point, we’d get thrown off because our bodies didn’t work as they needed to. It was an impersonal, clinical process and something that felt wrong for us.
Although I didn’t feel it, I was fast approaching 40. And in the world of IVF, that matters. A lot.
But the appointment at the fertility clinic changed something. It didn’t make me despair at the statistics the doctor told us about, even though he said the success rate for my age was around 15%.
Suddenly, everything became clear. It didn’t matter to me how I became a mum. The pregnancy and giving birth part wasn’t that important to me.
Adoption was something we’d talked about for a long time before the appointment with the doctor. I think I always knew I wasn’t going to get pregnant, and adoption was something we’d spent a lot of time thinking about.
For us, the method of becoming parents was less important. We just wanted to have kids. We knew there were thousands of children waiting to be matched with adoptive parents, and that we’d love a child that wasn’t genetically ours, just as much as if we’d had one that was.
My professional life as a legal adviser in Magistrates’ Courts involved dealing with adoption cases in a courtroom so I knew a lot about the process already. That helped me know what to expect and the basics of what the process involved.
I knew about the type of issues children who’ve experienced early life trauma often face. In a lot of ways, hearing that IVF wasn’t our only option, and deciding it just wasn’t the route we wanted to go down, was a relief. It felt like the beginning of our journey to becoming parents, not the end.
We gave ourselves some time to make sure we’d made the right decision. Accepting you are never going to have a child that carries your genes, looks like you, and is part of you, is tough.
For a long time, I felt like I’d failed as a woman because I couldn’t get pregnant.
But gradually, I realised that just because I couldn’t get pregnant, that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a mum. And that’s all I’d ever wanted.
I knew adoption was the right option for us. It was how we wanted to create our family.
But moving on to adoption brought up the age issue again. Was I too old to be a mum to a young child? This time, my concerns were answered very quickly by our social worker. And it was the answer I was hoping for.
My age didn’t matter at all.
A very long 10 months after we were approved to be adoptive parents, we found out about our eldest daughter. I was convinced our child would be around the age of two when we met them.
So, I was gobsmacked when we were told she was just six months old.
The next few months passed in a heartbeat. We met our precious little girl and brought her home after a short period of getting to know her at her foster carer’s home.
Seeing your child for the first time, whether you’ve given birth, adopted, used a surrogate, or something else, is a feeling you’ll never forget. Your age doesn’t change that.
Our youngest daughter was only five-and-a-half months old when she came home. I was almost 46 and my husband was 55.
We were contacted by our social worker when the birth mum became pregnant again four years later and asked if we wanted to be assessed as adopters for our daughter’s sibling.
Sadly, the birth mum’s circumstances hadn’t changed, and adoption was the plan for the unborn baby.
At that point, we hadn’t intended to adopt again. So, it came out of the blue and turned our world upside down.
Our ages weren’t of concern to our social worker. However, we spent a lot of time thinking about whether we were doing the right thing becoming parents to such a young child at the ages we were.
But our main concern was for our eldest daughter. We felt that saying no to being considered as parents for her baby sister because of our ages felt wrong. We’d be depriving her of the chance of growing up with one of her siblings because of a number.
For her (and her sister), our ages don’t matter at all. They are eight and four now and don’t care that our hair is getting greyer (by the day!) or that our bones creak. All they care about is that we’re a family.
So, although I’d love to be able to cope with sleepless nights in the way I did in my twenties and I’d prefer it if my body didn’t ache quite so much after a day of fun at the park, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Being an ‘older’ mum doesn’t hold me back. I think I’m a much better mum than I would’ve been in my twenties or thirties. So, for me, my age is just a number.
Age is Just a Number
Welcome to Age is Just a Number, a Metro.co.uk series aiming to show that, when it comes to living your life, achieving your dreams, and being who you want to be, the date on your birth certificate means nothing.
Each week, prepare to meet amazing people doing stereotype-defying things, at all stages of life.
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