Creating life in midlife; is it having too much?

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 22, 2002

My gynecologist's office specializes in fertility, and every time I go, I see beautiful young women who can't get pregnant. They probably look younger than they are, because they work out and have great haircuts, but they're still an age I consider young -- late 30s, early 40s. But I'm not Mother Nature, and she does not agree with me.

She starts aging a woman at 30 when fertility peaks. At 35, fertility plummets 50 percent and at 40, 95 percent. So, even if you still wear baseball caps and feel like you don't know what you want to do when you're grown up, Mother Nature has stamped you "expired."

This is not really new news. When I was of childbearing age, my OB-GYN wanted me -- as all his patients -- to have my first baby before I was 30. I missed his deadline by 26 days. I wanted a child, so I went about doing the things it seemed to me at the time I needed to do to get one in this day of birth control and planning for babies, not just letting them happen. No more hippie boyfriends, for one; I needed a man who'd be a good father. It wasn't that cut-and-dried, of course, and I could have profited from a little (well, a lot) more maturity, but at least I had the basics down. The last thought on my mind then was that this would be a good time to start my rise up some corporate ladder.

So, when the much-ballyhooed book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, came out with the big news that executive women over 40 tend to be childless, I wasn't particularly interested. That was before the book made the cover of magazines and became the subject of columns and comment, and pictures of triumphant midlife moms were suddenly turning up everywhere.

"Madonna, pregnant at 44" on a supermarket tabloid; "Geena Davis, new mom, 46" on the cover of People.

So, even if you're as lucky as Madonna or Geena and beat the odds, is this a good idea? I mean for women who aren't movie stars?

And not just the pregnancy -- as any mother, even one over 40, knows, that's the least of it.

Women I know who had children during the traditional years -- 20s, early 30s -- shake their heads. One, who carefully planned her pregnancies around the demands of her medical career, pointed out the problems that can occur with babies of older moms. "Some of these celebrities who say they've had miscarriages -- I wonder if they're really miscarriages."

Even if the child is a perfectly healthy kid, those of us with grown kids can't imagine dealing with the sleep deprivation and demands of an infant at 45 or a teenager at 60. We're tired. We need time for ourselves. We like quiet. Of course, maybe that's because we've already raised our children.

One of my friends who had her second child in her early 40s, confided, "What if I get sick?" As in disabled, she meant. It's a thought that never occurred to me, or to most women, at 31.

Last year, a good friend in her 50s became a first-time mother through adoption. She wrote that she'd scheduled a sabbatical so there would be plenty of time for, in her words, "child gazing." I reminded her of this phrase after she came home with a 2-year-old. "What was I thinking?" she cried.

What, indeed. She was thinking the same things I thought before I'd had a child. Somehow the reality of kids, like that of labor pains, really doesn't hit until they're yours.

At least Creating a Life isn't selling. One article speculated that's because the media have put too much emphasis on the downbeat message of the book -- those poor, sad childless CEOs with six- and seven-figure incomes and no one to spend it on but themselves -- and not enough on, you guessed it, Having It All. Like the author, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who, at 51, had a baby through in vitro fertilization even though she already had three children.

Isn't there something to be said about Having Too Much?

-- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright