The Geriatric Mother
Good morning everyone… perhaps it’s the middle of the night for you… often is when you have an infant. In any case, I am delighted to introduce to you my blog which I’m hoping might offer a few pearls of wisdom, a whole lavender bunch of comfort and maybe even some sensible discussion.
The Geriatric Mother - a strange name for a blog written by a 41 year old perhaps? You might think so. However, this is actually what they call us. To explain… this blog is aimed at women who become mothers after the age of 35. When I was finally pregnant with my first daughter (more about that later), I found myself chatting to a midwife one day and her words left me with that phrase hanging in the air… “well, because you’re a geriatric mother…”
It didn’t really matter what she said next. I was sitting there thinking… what are you talking about!? I’m 37 or I was at the time. That’s not geriatric. I mean… seriously?
That singular descriptive word used to define how I came late to motherhood suddenly labelled me as someone who hadn’t got my life together early enough or who was perhaps too old to think about having children at all. “Don’t worry,” she said, “37 is the average age for first-time mothers in the Richmond borough. “Yes,” I thought, “of course it is… we’ve all been working!”
There it was though. It seemed that women who had prioritised career over family life or who simply hadn’t pinned down one of those promiscuous city boys in our 20s, were now to be given their own category of… what was it… pity? “Pity you left it so late,” “pity you had a miscarriage,” “pity your eggs aren’t harvesting… but you are a geriatric mother you know… it was always a risk.” I don’t know. I don’t like to put a victim’s hat on so perhaps ‘pity’ isn’t the right word. To be sure, all the medical staff were extremely understanding and supportive… but with every failed IVF attempt and every passing month, I found I was unwittingly growing into the label they’d given me and wishing even more, that I’d started sooner.
You might wonder why, after two births, I’m still musing over this. Surprisingly, I’ve found that this unwelcome tag sits even more heavily with me, now that my children are here. In truth, therein lies the purpose of my blog. Four years later, I am a geriatric mother of two, absolutely warmed to the core of my soul by my children… but getting to this point meant giving up my career which was followed by a decision to leave the city of London and move home to rural Ireland. It’s a decision I’ll never regret, but it’s one which has left me with absolutely no idea of who I am beyond the worlds of my husband and gorgeous girls. So here I am, hoping to reach out to you – you previously confident, successful, globe-trotting, public-speaking, energetic, professional, career-women; you geriatric mothers who gave it all up to have children and who now, because you don’t want to work full-time while your babies are small… have absolutely no idea what to do next. Perhaps like me, you have too many ideas but none of them are sticking. Perhaps you’ve decided to be a stay-at-home-mum but hate feeling as though you have to justify that all the time. Perhaps, no matter how many business plans you write, social media identities you form or how much market research you do… ultimately going back to work, going back to the thing that has always defined you or a new thing that could create the ‘new you’… means leaving your precious babies to be taken to the beach by somebody else. And what’s the point in that?
I look forward to getting to know you, to sharing my ideas, to sending you links and to hopefully pulling you forward into the next chapter of your lives… with clarity and with confidence. With any luck, in doing that, I might find some for myself too.
On a happy note… it’s snowing here today – yeehah! I’m off to build a snowman with my girls.