On Giving Birth at 42

For most of my early life I wanted nothing to do with children, many of whom I found barely tolerable with their constant interruptions and endless questions.  I had a friend whose 6-year-old son spoiled every outing with his screaming and yelling, and another whose two-year-old daughter sat permanently on her lap, holding her hand over her mother’s mouth whenever she tried to join in adult conversation.  It was the era of Frederick Leboyer’s ‘Birth Without Violence’ and I even objected to that.  All this fuss about birth from the baby’s point of view!  How about what the woman felt?

Just the same, the idea took root.  My biological clock was ticking, and I raised the subject with my GPs.  Both were men, one Italian the other Iranian, and both were sympathetic.  I was 37, my window was closing but, perhaps because of their cultural and religious backgrounds, they greeted me with warmth and enthusiasm.  Indeed, when I told Dr Patriarchi that I still wished to have a baby, he said ‘Of course, you do!  You’re a woman!’  And went on to discuss the logistics and likelihoods in the kindest way possible.  I was healthy and in good shape, it was not too late, but I probably should be married first.

Two years on, I was living in the Midlands and visited my GP for a general wellness check. Once she discovered I was considering a pregnancy at 40, however, she exploded, calling me a selfish and irresponsible ‘old’ woman who had squandered her fertility, and now thought she could play catch-up.  Goaded by shock and disbelief, I told her to fuck off and she retaliated by striking me from her patient register. 

Given that I eventually produced the kid she said I was too old to have, I sent her a photo of him, along with a smug little note reminding her of our altercation.  Then, a few months later, the cosmos gave me a bonus dig at her.  We’d moved to Germany but, by using a friend’s British address, able to get Sky TV, on which the doctor was interviewed about a local n’er do well.  And by happenchance, the n’er do well (smoking and visibly drunk) was identified as her, while the doctor was labeled ‘Mary Such and Such - Repeat Criminal Offender’.  I hoped this ruined her day, but did not follow up with a second little note in case it pushed the Cosmos too far.

For the Cosmos, on the heels of my shouting match with the GP, had sent me what is commonly called an announcing dream.  What Google describes as a ‘vivid, significant dream, where a future child communicates its presence and desire to be born’.  In mine, a dusky version of my younger brother appeared in high-waisted black pants, and a plum-colored silk shirt, together with a cheese-wedge afro reminiscent of Richard Ayoade in ‘The IT Crowd’.  He was there, it seemed, to lay the groundwork for his arrival.  I was appalled by his fashion sense and said as much.  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.  ‘A black flamenco dancer?’  He laughed, and perhaps to soften the blow showed me a beautiful brown baby tottering unsteadily in his first attempts to walk. 

In the morning, I woke my husband and, quoting the gypsy from the Muddy Waters song, told him, ‘You got a boy childs comin’, to which he responded, ‘Gonna be a son of a gun?’  He admitted decades later that he thought I was bonkers, but it kept me happy and he left it alone.  I, on the other hand, was committed.  I knew with absolute certainty it had been real and began to make plans.  But what I hadn’t reckoned on was how long these plans would take to materialize.  Each time I got my period, I was disappointed and, as it stretched into a new year, devastated.  But, on month 15, we had lift off.  I did 3 tests and a 4^th in my German doctor’s office, before relaxing into delayed delight.

To say I enjoyed those next months would be an understatement, although there was a lot not to like: I jumped two bra sizes, and the maternity clothes were so awful I made do with large tee-shirts and leggings. Demi Moore may have been naked and heavily pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, but I was more pit pony than glamor girl.  My sturdy, reliable little body acquitted itself well and returned close to normal afterwards, but it was not a pretty sight in full bloom.  Plus, I was violently sick for weeks, dragging my toenails up through my body on the side of the Autobahn during my daily commute.  I worried that I was starving to death, losing weight rather than gaining it, until at a friend’s cookout I insisted on a chili-laden hot dog with lashings of onions and cheese sauce, and finally found something the baby would tolerate.

I also read everything I could find on childbirth and child rearing.  I was starting from scratch and needed all the help I could get.  My primary influence was Thomas Verny’s ‘The Secret Life of the Unborn Child’, in which he warns that the third-trimester fetus is aware of her surroundings and, in particular, listening to what is going on in the outside world.  Verny was very much swimming against the tide in the 80's but by the 90’s, when my son was born, his ideas were becoming more mainstream.  Certainly, I took his advice to heart and monitored my stress level and mood swings.  I played music and talked to my belly when I was driving.  And I kept my thoughts positive.

The Austrian researcher, Gerhard Rottman, was another huge influence.  I am unable to quote from the original source, but the gist of his work is that there are 4 kinds of pregnant women:

Ideal Mother – Wants the child, and can afford it.

Ambivalent Mother 1 – Wants the child, but cannot afford it.

Ambivalent Mother 2 – Doesn’t want the child, but can afford it.

Catastrophic Mother – Doesn’t want the child, and cannot afford it.

Of course, I was the Ideal Mother: wanted the child desperately and could afford it.  Equally, as a teenager, I could’ve been Catastrophic Mother.  My 19-year-old self might’ve been angry and resentful, humping the kid from one party to the next, hating the whole situation and wishing I could rewrite history.  Similarly, it was possible for a mother of 4 to take a different approach to each new arrival, depending on finances and preferred genders.  I witnessed this with a work colleague who, weeks from birthing her second daughter, was already planning her third pregnancy for the boy she and her husband had wanted all along.  What if the girl fetus picked up on that? I asked myself.  Surplus to requirements before she was even born.  But for me, as an older woman, it was a blessing.  I was eager to settle down, and we had enough money to subsidize that.

I’d also hoped for the Joan Rivers delivery: ‘knocked out at the first pain and woken for the hairdresser’, but that was not to be.  My waters broke at 5 a.m. and, guessing I wouldn’t be fed again that day, I cooked a full English breakfast, and scarfed it down standing at the kitchen counter.   I was in labor for 17 hours.  The first ten were very do-able, the last 7 kind of nightmarish.  It wasn’t the pain I minded, it was the certainty that I was trapped in a body over which I had no control.  I was completely helpless, a prisoner to a force that came and went on its own terms, not to mention my geriatric cervix, which had hardened from a piece of sponge into a lump of concrete. The baby was in fetal distress and I wound up with a caesarean, during which I vomited what was left of the full English breakfast onto the anesthetist.

His father, who ascribes to the Alfred E Newman ‘What Me Worry?’ school of thought, took all this in stride, singing to the baby in the Pediatric Unit and, oblivious to the German social order, calling the attending specialist Erika, rather than Frau Doktor Schmidt. Once we got home, he entertained himself by tossing the boy around like a football while I, shaking with anxiety, did everything by the book.  I’ve often wondered what my son made of that.  Where was the chatty lady from the car trips?  And, who was this misery guts who’d replaced her?

Anyone who’s seen the Luvs commercials knows that new mothers are catastrophizers.  I was no exception and blamed myself for every blip, including the fact that he was colicky and spent half the night screaming.  Was I feeding him too much, or too little; eating the wrong foods and giving him gas?  When we moved into our building, we’d introduced ourselves to our upstairs neighbor, a tight-lipped Pole named Frau Pietruszka, who told us – ‘I hate black people!’ - and slammed the door in our faces.  As we paced the floor with the baby, we listened to her stomping to and fro, clearly unable to sleep, and if we met her on the stairs my husband would laugh maliciously and say, ‘Keeping you awake, is he?’  I kept my mouth shut, because my former self would’ve been equally enraged by a colicky brat, and because we were both hollow-eyed with exhaustion.  Indeed, my husband, coming home from an evening shift, could hear the baby howling as far away as the parking lot and, after running up 4 flights, found him in a bassinet on the bed with me fast asleep beside him.

But all things pass and we woke one morning to find that the grizzling monster had been swapped with a smiling angel.  Flooded with relief, we set off into 20 years of living in the Now and reveling in it.  Small boring days that never got old; a pleasure and a privilege despite the screaming and yelling, the constant interruptions and the endless questions. 

Not surprisingly, this domesticity turned my thoughts to my mother, a mini-version of the mother of 62 children, from Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life’, dropping number 63 straight from her womb to the kitchen floor, and telling a teenage daughter, ‘Get that will you Deidre…’   I know her first two pregnancies were joyous, but her enthusiasm took a hit with us latecomers and, by my arrival, she was hovering just above basic maintenance.  There was food on the table and clean clothes, but no personal relationship with either of my parents.  And, as I went about my daily routines, swamped with love for my own special little person, I found myself grieving for the child I once was, alone and lonely, leaning heavily on the good graces of my older brother, whose music and politics I adopted, and who my son is named for.

My mother was, of course, a victim of her era and, when I count my blessings, I always thank God for the timing of my life.  In fact, when my son was in 8^th Grade he was sent home to ask us which modern invention had had the greatest impact on our lives.  His father would’ve said the jet engine, but he was out of town so he was stuck with mine: the contraceptive pill.  I was on it from 19 to 39 and for a further 5 years after his birth and, as a consequence, sidestepped most of the nonsense foisted upon women of past generations. 

I had one pregnancy and one kid – my beautiful high-intensity, high volume boy that no amount of feminism could damp down and, trust me, I tried.  I would say that ‘boys will be boys’ if that expression wasn’t now used as a cover for toxic masculinity, but men and women really do think differently.  He’s now in his thirties, a Bob Marley lookalike who works at a non-profit; a decent guy ‘who can calm a frightened animal or rock a child to sleep’.  Like his father, he drives stick shift and fixes cars, but he also has a large vegetable garden and watches Ted Lasso with me.  A nice combination of both our genes, in my opinion

Could I have had a happy life without him?  Sure.  You don’t miss what you don’t have.  And yet, having a baby was the best thing I ever did.  It grounded me as a human being - the kick in the pants I needed to evolve.  I’m still occasionally angry or sad, but I haven’t been depressed since he was born, perhaps because I was too busy with all the mundanities that got us out the door every morning.  He was sometimes a pain in the ass, willful, pig-headed and uniquely himself, but I’d checked a lot off my list before having him so there was no sacrifice, and he was never a chore or an imposition. 

Was I a good mother?  He complains about a bunch of stuff, including my hyper-vigilance and catastrophizing. ‘I could make a career out of worrying’ as Katherine May says.  I’m prone to whining and shrillness and I definitely over emphasize the importance of ironed shirts and polished shoes, tasks nobody his age has any interest in.  And despite working very hard on avoiding my parents’ mistakes I somehow made a whole new set of my own.  Seeing that none of them involved beating him with an electrical cord or eating dinner in complete silence, I think he should suck it up.  But that’s what the Cord Wielder and the Dinner Nazi thought as well, right?

I guess only time will tell how my legacy stands but, from my point of view at least, it was a blast and I loved every minute of it!