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Midlife Mamas: It’s Worth The Wait by Karen West

We’ve all seen the headlines: Women’s biological clocks start ticking in their late 20s. Fertility declines with age. Women who want it all find it’s too late.

Tell that to the burgeoning number of “midlife mamas” — women all over the country having babies later in life, and for some, on their own terms.

Many are resetting their biological clocks to establish careers, build financial nest eggs and travel the world. Others become older moms unexpectedly after years of unsuccessful attempts. And some prolong having children until they find the right partner or “retire” into parenthood. They are rewriting the book on motherhood — and aging — in America.

Midlife mamas — whether they are gay or straight, divorced or married, use donor sperm, in vitro fertilization, conceive naturally or adopt — agree that age and a sense of readiness have personally given them the wisdom and patience to be better, more content mothers. In interviews with more than 30 older moms in the Seattle area, almost all said they were happier having children later in life. And research shows that women who wait are even living longer.

“I was a pretty squirrelly twenty-something, a relentlessly striving thirty-something and by comparison a sensible forty-something,’’ says Bonnie Albin Fraik, who discovered she was pregnant at age 41 while living on her sailboat in Puerto Vallarta. She had financial resources, a stable marriage, plenty of options “and perhaps a little accumulated wisdom.”

The wave of new, older mothers is spreading across the country.

• In 2006 more than 600,000 babies (one in seven) were born to moms 35 and older in the United States, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics.
• The birthrate for women 45 and older tripled between 1990 and 2006, according to the CDC, and the actual number of births to moms 45 and older has quadrupled (up from 1,638 in 1990 to 6,956 in 2006).
• Later celebrity moms, such as Julia Roberts, Madonna, Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek, grace the covers of magazines on supermarket news racks.
• Support groups for older moms, including Seattle’s Fabulous Mamas Over 40 and 80’s Ladies With Babies, are being formed in just about every city in the country. There's even a new magazine, Plum, that targets pregnant women over 35.

“Women now have the option to define for themselves when they’re ready for family, rather than sticking to a schedule set by social convention,’’ writes Elizabeth Gregory in her book, Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (Basic Books, 2007). “As a society, however, we have yet to come to terms with the phenomenon of later motherhood, and women who decide it makes sense to delay pregnancy often find themselves confronted with alarmist warnings about the dangers of waiting too long.”

NEW LATER MOMS

Having children at a later age is not new, but U.S. Census data shows a dramatic increase in the number of women choosing to start their families at age 35 or older. Gregory, director of the women’s studies program and professor of English at the University of Houston, calls them “new later moms.”

In a telephone interview from her home in Houston, Gregory, 51, points out that her grandmother had the old-fashioned kind of later motherhood by having her eighth child when she was 39. That’s the same age Gregory was when she gave birth to her first. She notes that in 2005, one of every 12 first births in the U.S. was to a woman 35 or older, compared with 1970, when one in every 100 first children had an older mom. After the first child, many new later moms, including Gregory, go on to have more kids.

“This is a generation of women with more clout,’’ says Gregory, who adopted a second child at age 48. “The difference from the later moms of years past is that the new later moms have more cultural capital: more education and higher wages ... They are established in their jobs and secure in their senses of self so they can focus on their kids’ development rather than their own.”

Debbie Kobelansky, 50, is one of those new later moms. She made a conscious decision to start her family later in life, mainly because she also married later. Starting a family later allowed her to establish her career as a health care risk management consultant in Seattle and develop the financial means to help support her family. “I did so much traveling in my 20s and 30s, so I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything,’’ says Kobelansky. “I don’t have the conflict younger women feel who may just be establishing their careers.”

She and her husband first decided to become foster parents and later adopted those children, who are now 5 and 7. The couple fostered both children as infants, but the adoption process took 18 months for one and nearly three years for the other.

Leslie MacGregor, 42, didn’t even think about having kids until she was in her 30s. She was busy traveling and working long hours as a vice president of advertising for a global technology company. “I feel much more content and comfortable with a baby after 40 than I did with my first one,’’ she says. “The experience feels more natural, less worrisome and more enjoyable.”

The mother of three boys, now ages 7, 5, and 2, MacGregor was fortunate to conceive immediately with each child. Shortly after having her first baby in California, the family moved overseas and she had two more children, one in London and the other in Amsterdam.

THE WAITING GAME

Not all older mothers make a conscious decision to wait. Sometimes Mother Nature decides for them.

Julie Clark, for example, always wanted children, even as a teenager. She had had an early abortion at age 17, which, she says, “I didn’t want but felt pressured into,” and then in her 20s lost two babies through miscarriage in her first marriage. “Although I developed a career and a full life without children, having children was my dream from age 17 until 41, when I finally got them. It was worth the wait.”

Clark, of Bellingham, was 41 and 43 when she had her daughters, now 4 and 6. She met her husband at age 39 and they began trying to have children shortly after they married. “I was lucky at my age to get pregnant within a few months,’’ she says.

She wanted to have another baby but assumed she wouldn’t get pregnant while exclusively breast-feeding. But when her daughter was five months old, she did get pregnant. Sadly the baby died five months into her pregnancy. It was a heartbreaking time, but several months later she got pregnant again and gave birth to another daughter.

For Alex Sanso, 46, the concept of motherhood evolved over the years as she settled into a long-term relationship with her female partner. She never thought of herself as the mommy type. She liked children and loved spoiling her niece and nephew, but admits it was nice to give them back to mom at the end of a fun-filled day. “I always thought I was too selfish and interested in too many other things to actually want to raise a child.’’

But after a few years, she and her partner started exploring adoption. “A child started to feel like a missing piece for us and my feelings shifted,’’ she says. “Then, almost like the proverbial ticking clock, at age 39, I suddenly had to do it.” Her realization happened while riding the subway to work one day in Tokyo, where she was a designer for Disneyland. “I was surrounded by all these cute kids and their families on their way to Disneyland, and it hit me.”
Instead of adopting, they researched sperm banks in California and had four vials shipped to Japan. Using her own egg, Sanso’s doctor performed an intrauterine insemination in his office while she held hands with her partner and her mother. The first insemination was successful and she gave birth to a healthy boy, now 6.

Sanso says she never felt like an “older” mother. “We were living in Tokyo at the time, so it was more unusual that we were two women trying to start a family than the fact that I was older.”

MENOPAUSAL MAMAS?

Despite acquiring wisdom and patience with age, many older moms still have their share of worries: sleep deprivation, mortality and menopause, to name a few. “I became perimenopausal as I became a new mother,’’ Debbie Kobelansky says. “Talk about conflicting hormones!”

Others ask themselves: Will I be able to physically keep up with my active kids? Will I be around to see my children graduate from high school, marry and have children of their own? Will my own parents be around long enough to develop relationships with their grandchildren?
Jeanne Flohr, an administrator at O’Dea High School in Seattle, had a bittersweet experience with the birth of her third child at age 44. Her mother died unexpectedly just 12 days after her son was born last May — three days before Mother’s Day.

“She only held him a few times and he will never know her as his sister, brother and cousins did,’’ Flohr says. “Mom was a wonderful teacher, an avid reader, and enjoyed exploring the city and parks with her 13 other grandchildren, and it makes me very sad to know Charlie will not experience her joie de vivre.”

Flohr already had two children, then ages 12 and 13, when she unexpectedly became pregnant. Although it was a shock, she and her husband welcomed the news. Her teenage children had a slightly different view at first. “Once I was showing, they were embarrassed to be seen with me ’cause it means, you know, Mom and Dad ... Then, after Charlie arrived, they didn’t like me walking them to and from school with the stroller; otherwise they were good with it.”

Katie Perry, 45, worries that she won’t be able to have a relationship with her grandchildren. If she could do things over again, she says she would have had children earlier, “just so that I physically had more energy and could be around for a longer period of their lives.”

Perry had her first baby when she was 38 and the second at 40. She didn’t make a conscious decision to have her baby later in life but waited until she found the right partner. “Life was full of adventure and travel and work. I was in and out of long-term relationships. Although I always knew I wanted to have a family, I really started thinking about family and future at age 35. At age 37, I found a person to do that with.”

The stress of caring for elderly parents while nurturing a toddler also is a factor for many older moms, including Bonnie Albin Fraik, 47. Her ailing father died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, shortly after she had her baby. She remembers “being wiped out with an infant/toddler while my father was falling into dementia. I would have liked to have spent more time with him.”

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Menopausal moments and being part of the sandwich generation don’t usually come up in conversation at new parent support groups. That’s why Suji Quay started her own last year, exclusively for new mothers over 40. “I was at different stages in life than most of the other moms and I wanted to talk with women my own age,’’ she says.

The group started out with just a few older moms meeting in neighborhood coffeehouses in Seattle. It has since changed its name to “Fabulous Mamas Over 40” and has grown to more than 40 members from Marysville to South Seattle. The group, now being led by Elise Gordon of Lynnwood, sponsors semi-monthly “meetups,’’ including mom’s nights out, trips to the zoo, museums and parks.

For Gordon, 45, “Fabulous Mamas” has given her an outlet to share parenting strategies, discuss aging issues and swap “older mom” stories with women of her generation. “Between taking care of ailing parents, running a household, taking care of kids and working, older mothers need support,’’ Gordon says. “They need to know there are a lot of other moms out there dealing with the same issues.”

Society and the medical community seem to be warming up to older mothers. The fact that she was 41 when she became pregnant didn’t faze Albin Fraik’s perinatologist. “On my first visit, he told me he didn’t blink unless you were over 50, so being 41 was nothing.”

Dr. David Luthy, medical director of obstetrics and gynecology at Swedish Medical Center, says women over 40 having children is commonplace nowadays, especially in King County where the birthrate among older mothers leads the country. “It certainly doesn’t raise any eyebrows in our office.’’

He cautioned, however, that complications can arise, such as preeclampsia or diabetes, with mature maternity.

Leslie MacGregor, who had two of her three children overseas, found the medical approaches in the U.S. to be vastly different from those in Europe. She was 35 when she had her first baby in California and “everything was very clinical and all about testing and monitoring the baby.’’

She had a completely different experience three years later with her second child born in London. “The European model is all about pleasing the mother,’’ she says. She had an even better experience with her last child born in Amsterdam.

The Dutch, who believe birth should be natural, not medical, take a non-interventionist approach to pregnancy. So when MacGregor instructed her doctor in Amsterdam to give her an epidural for her last delivery, he just smiled and said he would see what he could do. “I was moaning like I was in a tribal community and screaming for an epidural,’’ she recalls. “All these Dutch women were looking at me like I was a crazy American who wanted painkillers.” She never did get the epidural because her baby was born within the hour.

As they left the hospital, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that a nanny had been assigned to them for the first two weeks. “That’s just the way they do things. It’s such a different mentality.”

She hopes that mentality will eventually find its way to the U.S. Gregory, who spent several years studying older mothers, says American society is slowly adjusting to older motherhood. “There’s been this great anxiety about women over 35 having children, but the story so often is very different. Doctors and society have discovered that older moms are doing just fine.”

Karen West, 50, is a Bainbridge Island-based writer and mother of a 6-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy.

©2009 Caliope Publishing Company