Unless you have spent fifteen years as a married woman without children, you probably do not even realize just how often in the course of everyday conversation the topic of having children arises. When I was a newlywed of twenty-four, I was asked as soon as I returned from my honeymoon when I would be having a baby. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had posed the question during my wedding reception and, to save my sanity, I promptly blocked out the memory. As the years went by, I found that the questions became less and less frequent, as those who knew me no doubt deduced that since I had clearly become older than dirt, it was too late for me to ever be a mother.
What is the rush to be a mother? I know that biologically a woman in her early twenties is ideally suited to having a baby, but in my opinion this is a major design flaw of the human organism. Biology and a culture were in a conspiracy to push me into reproducing before I was ready to take such a monumental step. Those of us who wait, who postpone pregnancy until we feel ready to take on the responsibility of raising a child, are bombarded not only with the “over thirty-five” gloom and doom about fertility, but also with cultural messages lauding motherhood as the most fulfilling of roles that we should immediately embrace.
It is a shame, really, that evolution has not caught up to the reality of forty being the ideal time to have a baby. In addition, the medical establishment has not clued in to how well suited a forty-year-old woman is to both pregnancy and to parenting a newborn. By the time I got pregnant at age thirty-nine, I was healthier than I had ever been in my life, both physically and emotionally. If it weren’t for the pesky biological fact that my eggs are as old as I am, I would definitely be in better shape to have a baby at forty than I was at twenty.
