I don’t feel particularly cool – to be honest I feel a bit knackered, and I’ve been wearing the same jeans for weeks – but I know what she means: I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve taken baby number two in my stride. So far, it’s felt easy. Normal. Natural, even. As though she’s been part of our life for years, which on one level she has.
Certainly, there has been nothing like the mind-shaking tumult I experienced with my first daughter nine and a half years ago, the upheaval of which basically sent me a bit mad. I’ve no idea if Swank put off having a baby until nine months ago.
I’ve no idea how she did it, either, whether she used IVF or another means, or simply got exceptionally lucky. All I know is while my newborn was no accident (after years of struggle I didn’t, in the end, conceive naturally; we had IVF), becoming a mother for the second time at the age of 48 was never part of the life plan. Yet at the same time there has been something strangely liberating about bucking the expectation that having children is a thing you do in your 30s.
I’m usually embarrassingly anxious about other people’s opinions but perhaps because my husband, 59, and I never wavered in our determination to add to our family, I really don’t care how many eyebrows the arrival of our daughter has raised. In fact, it’s only made me braver about bucking other tiresome orthodoxies surrounding parenting, such as exclusively breastfeeding, which is beautiful and bonding, yes, but also utterly eviscerating when it’s you doing it every night at 3am. And no, I don’t feel guilty about my desire to go back to work as soon as I can.
Nor am I having an existential crisis about the fact I have currently swapped using my brain for grinning foolishly at my daughter’s crinkled little face. Despite having almost no control over my mornings right now, I feel, perhaps for the first time, in control of everything else. Of course, there remains a lingering societal suspicion of older mothers. We are freaks of nature who defy the cosmic order of things. We see motherhood as something we are entitled to entirely on our own terms. We clearly spent our 30s selfishly pursuing career glory and hedonistic weekends before waking up on our 39th birthday in a panic about getting pregnant.
Our subsequent extremely expensive struggles with infertility are all our own fault. In truth, however, nearly all my female friends have wanted children since our late 20s and early 30s and most of us have spent nearly a decade trying to make it happen. Yes, a few got on with the job early on but several of my friends lost years of their childbearing prime to relationships with men who intimated that they wanted children at some point yet never fully committed to having them.
I spent several chaotic years with a highly erratic chap whom, even from the depths of my infatuation, I was able to intuit was far from ideal father material before having the fortune in my mid-30s to meet the man who is now my husband. A couple of my friends have been unable to find anyone suitable at all and have taken matters into their own hands by having children by themselves.
All of us know the dull ache of absence while in the presence of other people’s children; the awful lonely sadness of a miscarriage. None of this makes us special, but it does make us women of a certain generation, for whom motherhood has invariably been the product of a complex and often painful negotiation with circumstance and biology. And yes, there are aspects about the birth of my daughter that haunt me in the early hours of the morning.
Older mothers of newborns might be cool, but I’m not sure a geriatric mother of a teenager qualifies in the same way. There will undeniably be a cost to my daughter of having an older mother, however much she is loved. I imagine strangers in the street have already mistaken me for her grandmother.
And please, dear God, don’t let anyone mention menopause. I can’t imagine dealing with a toddler is anyone’s ideal solution to coping with a hot flush. Moreover, I can’t easily ignore the nagging thought that having spent my 40s trying to have a second child, a baby is a way of staving off my own mortality. Other friends my age have recently made seismic decisions about their jobs and relationships.
Embracing the craziness of parenthood for the second time instead is perhaps my selfish version of stopping the sapping, mid-life spiritual drift, a pre-emptive strike against my life slipping out of shape. I worry, too, that my first daughter is old enough to feel, on some deep untouchable level, that she is being replaced.
In fact, the more complicated, less easily expressed truth is that our efforts to have another child are entirely because of the joy she herself has brought. Mostly though, I am overcome by how lucky I am. In short, having a baby at this age has brought about a previously unimagined peace. I hope Swank feels the same. Then again, she’s had twins. To which horrifying prospect, I can only say: surely that wasn’t planned?
