Older Mothers - and I mean OLDER

'm deflected from what I was going to tell you about my current state of mind by something in the papers today which has, yet again, incensed me. Apparently it's become a race to beat the record to be the oldest, most wrinkly, most short lived mother in the world. Beating the 57 year old woman who had a baby made up of a Russian egg and her high-waisted-slack wearing, anxious looking husband's sperm, we now have a 66 year old English woman who seems to hae gone down the same donor egg route. We already have that witch-like creature in Romania and another one in Spain, both of whom seem never to have given a thought to the most important person in this story, the baby itself and what will he or she think about having a doddery or even dead parent when they're on the cusp of adulthood.
And do they have absolutely no idea how exhausting it will be? Why, oh why do they do it? I'll be castigated here, but I am an older parent myself and although my life is fulfilled and complete and with none of those bone aching regrets unwillingly childless parents must have, I stand here today to say you would have to be mad to set out to become an older parent.
Older parents such as my R and I, and those extremely older women reported in the press, are older as in old enough to be grandparents. We’re Saga’s target readership. We’re the relics in need of a boost but it’s gin sans seng that we reach for. Having babies was designed for younger, sleeker folk. So as we balance Child Trust Funds with faltering Pension Schemes forgive us for telling anyone who'll listen that this ain't a walk in the park.
Reaching un certain age you become resigned to many things. Wrinkles. Being old enough to be that copper who stopped you for doing 39 in a 30 zone’s mother. Failing to get into X Factor auditions.
So why add mastitis, sleepless nights and school runs to this toxic mix? Doesn’t that smack of early onset dementia at an age when most people are perfecting the fox trot? Tackling babies, toddlers and teenagers was never for the faint hearted or arthritic-hipped, but more and more of us middle aged (‘middle-youthed’ is never going to catch on) are going for it.
The journey older parents make may involve careers that needed establishing first, years waited or several marriages endured before finding the right partner, or fertility treatment battled through (and Richard and I have experienced at least two of those). But embarking on second time parenthood still feels, at times, like you’re the only lemming diving off that cliff.
Or the only fish swimming against a tide of young, fit, well paid lovelies. I mean, according to statistics I'm something of a miracle. I conceived my babies naturally (two accidentally) the last two at 38 and 41. Older mothers in general are doubling in number. There were 18,205 births to women aged 40-44 in 2003 (yes, I was one of those!) compared with 9,986 in 1993, though these figures don't specify how many were 'assisted' conceptions. The chances of conceiving naturally in your 40s plummet to around 10%. In your late 40’s, 2-3%. And in your 50’s, dear God, imagine that - it’s an optimistic 1%. The success rates, if you can call them that, for IVF treatments are 33% in your 30’s, descending to 8% in your 40’s.
Disraeli may have declared that there were lies, damned lies and statistics, but statistics can be fun when those clever people crunching the numbers come up with something positive to cheer you up. Once you’ve become an older parent, the exhaustion will hit you like running into a wall. But at least your kids will be clever, according to a report published at the time of writing which concluded that older mothers (provided, presumably, that they come from well off, relaxed, motivated parents) have brighter babies who get more A* GSCE grades than those born to mothers in their twenties. Fine. But frustratingly the studies end there, because they were only started 20 odd years ago. So what I want to know is, how far along the road are these brilliant babies born to doddering parents to becoming the next Alan Sugar?
So despite the warnings of obstetricians and fertility specialists not to defy nature or endanger health by putting off childbirth, some older parents are still able to produce wunderkinder from eggs that should have dropped off the tree and sperm that should long since have hung up their Speedos.

My parenting career was never meant to take this long. My childish dreams of becoming a princess never factored in my knight taking 35 years to show. I certainly didn’t envisage him turning up in a tired blue Saab rather than a prancing white charger. And while I waited, writing poetry and listening to 10cc, the fairy tale was gradually being crushed underfoot by the business of growing up.
But through the messy relationships and honours degrees, the travelling and the jobs, happy ever after always, for me, included not only plenty of earth-shattering sex but cherubic babies too.
I’ve never gone along with the finger-wagging assumption that having children young ‘ruins your life’, especially when that life consists mainly of hanging round bus shelters, sitting endless exams and being confused. What’s so great about being young anyway? Apart from the parties, it’s about smoking too much, dabbling in dubious sex, having no money and being lectured all the time.
The idea of getting the child-rearing over with in one’s physical prime is extremely seductive if properly organised. There you are, having babies when you’ve bags of energy. You’ve all the time in the world to decide what you want to be when you grow up, without being bamboozled. I always fancied being one of those glamorous, assured, youthful mothers (like my own sister, in fact) who have their kids in their early twenties, whose daughters look like their sisters and whose lives really do begin at 40 when they have confidence and maturity and no biological clocks or broodiness standing in the way of a glittering career. And money.
I wanted all of the above, and a committed partner by my side.
Which is why fingers wagged like crazy when I embarked on accidental lone motherhood at the age of 26. My pattern of swimming against the tide and in the process achieving precisely the opposite of what I claimed to want. My peers were all single and childless and this being the Eighties, swilling champagne and yelling into shoe box sized mobile phones. Me? I was getting sacked from a dream job with the late eminent literary agent Giles Gordon. He cited personality clashes but I fear it was more to do with my coming in to work every morning with a raging hangover, sinking several pints of Pils every lunch time, having a hectic love life and heading for a serious drink problem.
This ringing rejection sent me reeling. So I decided to throw off the shackles of my (literally) cloistered Catholic convent and quadrangled Oxford college and go to a place where no-one would know me as someone's daughter, sister or girlfriend. So I answered a newspaper advert, got on an aeroplane with a bunch of unknown Brits and flew off to Cairo to teach English for two years while all around me were becoming stockbrokers.
Amongst the plethora of experiences including running a nursery school in a slum area of the city, being caught up in a curfew when army recruits ran riot, riding in the desert, gasping at the antiquities that make Stonehenge look like so much Lego and learning rudimentary Arabic, I stumbled across the man with bright blue eyes who would become G's father sitting at my dining table one afternoon when I got home from work. I'll call him T.
As is the way when you live overseas, my flatmate had met him on a trip down to Aswan in the far south of Egypt where he was working, cut off from other ex pats, and told him to come and crash when he next came to Cairo. We hit it off instantly and became intensively good friends throughout the two years we were in Egypt and beyond.
When the amitie amoureux became passionel one night, and G was conceived, everything changed. T wasn't ready for fatherhood when unexpectedly thrust upon him and he was out of there. I kept tabs on him even though he was for most of G's first seven years in and around Africa.
In the meantime everyone else around me seemed to think this unexpected pregnancy was not only an embarassment but had slammed shut all the doors.
But scary, tough and lonely though single parenthood might and did prove to be, I saw having this baby more like flinging open the windows. It was going to be what my 9 year old E calls ‘a spectaculier adventure.’

But I was 26, for goodness sake. Not 66! Even then I was described obstetrically as 'elderly prima gravida' which made me laugh, as only the young and beautiful can laugh.
There are faded photos in our downstairs loo reminding Richard and I and our friends that once upon a time fatherhood meant being a thirty-something hunk in ill-advised swimming trunks, dandling a pig-tailed three year old who is now a married woman who trains and rides showjumpers and drives a 4 x 4. Motherhood was a pre-Raphaelite nymph reclining in the daffodils with a dimpled cherub who has a beard now and gets summer jobs at Glastonbury.
The long and winding road that led us to older parenthood came to an abrupt dead end when, six months after we first met, I took my eye off the ball, failed to pounce, and R married someone else. I was that socially perfect child-bearing age of 29, and R was a virile 42. I was a single mother. He was divorced and the original edible bachelor. I knew he'd be a terrific father but it was another 8 wasted years before we got together.
And in the migraine-inducing situations stakes, I can go a whole lot better than Bridget Jones. Because as well as having to listen to him at work banging on about this new woman every morning when they’d been on a date, I went like a fool to the wedding and instead of having a gorgeousness attack and proclaiming in the church that it should have been me, I spent the day lurking miserably in the shadows as he strode about looking handsome and making speeches. Then I watched the putative father of my children climbing into a white helicopter to fly off on honeymoon with another woman.
Thereafter he was known in my family as ‘the one that got away’.
Not long after that I took my son and decamped to London, thinking I'd find happiness. But the crock at the end of the rainbow turned out to be full of something other than gold. Living in London as a carefree singleton was one thing. Going back to London as an impoverished single mother was a disaster. It was like pressing your nose up against a window, never invited to come in. Everyone had moved on. They all earned ridiculous money, for one thing, had bigger houses and flats, flashier cars. Funnily enough they hadn’t moved on in the baby stakes, so on a whim they could be in a cocktail bar in the City, or Dublin or Paris or Positano. So even if I could afford to join in the shenanigans and even let my hair down, every move I made was always hedged about by the frantic search for a babysitter.
Who materialised in the shape of G’s father, the reconciliation with whom was one of the three most positive things to come out of our three years in London. His cautious forays into his son’s life started with the historic day when G, with me right behind him, strolled up to the stranger waiting on our doorstep and cheerfully said ‘Hi there’. I watched them walk off, both with the same loping stride, to spend their first afternoon together in Holland Park. Soon his dad was taking him off for full-on weekend visits, then holidays, so for the first time in seven years G had his own father to add to the list of people who loved him – and I no longer felt like a lone parent.
The second positive thing to come out of London was the soar in property prices, so that even my two room garret in Earls Court (or love nest atelier, as I preferred to think of it) which juddered regularly to the dawn rhythms of the District Line, ended up supplying the deposit for Cloud Nine, as R and I soppily called our first home together).
And of course the third positive outcome was my first date with R. Six years after we first met, he was free. And so was I. It took one phone call out of the blue, one slap-up dinner at his namesake restaurant Riccardo’s in the Old Brompton Road, one tipsy nocturnal ascent of the 87 stairs to my love nest for ‘coffee’, and we were inseparable. I wasn’t going to lose him twice. After kissing all those frogs, and I don’t care how corny this sounds, I’d found my prince at last.
The joys of the older man. Let me count the ways. He didn’t, even after two failed marriages, bleat on about commitment phobia. He wasn’t put off by my baggage because he had his own, God knows, and anyway he thought I was a goddess, warts and all. He had come through years of heartbreak being denied access to his own child but was happy to take care of mine. He was going to stick around to be a father to our children. He phoned when he said he would. He didn’t have the kind of irresponsible haircut which tells you a mile off that this one is a fuck-wit with all the moral rectitude of Russell Brand. He didn’t turn up late for dates, even though I only had to cross Earl’s Court Road to get to the rendezvous and he had to drive the length of the M3. He always booked a table. He was, and is, a true gentleman.
Dithering is a sin. Bad enough when you’re young, but when you’re older, it’s reckless. You don’t hang about. You haven't got time. You can’t be arsed with games.
And you’re honest. Richard’s first comment about babies once we were courting was to inform me (like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman repeating ‘I’m an excellent driver’) that he had extremely superior sperm. Too much information, perhaps? Well, he was privy to this fact thanks to years of unsuccessful IVF treatment during his first marriage when he’d actually seen said sperm doing the front crawl under a microscope and it/they were decreed to be top quality. You may think this is all a bit wildlife documentary, but as mating calls go it was, for this broad at least, a winner.
Which is why I was 38 (getting older by the minute) and six months gone when I married him.