The first blog I ever started reading was A Little Pregnant back in 2004. A friend sent me the link and I found the blog additively hilarious and for some reason, it hit me close to home.
I don’t know why I read infertility blogs, or why I identify with people who are infertile. For some reason, on some level, I counted myself as possibly being among them.
All my life, growing up, my mother would apologize to me that she couldn’t give me brothers and sisters. My birth date is a good eight years after my parents’ wedding day, and while I know they didn’t start trying right away, they did tell me that they had to seek professional help to conceive me. My mother had me the day before she turned 33, and she never produced another child. I know, without ever being explicitly told, that my mother meant to have multiple children. She didn’t think it was healthy for me to grow up without siblings.
They’ve never told me why they had trouble conceiving me. Was it my Dad? My Mum? All I know is, I was concerned that I might have fertility issues too. I grew up knowing that some babies have to be really worked for.
Today, Julie made a post about “Preservation IVF”.
Essentially, some cock-sure 30 year old has decided to have IVF and store the embryos so that she can have kids whenever she wants in the future, instead of feeling the time crunch. First of all, I don’t understand – producing eggs is not the only aspect of pregnancy. You have to be able to carry those embryos. You can’t stick ’em in a 50 year old and expect them to implant. Menopause is still a barrier, frozen babies or no.
But even if she could do that successfully, is it wise? It made me think of a rant I heard when I announced my pregnancy at work.
“I’m so glad you’re having kids young!” burbled a permanently youthful volunteer who doesn’t seem old enough to be a grandmother already. “I really don’t like all these people who wait until they’re forty to have kids. Then they discover that they can’t get pregnant any more, they panic, adopt, and then they find out that they are so set in their ways that they don’t like parenting. The kids exhaust them and disrupt their lives. The generation gap is so wide that it gets in the way of having fun. You need to have kids when you’re young, and flexible. There’s a reason why women are fertile at 20, and not 40.”
I know she was thinking of some of my coworkers, who are in their forties and adopted their children after battles with infertility. While they love their kids, they don’t seem to enjoy their company. One told me that she dreads Friday and looks forward to Monday, when the kids are in school. It made me sad to hear that. I remember one day when I was little, there was a snow day and my mother and I danced with joy at getting to spend an unexpected day off together. That’s how it should be.
Maybe this volunteer had a point.
I know that I’ll find my kids exhausting at times, and that there will be moments when I will rejoice in being free of them for a bit. But I certainly can’t imagine that waiting until I am older would make things easier in that department. I won’t have more energy, more patience, or more flexibility when I am forty. Then again, maybe some people just enjoy their children more, and age has nothing to do with it.
Is it smart to hold off having kids, or are women waiting too long? This doctor thinks we are. He says that women need to be convinced that earlier is better. If you do have an actual medical condition like PCOS or endometriosis that reduces your fertility, starting young gives you that many more rounds of IVF. If you are healthy and fertile, and assume that this gives you the gift of time, you may discover one day that the time is gone.
Then again, we’ve been told that you should wait for your career to be well established, your finances to be stable. Babies are expensive, even in Canada where medical care is free. Nor do I like it when I see people who have children thoughtlessly, without realizing how much their lives will change or how much effort is going to be involved. That’s sad, too.
Is there a balance between job/money and youth/energy? Where do we find that balance?
Are babies being over thought, or is financial stability worth the risk of infertility?
Personally, I think emotional maturity is more important than youth and a good financial position (which may change beyond one’s control). But 30 seems like a nice round number, so I’ll go with that. In the words of The Specials:
“Keep a generation gap / Try wearing a cap!”
Easy for you to say, you’re a man! :-p
P.S. “UnwarranTed” = awesome
Apparently, men have a biological clock too…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17430422
It makes sense that there would be some decrease in fertility, but since Picasso fathered children well into his seventies, it would seem to be less cut and dry.
Then again, I’ve heard multiple men measure their remaining youth by how many Olympic games are left before they could become too old to qualify…
i was told at age 26 to “start thinking about having kids if i wanted them”. that was just not an option at the time.
not because i hadn’t finished college and was a mere teacher’s assistant with crap pay.
not because i still lived at home with my dad.
not because i didn’t want it enough.
i didn’t have my babies then because i didn’t want to have babies with the man i called my boyfriend for 7 years. endometriosis made me realize what he couldn’t and what he hadn’t given to me, and that we were heading nowhere.
of course having children earlier is easier physically. that is the way of nature. i had moms of kids in my preschool class who had 2 or 3 babies before they were 20 years old. is this the ideal situation? not for most. not for them, certainly. for the most part they lived as single parents, and for the most part they lived in poverty, if they did not have an older relative’s help. these are the parents who dread friday afternoon and live for monday morning. not the woman who has battled infertility and lost, only to adopt. not from my experience, anyway.
is being a parent easier at 20 than 40? i don’t know, but i do know that all people are different. of course you are older at 40, so there’s that. but there has to be a certain wisdom that comes with those years. i don’t think you can say one or the other is better or worse.
for me, i wanted my babies to have the luxury of a family that loves them, not a single mom who had them because she had to, against a ticking clock. someone who had to struggle to give them a good life. i don’t think these things can be rushed. and i certainly don’t believe the examples you gave of adoptive parents are the norm. if i can’t have children naturally because i waited until i had the love of my life by my said, well then i will just do what i need to do to grow our family. and the negativity of others will not figure into what i do, for i simply do not care what negative people have to say. they are usually wrong, and speak from a place of frustration or hate. i have no place for this in my life.
and i will be grateful for whatever life brings me, as it is my life, after all. i do not wish to have children because i am ‘supposed’ to or because my family so desperately wants them (they do). i want to have children with my beautiful husband, to pass on the love and laughter of our marriage and our life together.
* im 32, almost 33 now
*the love of my life by my *side*
I know, I started feeling the “baby urge” at 16 but obviously it would not have been wise to start listening to it then!
For me, the limit was marriage. While my husband and I didn’t start trying right after marriage, we both knew that if a pregnancy happened, it would be a happy thing even if unplanned. If I hadn’t gotten married until 32, I would have waited til then to have kids.
For you, too, your situation is complicated by endometriosis. Having kids earlier may not have even been an option for you – you may not have conceived naturally at 23 either – and IVF isn’t cheap.
How do you feel, as someone who struggles with infertility, when you meet someone who has become infertile simply by the process of time, because they kept saying “maybe next year”? Because those are the people who are really the subject of this discussion. I think we all know people who COULD have kids, but feel so frightened of the finances of having children that they keep putting it off, because our society bombards us with “KIDS COST MONEY AND SMART PEOPLE WAIT”. Does it bother you to see someone who could have had kids naturally, but simply chose to wait and travel the world until they were 38, and then were heartbroken to discover that they could no longer conceive? Do you feel that our culture puts too much pressure on us to wait, and doesn’t make it clear enough to us that waiting may result in our losing our chance?
I feel like I might be having my kids too young. I’m not as financially stable as I would like to be, and my career recently fell apart. By Western culture’s standards, I’m foolish to be pregnant at this stage. But by biological standards, I’m moving into the upper limits. It seems like a strange dichotomy.
I have no personal opinion on the matter. As a child of infertility, but not someone who has struggled with it herself, I feel like a member of both camps, and of neither. Keep in mind that my own mother probably tried to have a child young, but couldn’t. So I KNOW youth is still no guarantee.
you make it seem like everyone has children exactly when they plan to and if you don’t have them young its because you planned it that way.. not the case. also that cocksure 30 year old was very smart in having her eggs stored at 30 as your eggs deteriorate in both number and quality as you get older and you can actually stick them in a 50 year old uterus who has gone through menopause and expect them to implant. ivf sends you into a mini menopause using drugs at the start of a stim cycle and then drives the whole thing with other drugs. whether this is right or not is a whole other discussion and not one i am keen to get into as ivf and ethics is a very complex and personal issue for each person doing it. as far as age goes that has to be completely individual as well , you either give up your youth and have kids and wait till your free to make up for lost time or, you live your life to the fullest then settle down to have your kids, or you have a plan for life and in one or two incidents it all goes out the window so you do whatever it takes to try to get the life you always wanted.
as far as the young and very suburban and ignorant volunteer at your work who said ” there is a reason why women are fertile at 20 and not at 40″ she needs to become a bit more educated about female fertility, women are fertile when they are 40.
Hey, hey, keep in mind that I am proposing no personal opinion. I held off having kids too. I’m 28, not 18, and according to fertility experts, that’s the beginning of the end… and yet, in my mind, I am young to be having kids! Why does my culture and my body live off of such different time tables?
I know less about IVF than people who have been through it, but Julie at A Little Pregnant knows tons and she and most of her commenters do seem to think this woman IS being ridiculously overconfident, so I’m inclined to believe them. I’m glad IVF exists, because I believe that to want children and be denied them is a truly torturous feeling, and what is Western medicine for if it can’t even give us children? But, as is pointed out in that article, should women be relying on it? Are women being led into a state of false hope, thinking that they can conceive at almost any age, only to discover with heartbreak that they were mislead?
This volunteer (who is well into her fifties) didn’t judge people who couldn’t have kids earlier because of life situation etc (she certainly wasn’t proposing that all 18 year olds get knocked up out of wedlock and in the middle of their schooling), but she said it made her sad to see people who thought that they could put it off and still have biological children at the end of it – if you are married, settled, and you want to have kids, is it wise to postpone, knowing that you are taking the risk of heartbreak in the end? And anyone with fertility problems will tell me that it *is* heartbreaking.
Are women putting it off thinking that they are being smart, when in fact they are walking into misery? Why does our culture tell women that we should wait until we are well settled, financially stable, and well into our careers, when our bodies disagree?
Women can be fertile at 40, but as the doctor in that article says, fertility at 40 can not be counted on. So why are we being led to believe that it can?
And here I thought I was the only one who worried about these things. 🙂
I have endometriosis. It’s mild to moderate, but because of that known correlation between the condition and infertility, I was very afraid of having problems conceiving. My mom also has it and it took her about eight months to get pregnant with both me and my sister, so that concerned me too. She was a lot younger than me. Between my questionable fertility and my advancing age (not THAT bad, but I did turn 30 the year Liam was born), I was worried it might be, at the least, a long process. And then in our very first month of trying, I had a chemical pregnancy, a very early miscarriage. This worried me even more, so I approached the subject as I do many other things: tons of research and (over-)planning. I charted. I took herbal and vitamin supplements. I checked for my physical fertility signs. Etc., etc. I just wanted to give us the best chances possible. In the end, it only took two more months and, interestingly, went the EXACT same way for #2, right down to the early miscarriage!
In other words, I had nothing to worry about, most likely. Or maybe all those things really did make a difference. Who knows? But I’m glad to know I’m not the only one.
I envy men and their interminable biological clock.
There’s a lot of discussion about people *choosing* to have babies later, and some do, but choice is always conditioned by external factors. Among the people I know the main factors are: a lot of my friends are academics, and an academic career doesn’t even really start until your late twenties; housing is so expensive here that you can’t afford space for children until your career is well under way. Among my peer group of academics I have had children unusually young (Hugh was born the year I turned thirty – I realise that’s not young by biological standards): I was lucky enough to get a permanent job early, and then I didn’t prudently wait to build up a strong publication profile, a source of much anxiety and pressure for me now, or to own a house. I too was worried about my fertility, not because of any family history but just because my hormones seem to be a bit wonky (irregular periods, that sort of thing).
I agree that having children at forty has disadvantages. My grandmother was thirty-eight when she had my mother. As a result, I hardly knew her: she died when I was ten. On the other hand, I have friends who’ve had children around that age and they are doing great. I’m reluctant to make a blanket judgement about this: but I’m glad we went for it (comparatively) early.
My Dad was 45 when I was born. He was a great father, but it certainly did lead to a different dynamic growing up. He wasn’t a toss-a-ball-in-the-yard kind of Dad. More of a dandle-you-on-his-knee kind of father. My mother was the one who did the chasing around.
Now he is well into his seventies, and his older brother has already died of cancer. I think one of the pressures I experienced to have kids younger (and 28 isn’t *that* young) was to make sure my children knew their grandfather…
I just turned 39 and just last week did IVF with some very promising embryos. I can say without a doubt that parenting at this age will be 100% better for me and the child than it would have been ten years ago. I am now financially independent, married to a fantastic man who will be a great dad, and living in a nice home in a great neighborhood. More important, I am much more patient, loving, wise, and ready to focus on someone else’s needs than I was in my 20s when I was just trying to get through grad school while keeping a roof over my head and figure out who I was and where I belonged. I am ready!
I know I’ll have less energy than I would have but I eat healthy, exercise religiously, and look a lot younger than I am. I don’t think that my child will ever need to be embarassed by having an “old mom”. I think it’s all a matter of the people involved.
My mom had me at 33 and she was never an “old mom”. However, my Dad at 45 was definitely an “old Dad”. I remember a friend coming over to my house and seeing the tall, silver haired man weeding in our garden and saying “That’s your Dad?? He’s a geezer!!”
My father was the same age as some of my friends’ grandfathers.
Did it embarrass me? No. I loved my father. I knew he was older than most Dads, and it struck me as strange, but I wasn’t ashamed of him.
I don’t think he’s sorry that he had me at this age – better late than never, right? But I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t wish that he could have had children earlier. I wonder what it was like for him, watching his brothers and sisters have grandchildren while his four year old begged him to play “fairies” with him. His brother, now passed away, would be a great grandfather, yet my father isn’t even a grandfather yet.
To his credit, he has never translated it to pressure on me. He has never said “I hope I see your children before I die”. He has never asked me when I would have kids. He was pleased about the pregnancy, though, and I can’t wait for him to meet his grandson. I want my children to know him, and he’s already in his seventies…
When I was 22, a friend of mine had the first of her four children (all of whom were born before she turned 30), and her reason was that by starting early she guaranteed that they’d all be out of the house before she turned 50. That reasoning always seemed really odd to me – if the goal is to have your children out of the house, why not just … not have them?
I don’t think it really makes sense to talk about the age at which one has children as if it were entirely a matter of individual choice. The average age at which one has a first child has been rising steadily, and there are a lot of cultural factors that influence that. Many people are not in a financial position to support a family until much later in their lives, so whatever they might want or choose, there are larger economic realities that prevail.
I agree. I guess it comes down to… if a couple wants to have kids “some day”, and they have a place to live, and finances, are they wise to think they can put it off?
The doctor in that article seemed to think that women are being led to believe that they can postpone parenthood almost indefinitely, and wait until 40 because medical science might be able to “save” them. He felt that it should be made more clear to women that if they want kids and find themselves in a position to have them, sooner is better.
I definitely feel that that is not made clear in our society. We are given a lot of reasons to put it off, and what with aging movie starts pumping out twins left and right, women are seeing age as less and less of a barrier. But maybe women should be reminded occasionally that Western medicine or on, our bodies have a shelf life…
I think it’s a very individual decision. We got married and waited four years to try for kids. Wish I’d tried a bit sooner, because it took a year and a half to conceive. The extreme cases are the ones that make me scratch my head–the women in their 50’s and 60’s having babies through IVF. Just saw a news story about women in India finally having the children they never could, but they’re old enough to be grandparents. They were thought of as less-than-worthy due to their previously childless status. Seems like a bad reason to bring a life into the world. I worry for the child–he won’t have parents for very long. The older women have to receive all kinds of shots and meds throughout the pregnancy to enable the body to maintain the pregnancy. At that point it just seems so unnatural.
I agree, and yet I can’t really blame them. The urge to bear your own genetic child can be so strong…
hmm you raise somme interesting questions, and though i do love julie’s writing, i can’t say i blame this girl for banking her eggs. i don’t like her blase’ attitude, but i sure as hell wish i had banked my eggs. my lovely 26 year old eggs. 😦
everything for me is seen through the veil of infertility, so it’s hard to be unbiased about these issues.
you bring up the fact that i may not have been able to conceive around the time i found out about my endo ~ at 26 years old, i had already been with my boyfriend 7 years and we had NEVER used protection. and i was never a day late. so id be willing to bet that i was infertile (semi-fertile?) even then.
i feel that people have to live their own lives, regardless of their fertility status and grow in their own way. im sure some people put it off thinking that they will get around to it soon enough. but that’s the thing with this life, it bites you in the ass when you aren’t looking. you turn around and all those years are gone.
just a little more about my personal story, with most doctors and insurance plans here in the US, a woman has to try 3 IUIs before she can move on to IVF. we weren’t covered for IVF, and even though my tube was twisted, it was still patent at that time. though with an ovary below it, i never saw how it was supposed to work, but i let two differennt doctors talk me into IUI anyway. i DO wish i had not done those (one was torture on my cervix and i always wonder if there was injury…) and begged, borrowed or stolen the money to do IVF sooner.
“that’s the thing with this life, it bites you in the ass when you aren’t looking. you turn around and all those years are gone.”
Amen.
I don’t blame this woman for banking her eggs, but I do resent her blause attitude. Did you read her website? I was offended.
I don’t think that banking your eggs gives you an extended fertility shelf life and I think convincing women that they can buy themselves time is wrong. This woman might be in for a massive let-down some day, when she realizes that only two blastocysts survived being thawed, and then neither implants, and now she’s 40…
I don’t have many complaints about the Canadian medical system, but I do wish IVF were covered. Britain covers three cycles for women between 23 and 39, and is considering removing those restrictions…
what i like about our system is there is no waiting period. if you have the money/coverage, you can start right in rather than being put on a list and having to wait months, as i have seen with friends in england and france.
i didn’t look at her website, she seemed like a dick.
We don’t have waiting periods for a lot of stuff (for example, emergency surgeries have no wait time), but I have no idea what it’s like for uncovered things, like IVF.
The oldest mother I know was 48 when her child was born. She is 52 now, and is as fit and youthful as many 25-year-olds… only a lot wiser. Both she and her 57-year-old husband are doing brilliantly, they have financial stability, a nice house in a nice area of town, nice vacations, nice everything… and her child is thriving.
However, in ten years, when their daughter is still a young teen, they’ll be 62 and 67, and as my 72-year-old mother says, “After 60, there are no guarantees.” Well, there never are, really: any one of us could be hit by a truck on the way home from work, and that’s that. But what she means is that you can’t trust that your health in the way you can (reasonably, statistically) when you’re in your 20’s and 30’s.
She has a point. All parents-by-choice start out with the yearning to “have a BABY”, but very few of us really ‘get’ that we’re producing HUMAN BEINGS that are going to be around for the next several decades, and who will be NEEDING us for a solid twenty years.
I don’t think it’s such a tragedy that this woman may well not live to see her grandchildren, but that she and her husband could be frail elderlies, or perhaps even gone by the time their child graduates high school? That’s a problem. They may not, of course. There are lots of healthy 70-year-olds out there. But they could. Suddenly, that ‘sandwich generation’, the adults caring for both aging parents and children, has shifted down half a generation, and you have a university student with failing parents… and with little other family to support her. That’s a heck of a burden.
So I guess I lean toward having your children earlier, though I see anything up to late thirties as ‘earlier’… so maybe I don’t!
I do take issue with your statement that you won’t be any more patient at 40 than you are now. I am a LOT more patient now than I was in my twenties. Now, as it happened my children didn’t make me struggle with impatience a lot. I reserved it for different sorts of annoyances, but can you get more patient as you age? Absolutely.
My Dad had a mild stroke the same year I graduated university. I’m grateful that he’s still around…
I was 42 when my kid was born, because I didn’t realize it was going to be a problem to get pregnant. I feel younger than a lot of younger parents I know – more relaxed, less uptight. It is what it is.
Youth at heart – the most important thing.
All of this. Exactly.
I feel like people sorta dogged you for picking on older moms. But your point is that, increasingly in our culture, there is almost pressure to wait until the “magic ideal time” to have children, which usually only comes once one is scraping the bottom of your fertility barrel. Sometimes taking the chance when you are younger IS the “magic ideal time.”
I think waiting for a happy marriage and financial stability is awesome, whether that means you are 25 or 45.
And yes, with DH’s parents reaching their 70s, I am definitely feeling the need to procreate before they leave this world. They had major fertility issues and I know they always wanted more kids. I want them to experience a house full of grandkids, even if they never got a house full of kids themselves.
Yes, that’s how I feel about my parents. My mother always regretted that she couldn’t have more children.
There’s also the retirement factor. PH is always saying that he wants the kids out of the how by the time he retires so he can SLEEP :-p