Are we better off waiting to be older parents?
Philip Ferreira was 54 and Natalie Grunberg-Ferreira was 41 when Arieh, now a year old, was born. Photo: Jimmy Jeong
A friend knew what they were going through and offered to donate her eggs. Rob’s sperm and the donated eggs added up to five embryos, one of which was transferred to Kristina, who was by that point 45. She got pregnant, and 10 years after that discussion in Fiji, Kristina gave birth to her daughter, Kaitlyn. “A perfect baby. Slept through the night right away,” she says.
She did. Her daughter Sam arrived in June 2017, a few weeks before Kristina’s 51st birthday. Kristina’s stomach is still distended from torn abdominal muscles. She’s bone-tired, shuttling two kids, ages six and two, between activities and child care while working three days a week. The $50,000 cost of IVF on their line of credit means she and her husband are indefinitely postponing the home they wanted to build. “I wouldn’t recommend having a kid at 50,” she says.
For women who seize the opportunity afforded them by this moment in history and become later-life mothers, the challenges are many, including the aforementioned exhaustion and playground side-eye . But older mothers also project a very specific kind of joy. Elizabeth waited to have a kid because her mother always told her and her sisters: Fly. Have a life. Don’t rush. “It was never my intention to find somebody, get married and have a baby,” she says. “That was just never on the forefront for me. It was, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with my life, for me.’”
When Graham was 18 months old, Elizabeth and Mark split. She moved to Toronto and started over with a baby. So her experience of older motherhood is inseparable from her experience of, which is also on the rise: 19 percent of Canadian children who are newborn to age 14 live primarily with a single parent, and 80 percent of those kids live with their mothers.
Elizabeth brings her folding chair to every single one of Graham’s baseball games and gets very excited when he hits a home run. “Maybe too excited,” she admits. But she, and her parenting style is pretty relaxed, which may be an older parent thing, too. “I just see the bigger picture. ‘This, too, shall pass’ is my favourite expression.” She makes healthy lunches. She enlists a French tutor.
But, of course, no matter how young one behaves, biology is a fact and fertility is limited. The problem for women is that the optimal time to reproduce collides with the optimal time to get educated and. Considering the realities of having kids today, delaying parenthood is a pragmatic move. Political bluster about universal child care tends to disappear after elections, and in overpriced cities and uncertain economies, the cost of raising a kid requires economic stability.
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