Mom, 52, wants more kids
My friend Susan is showing me the baby’s room with its wood crib and changing table and, in the closet, tiny blue sweaters and mint-green blankets folded in soft stacks like a summer layer cake.
Her son is 13 months old, blond, green-eyed, stunning. He’s holding tight to one of Susan’s fingers, lurching in the halting gait of an almost-ready-to-walk baby, dropping each foot as if he’s stepping off an escalator. Already she has filled albums with his photos.
Susan is a first-time mother. She is 52.
And she might be pregnant again.
She will find out Friday if the donor egg, inseminated by her 61-year-old husband and implanted last week, has taken. They want their son to have a sibling, in part because of their ages.
“We vowed from the start we’d have two,’ Susan says. “They’d have each other to go through life because we might not be around as long as some other parents.”
Susan and her husband requested their real names not be used to preserve their privacy. They are proud of their new family, but they know their decision is not embraced by everyone. Susan listened one day as callers to a local radio show spewed disbelief and disgust over the New York motivational speaker who gave birth to twins in November at the age of 56.
When science makes possible what nature never imagined, people get a little nervous. They wonder where it will all end: Cloning? There is a sense of hubris in outfoxing nature. Such brazenness, the critics say, surely exacts a price, and the price to midlife mothers — at least in the public-opinion arena — is a presumption of selfishness.
Men have always had the option of waiting until their careers had reached their peaks before taking on parenthood, raising few eyebrows as they began second and third families. Now that technology gives women the same flexibility and opportunity, suddenly children must have parents who can snowboard and live long enough to attend their grandchildren’s Little League games.
Susan felt such judgment even from a few friends. But seven close friends she has had since her high school days threw her a baby shower. Two of the friends are grandmothers.
Susan had wanted children for years, but her ex-husband didn’t. When her marriage fell apart several years ago, in part because of her desire to start a family, she had lunch one day with a former boyfriend who had never married. He was 58 at the time and, after a long career in the media, wanted to raise a family. The spark between the two re-ignited.
After one fertility clinic turned her away because of her age, Susan found herself in the office of Dr. Richard Chetkowski, medical director of the Alta Bates In Vitro Fertilization Program in Berkeley, Calif. The Alta Bates ethics committee had decided years back it would not impose an age limit.
Chetkowski says he considers every situation separately. He recently counseled against pregnancy for a woman whose medical evaluation uncovered heart disease. But for healthy middle-aged women, he believes the decision is theirs alone.
Susan and her husband are at points in their lives and careers, as many middle-aged people are, when they have the time and the money to devote themselves to whatever pursuits they choose. Their pursuit happens to be raising a family.
We live in a time when technology can turn what we know upside down. But Susan’s story isn’t about how science changes everything. It is about the things that stay the same: That most people have an innate desire to have children. That a good parent is one who loves and nurtures, teaches and listens. And that no matter what your age or circumstance, when that baby stares up at you for the first time with those trusting eyes, you are never truly ready.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].