December 2007

PostingA funny old year

Some highlights - and some not-so-good bits - from 2007:

January - back to work for first time since having Beanie. It's like returning from exile in a foreign country. Painful to be parted from her. In more ways than one. Am still breastfeeding so by mid-morning my boobs are so hard I have to squirt out milk by hand in the loo to relieve the pain. My co-workers all seem young, slim and trendy. They're a nice crowd, but I bet none of them have ever even seen the structural monstrosity that is a nursing bra. It's hard to be hip when you're lactating. Am struggling to lose post-pregnancy weight.

February - builders rip our flat apart to investigate for dry rot.  Fitted carpets (laid only a year earlier) are taken up, architraves ripped off the window recesses.There isn't any rot, as it turns out, but in darker moments I sometimes think there might as well have been, with all the mess, upheaval and expense.

March - pregnant again, after only the first month of trying. It happens so easily, the pregnancy feels unreal from the outset. Va-vay and I - both exhausted from last year's onslaught - are ambivalent. An air of unbelievability hangs over the pregnancy's entire (short) duration. I'm not sick, tired or dizzy. At the time, this seems a good thing.

Start this blog, following a chance encounter with a writer at an Edinburgh City of Literature evening. Unsure where it will take me.

April -  Beanie's first birthday and our second wedding anniversary. Beanie walking.  Reluctantly, I wind down breastfeeding, thinking I should concentrate resources on the new baby.

May - start bleeding, losing bright red blood. When we go for a scan the next day, the monitor shows the baby has no heartbeat and probably died several weeks previously. People quote statistics at me, telling me 'how common' it is. Despite my earlier ambivalence about the pregnancy, am wretched at losing it. Feel a fool as well.

June - Va-vay goes on reproductive strike. He wants a break over the summer from trying for a child. I am now desperate for another baby. Everywhere I look I see prams, babies and smiling mothers. Despite the statistics, I can't imagine any of them ever having a miscarriage. I interrogate friends on whether they're pregnant, dreading them saying yes. It isn't healthy, but I can't help it.

July - Counselling helps me start to come to terms with the loss - and I manage to agree to wait before trying again.

August - Edinburgh International Book Festival. Hear Ian McEwan, Benedict Allen, Colin Thubron, Janice Galloway, Kate Mosse, Simon Armitage, Antonia Swinson, Esther Freud and Kitty Aldridge speak. This is fun. Realise I haven't enjoyed going out and about like this since before I was pregnant with Beanie.

September -  Scott Pack of The Friday Project signs me up to write a handbook for women who become mums 'fashionably late'. Looks like this blogging business is going somewhere after all.

October - holiday in France. Happy days.



November - turn forty. The event I've been dreading all year. Worse in the anticipation than the deed. A slap-up lunch with Va-vay eases the pain. I felt like this when I turned thirty - now I can't understand what the fuss was about.

December - difficult start to the month, with what would have been my due date. But good news follows. Can't say too much at the moment, but will keep you posted in 2008.

Posted 31 December 2007 11:25 | Number of comments: 13 | Comments

Books Fashionably Late - the book Miscarriage Work

PostingTake to the hills

ChristmasandHarlaw2007061_Small.JPG Edinburgh residents reading this will know about the beauty of the Pentland Hills that surround the city to the south, guarding it in a semi-circle of heather, hill, reservoir and woodland that gives views stretching over the town to the sea beyond. It is easy to forget Edinburgh is a coastal town, coming to a halt at the water's edge, perhaps because the weather does so little to encourage a trip to the seaside. Yet out on the hills, the city looks like an island or peninsula, lapped by water.

Before we bought a car earlier this year, we had limited means of getting out to the hills. On one occasion we resorted to taking a taxi to the start of a walk, dressed in walking boots, fleeces and gaiters (buses didn't go there). It reminded me of a journalist who boasted he had to take a taxi to the front line of a war somewhere in Africa. I forget where exactly. Hope he was still able to claim on expenses.

Now we have the noble beast, we drove out to Harlaw Reservoir under our own steam. I still find driving stressful, almost a year after buying the car, but there doesn't seem much alternative if we're to go anywhere interesting.

We waited inside the car until all the dogs barking and milling about the carpark had moved on. I'm useless with dogs. Beanie used to love them; now I fear I've passed my phobias onto her. She gets nervous too.

Beanie travelled in a backpack carried by her father. We managed a full circuit of the reservoir, overseen by the charred hulk of Black Hill (501m), whose blackened slopes are the result of 'muirburn'.

We spotted greylag and pink-footed geese, that roost in the Pentlands in winter-time (living in Greenland the rest of the year, greylag geese see Edinburgh as the equivalent of a winter holiday in the Caribbean or Florida), sheep, horses and some cows. Beanie greeted them all, except the geese, with the word: 'bear'.

On our return to the car we realised we'd lost one of Beanie's shoes somewhere on our walk. If anyone reading this spots a girl's shoe (size 4.5) out by Harlaw reservoir, please drop me a line.

Posted 30 December 2007 22:52 | Number of comments: 0 | Comments

Activities Car Daughter Out and about

PostingBleeping annoying

One of my Christmas presents this year was something called a Keyfinder, which Santa* admitted s/he found in the pages of the Radio Times. It could have been worse. I could have got nose hair clippers.

"I thought it might help you get out the house faster," Santa said in a helpful tone.

"I'm not slow. I have to get Beanie ready as well, you know."

"Yes, of course," Santa replied. With lowered eyes.

When I ripped off the wrapping paper and clapped eyes on the Keyfinder, I couldn't believe I'd gone this far through life without one, it seemed so simple, so ingenious, so.... life-changing.

I attached the Keyfinder as instructed to my errant keys. I whistled, the Keyfinder lit up and bleeped at me to reveal its whereabouts. In my hands. Okay, but, you know, I could see the principle and glimpsed in it the potential for a new me, a woman able to leave home in less than 40 minutes, someone in control of her destiny, with smooth hair.

As we sat there by the Christmas tree, I already began to think about buying other Keyfinders for glasses, hairbrush and hat. Perhaps for Beanie's shoes. Each of them.

Unfortunately, only four days after Christmas, all we hear is bleep, bleep, bleep. The 'device' bleeps when Beanie protests as I remove a carving knife from reach. It bleeps when she shouts for more rice cakes. It bleeps when she finds me slow in reaching more fromage frais from the fridge. It bleeps when we sing. It bleeps as we pretend to be crocodiles. It bleeps as she bangs her beaker on the table and grins at me. It bleeps as I remove the beaker. It bleeps when we laugh. Its bleeping shadows me, reproving me, shaming me into hushed whispers.

In a rare quiet moment, unpunctuated by bleeping, I peruse the instructions. They describe the Keyfinder as an 'invaluable little companion".  I grimace. "Try whistling at different pitches until your Keyfinder responds. NOTE: on occasion other sounds such as music, television or other background noises may have the same pitch as your whistling and may activate your Keyfinder. This should be considered NORMAL."

Va-vay has inserted the bleeping (yes, I can say that under the circumstances) batteries so efficiently I cannot prise them out. Though I break a fingernail trying. The keyfinder: not so much keyfinder, more sonic swearbox.

But then again, perhaps that is what Santa* had in mind all along.

* a character who has also featured in this blog under another name, (not Va-vay) but I can't say any more. And, just for the record, 'Santa' did do us proud with the fitted sheets we wanted.... 

Posted 29 December 2007 20:04 | Number of comments: 8 | Comments

Home Kit

PostingHalle Berry: older mum-to-be

images_Small.jpg It's official: being an 'older' mum is glamorous. Halle Berry, the Oscar-winning actress famous for roles in Catwoman, Monster's Ball and X Men, is pregnant for the first time at 41. Like many of the (non-celebrity) women I've interviewed for research into my book for 'older' mums, Berry appears to have delayed motherhood thanks to difficulty in finding the right partner. Hard to understand when you think how beautiful she is, but makes more sense once you know that her father abandoned her when she was four, the first in what turned out to be a string of abusive and broken relationships. However, it seems from a recent interview that Berry has finally overcome some of her old demons to embark on pregnancy. "I've wanted this for so long and I feel happier than I've ever felt before in my entire life," Berry told the Telegraph in Halle Berry: me and motherhood. Father-to-be is Canadian model Gabriel Aubry, whom she met two years ago filming a Versace ad. She told the Telegraph she credits a recent role as a widowed mother with helping her make the leap into motherhood. "I knew from playing a mother [in this movie] and having two adorable, smart children around me all the time that I was meant to be a mother. It's no mystery that right after we finished the movie it manifested itself in my life because I think I subconsciously knew 'Yes, I can do this, I'm really, really ready.'"

Posted 27 December 2007 18:16 | Number of comments: 4 | Comments

PostingChristmas time

Pippy060_Small.JPGMerry Christmas to all of you. Here's a picture of Beanie and our tree to wish readers peace and plenty over the Christmas break. Va-vay's looking forward to a festive nut roast (whatever does it) for his lunch tomorrow. Beanie will no doubt be dining on her staple fromage frais and rice cakes. While I'll be left to uphold tradition on my own with a turkey dinner. Have a great time, everyone. 

Posted 24 December 2007 18:05 | Number of comments: 4 | Comments

PostingRing and a prayer

navidad11_Small.jpg Just before the sky darkened this afternoon, I made it out of the house for the first time in three days. I almost skipped along the street, it was such a relief to be somewhere, anywhere that wasn't my bedroom and did not contain damp laundry, memories of round-the-clock nausea, or a re-purposed waste bin. A trip to an out-of-town shopping centre on Christmas Eve might even have lifted my spirits, I was at such a low ebb.

Once I tottered outside, I felt bereft without my sick bin, like when you learn to swim and let go of the edge for the first time. But the most simple experiences assumed proportions of wonder - nodding and smiling to our neighbour - who looks like Cap'n Birdseye and stands outside his tenement in all weathers smoking and grinning through his white beard - was my most exciting, no, let me be more accurate, my only social encounter in days. (I assume he smokes outside because Mrs Birdseye refuses to tolerate it inside, but it might be a throw-back to his nautical days pacing up and down the main deck)

As we passed our local church, Va-vay noticed a sign advertising a children's service. It turned out to be starting in two minutes' time. We dithered in front of the church, not knowing whether to go in, unsure Beanie was old enough, until a man came out to welcome us.  After that, there was no turning back.

For what was one of her first church services, Beanie (twenty one months) behaved impeccably, and sat quietly most of the time on her father's knee playing with his mobile phone. She listened without a sound while the vicar talked us through the arrival in Bethlehem of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and wise men. All was well until we got to the part where the vicar announced he would lead us in prayer:

"And now we are going to talk to God," he explained to the assembled tots and us parents.

At the call to prayer, Beanie pressed a button on the mobile, held it to her ear, assumed an expression of concentration, and piped up: "Hello?"

Who says the spirit of Christmas is dead.

Posted 24 December 2007 00:02 | Number of comments: 4 | Comments

Kit Out and about Paradoxes

PostingRoyals are different

262pxEdwardSophieWedding_Small.jpg Good to see Sophie, Countess of Wessex, leaving hospital last week with her new baby James.  Especially heartening to see Sophie's joy after all she must have suffered with an earlier ectopic pregnancy. Interesting, though, to note the lack of tut-tutting in the press about the relatively advanced age of James Alexander Philip Theo Mountbatten-Windsor's mother, since Sophie has reached the grand old age of 42 years old, which would normally be old enough to cue a bout of hand-wringing at the selfishness of 'career' girls who have the cheek to want well-paid work, fulfilling lives and children. But perhaps as a royal she has immunity to charges of 'having it all' and accusations of hogging medical resources laid against other 'older' mums. It'd be nice to see a similar tolerance extended to the rest of us, since I can't help being sick to the back teeth of reading stories criticising women for having the temerity to reproduce past the age of 35, despite the fact it's a natural enough thing to do, as the Countess of Wessex has just proved. In any case, though, I'm delighted for Sophie and wish her and her family all the best with this, their most precious Christmas present.

Posted 22 December 2007 17:39 | Number of comments: 6 | Comments

Older mother

PostingA spot of shopping

plustwos1_Small.jpg "What is it with you and your clothes?" I ask Va-vay.

We are sat in an Edinburgh cafe planning the final shopping onslaught before Christmas. My cup of hot chocolate must steel me for the fight with battalions of shoppers who are advancing on the city's shops like scavenging hordes. I have presents for everybody except Va-vay, who is unable to think of a single thing he might like for Christmas (saving arcane items of geekery that I do not understand well enough to purchase).

"What do you mean?" he replies. "I buy clothes, I wear them; they wear out. That's it."

This description barely does justice to the war of attrition Va-vay wages on his clothes.

"Yes, but Va-vay, the clothes disintegrate on you. Within months. Weeks even. Remember the Thomas Pink shirts?"

We both fall silent at the memory of the shirts, now reduced to dish rags and eking out their last days in a bucket under the sink.

"That wasn't my fault," says Va-vay. "Something in the fabric attracted stains." As if a laundress had put a curse on them. A Vanish-proof jinx that would defeat the housewives of Harry Potter.

"What about your socks, then?"

I've got the trump card here. Va-vay (who has size 14 feet) has issues with socks that not even his optimism can deny. They tend to sprout holes within weeks and his toes peep out to greet the world.

I've bought socks from all the obvious sock-buying places, thinking somewhere must have some that fit his feet. In vain. Our home is full of greying, unmatched socks that have wilted at the challenge of clothing Va-vay's feet. At night, his feet stick out the end of the duvet. Large and vulnerable.

I have offered to knit him socks, but Va-vay has declined, saying his skin allergy makes him sensitive to wool. Yes, it's hard to believe this is the same man who dashed across a busy B road to save the life of a caterpillar he saw stranded on the tarmac.

"Don't buy me expensive socks for Christmas," he says. "They're no better than the cheap ones."

"Va-vay, you do want something for Christmas, don't you?"

"You've got me a hat. That's enough."

"No! It's not enough. I want to buy my husband a nice present for Christmas. Why won't you co-operate in this? There's pleasure in giving as well as receiving, you know. You're making it very difficult."

"Oh, alright, alright. What about a pair of trousers?"

As well as having feet at the more err, generous end of the spectrum, Va-vay is also tall (around 6ft 6in). As you might imagine, trouser-buying has its challenges. We trail from shop to shop, meet assistants who laugh at us or cannot help, while elbowed by fellow shoppers who refuse to move aside for the buggy. I am paranoid that a stranger will touch me and cling to Va-vay. Our search for the right sort of trousers is proving fruitless.

Eventually, I spot a countryside shop purveying guns, Barbours, goggles, corded strawberry trousers, tweed caps, padded waistcoats and any other accoutrement you could imagine the sporting gent about town might need.

"Look, Va-vay, we could get you a pair of plus fours!" I tell him in excitement.

Va-vay glances in the window at the dummy done up in a pair of moleskin pantaloons that finish just below his knees. A shotgun trails by his side. Compared to his friend (in canary yellow trousers), his get-up looks almost sophisticated.

"Any pair of trousers is like plus fours on me," he says, with resignation.

We turn from the knickerbockers, and head for home.

Posted 18 December 2007 13:57 | Number of comments: 14 | Comments

Dilemmas Domestic chaos Edinburgh Husband Likes/Dislikes Out and about

PostingHell's kitchen

"I've got us a lovely supper," warns Va-vay.

"Oh yes, love, what's that?" I say from my bed, trying not to glance at the 'sick bin' that rarely leaves my bedside these days. Some days the mere idea of food is enough to make me hurl. I'm hoping today isn't one of them, though the rising bile at the back of my throat suggests otherwise.

"Spinach and potatoes," he announces.

"And?" I think, waiting for him to unveil the crowning glory of our evening meal that he's led me to believe awaits.

Some salmon? Steak? Even bean burgers or pasta would be alright. Maybe stew or pizza?

The pause stretches on uncomfortably long.

"Were you expecting... something else?" he starts, accusingly.

"No! Spinach and potatoes. How... lovely."

"I'm going to cook the potatoes so they come out all fluffy. You know how I showed you the other day, when you make them explode." Va-vay's little-boy enthusiasm for the ways of the kitchen is sometimes endearing, on other occasions (this one) just perplexing and annoying.

Briefly, I remember Va-vay doing a Nigella on me and bashing an innocent-looking baked potato with the blunt handle of a carving knife, because, or so he said, doing so led to a superior interior texture of spud. I tried to marvel at the sight of the thing's innards spread across the plate, but couldn't see quite what we were meant to be excited about.

"I thought that would be a good supper," he says, going all huffy.

"It is! It will be," I say, with a touch too much jollity.

He disappears into the kitchen. For much, much longer than it would take to cook some spinach and get some baked potatoes going. Eventually, well over an hour later he reappears.

"There's been a small delay," he says.

"What's going on?" I ask meekly.

"Oh, nothing," he says airily, as if I couldn't be expected to understand. "Just the potatoes cooking."

At nine thirty - more than two hours after Va-vay got home - supper makes it entrance. I'm desperate for food, as I alternate between cravings and aversions to the stuff.

"This isn't baked potatoes," I point out, in what even I realise to be a statement of the blindingly obvious.

"I could tell from your tone of voice you didn't want baked potatoes. So I've made this instead!"

"This" turns out to be potato and spinach gratin. Unfortunately, undercooked potato and spinach gratin.

We try to ignore that fact as we sit up in bed and listen to each other crunch through the potato. I wonder if a wobbly lower crown will survive the night. My mind turns to the Irish potato famine.

"Are you enjoying it?" asks Va-vay, in utter defiance of any realistic observation of the situation.

"Va-vay, I don't mean to be ungrateful or anything, but it's a bit undercooked."

"No, it's not!"

"Look, I'm sorry, but it is undercooked."

"Then just don't eat anymore," he tells me.

Sad to say, I'm so hungry I would eat a bag of mouldy old potatoes by now. I push on through to the end, then fall asleep.

A couple of days later, Va-vay has recovered his good humour and admits the gratin was not his finest culinary hour.

"Why didn't you just do the baked potatoes like you said?" I ask him.

"I wanted to do something nice for you," he says. "I could tell you didn't want a baked spud and spinach. It's alright for me, being a veggie face. You wanted something else." My heart wells.

Later, I confide in him that I'm nervous about a big Christmas meal with assorted people I haven't seen in months.

"You don't have to go," he says.

"I do, Va-vay. Really, they're expecting me to be there."

"If you stay here, I'll cook you a nice potato gratin."

He knows the way to a woman's heart, that man.

Posted 13 December 2007 14:52 | Number of comments: 12 | Comments

Food Husband Mistakes

PostingCue the Counterblast

Piece in the Telegraph today saying we are evolving to have more children later in life. To help us stay fertile longer we will be less troubled by diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart problems and obesity that occur in middle age and beyond.

Professor John Hawks, the anthropologist who led the team of scientists behind the research, told the paper that genes allowing us to stay fertile for longer, as we delay having children, seem more important than living longer in itself.

"The trend has been towards later reproduction," Hawks told the Telegraph. "Many people wait to have kids until they are in their late 30s to 40s. But very few people lived in their 40s more than 50,000 years ago. That's a big biological change. So genes that impede fertility at later ages must be experiencing stronger and stronger selection pressure."

Hawks continued: "The bottom line: people are unlikely to live much longer in the future - at  least, due to genetic changes - but they are likely to be better at having kids older."

Music to my ears.

Posted 11 December 2007 11:54 | Number of comments: 3 | Comments

Health News Older mother

PostingTime and Tide

Apologies for the lack of recent postings. I've only just realised it's been six days since I managed to blog. Six whole days. Shameful contrast to the high watermark of summer, when I set myself a target of daily postings.

I'd love to blame the downturn on Christmas and being too busy with shopping and partying to blog. But the truth is I haven't been too well and have hardly left the flat. I'm also finding I need to put any spare time into writing my book.

I've been busy reading around the subject of motherhood when not looking after Beanie and working on the book.

Regular readers of this blog might remember I'm a huge fan of Kate Mosse's Becoming a Mother. I liked it so much, I re-read it over the weekend, just to enjoy that feeling of companionship and support again.

I've also been reading Susan Faludi's Backlash - The Undeclared War Against Women, which has got me energised with anger. She dismisses the infertility scare stories of recent years as having little or no basis in fact, blaming them on widespread resentment at women's new-found freedom to work and decide when (or if) they will have children.

Reading Backlash reminded how fed up I am with some of the unflattering descriptions used for women who have babies after 35. Is it not about time the medical authorities thought up something less insulting than 'senile primigravida' to describe a first-time mother over 35?

I'm also losing patience with hearing healthy, blooming women in their late thirties and early forties described as 'older'.

When are we going to wake up to the fact that women in their thirties (and older) are in their prime? These are some of our most productive and creative years. Calling us 'old' is part of the same attempt to stigmatise any woman who shows some choosiness about when and how she has children that also leads to bogus infertility scares and 'man shortage' stories.

I don't think of myself as 'old' or even 'older' - and that's because, looked at in absolute terms, I'm not. I was older than the average first-time mum (29) when I had my daughter (at 38). But that doesn't qualify me for the zimmer frame and slippers quite yet.

Come to think of it, I don't even consider my mother, an energetic 67-year-old, to be  'old'. Though she has qualified for a bus pass that Beanie regularly filches from her handbag.

What do you think is a good substitute for 'old' or 'older' to describe new mums or mums-to-be over 35?

Posted 10 December 2007 12:17 | Number of comments: 12 | Comments

Blogging Books Dilemmas Fashionably Late - the book Older mother Paradoxes Work at Home Mum

PostingTruths about later motherhood

India Knight claimed this weekend in The Sunday Times that she was reluctant even to write about the number of women having babies in their forties doubling in the past decade, because doing so might encourage younger women into the deluded belief that delaying motherhood "until you're middle-aged" is a reasonable thing to do. You can imagine how I felt on reading her article, The lie of late motherhood.

Knight argues that women are wrong in thinking they can delay motherhood, because anyone who falls for that line is the victim of a feminist-inspired fantasy that has brainwashed us into thinking we can 'have it all' - career and children.

She claims women of her age (41) "have started talking breezily about IVF as though it were a procedure no dissimilar to Botox." Can this be true? Where are these brassy minxes? Nobody I know talks about IVF like this - what I hear is the strain on their marriages, the pain, injections,  uncertainty, mental anguish, expense, time off work, hospital trips, low success rates, patronising doctors. My friends and I might be pessimists. But at least we are realistic.

Knight doesn't do much either for the confidence of women who do, somehow or another, by hook or by facial surgery crook, manage to become mums later in life. "I know lots of older first-time mothers and they're absolutely knackered," Knight says. "They stagger round, broken with lack of sleep - because getting up three times in the night when you're 43 is not the same as doing it when you're 25 - with huge rings under their eyes and husbands who notice the latter and wonder what happened to the minx they married." My advice to any woman in this situation would be to insist your partner helps with the nightfeeds - and then he too will be such a broken husk of his former self there'll be less chance of wandering eye syndrome. That, or any predatory minx who catches his attention will wonder if he shouldn't be the one getting Botox.

I have great respect for Knight, and have long enjoyed her provocative columns, but have to dispute her claim it can be especially lonely being an older mum. "If they're on maternity leave, they find hanging out with the teenage mothers at the One O'Clock Club faintly disheartening, to say nothing of mind-bendingly boring."

That depends on where you live; round my way, most mothers are in at least their mid-thirties and, truth be told, it's a rarity to see a twentysomething new mum.

Knight is at her most controversial in this suggestion for anyone childless and broody: she advises they give up on waiting for 'Mr Right' and just get pregnant whenever or however they can, with or without a partner. She derides 'the sweetly retro notion of mooching around pining for Mr Right, as the clock ticks away and you find yourself eyeing newborns up in supermarkets.'

Does anything good ever comes from acting out of desperation? Is tricking an unwilling man into becoming the father of your child really going to lead to anything except unhappiness and confusion all round?

As I've said before, I have a lot of admiration for single parents, especially now I know what's involved in bringing up a child. I don't suppose many of them set out to be single parents by design; they, like most of us, are just doing the best they can given their particular circumstances. But surely the ideal situation has to involve two parents under the same roof?

Personally, I don't think we should encourage women to short-change themselves and give up on that dream, even if it takes a while to turn into reality.

Posted 04 December 2007 16:31 | Number of comments: 13 | Comments

Older mother

PostingPlain bonkers

Interesting debate going on here at The Daily Telegraph about when people should have children. The furore was prompted by a story reporting that the number of women having children over the age of 40 has doubled in the last ten years, which the paper says provides the clearest evidence yet that many women are delaying starting a family. 

In amongst the predictable rants (it is the Telegraph, and don't say I didn't warn you) against 'young carers', teenage mums, (you just can't win as a mother, damned if you have children young, damned if you leave it till later) 'feminists' and women who take 'men's' jobs, there are only a few more balanced opinions (mostly, it must be said, from women themselves).

"Women who have children after 40 are plain bonkers," wrote one man. Obviously, as a man, he would understand about desperately wanting a child, the deep, atavistic yearning to nurture a new life that seizes women regardless of age, education, social class or race, the sense that having a baby is what we're meant to be doing, almost (forgive me if this sounds pretentious) a part of our biological destiny, what our bodies are meant to do. If you have to wait until you're 40 to get the chance to do that, of course you're still going to want a child, regardless of what some silly old duffer says.

On a marginally less bigoted note, someone wrote that women can't afford to stop work to have children, now that double incomes are factored into house prices, (could you imagine the trauma of downscaling your lifestyle to accommodate a child?!!) and, of course, lest we should ever forget, there's the difficulty of finding a halfway-normal bloke as your partner in the crime of later motherhood. That one really can take time.

Looking at the Telegraph comments, I was reminded of just what a nightmare it was when I found myself single again in my mid-thirties, wanting to settle down, then realising it was mostly just nutters available, like the ones who write these vile comments and who'd have us knocked up and barefoot, without any state help, probably behind bars even, by the age of 22. Sorry, probably there were tonnes of lovely single guys around, but I just wasn't meeting many of them.

Va-vay, thank you a million times over for rescuing me from my ordeal. Every day, you make me laugh, you make me feel special, you encourage and support me in all my plans and dreams. You always think the best of people, never judge, and are kind and tolerant. If your elephant-strength toenail clippers are the worst I have to put up with these days, I count myself lucky.

Is there an ideal age to have children?

What made you decide to have children when you did?

Posted 01 December 2007 22:47 | Number of comments: 20 | Comments

Husband Older mother