Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

No fool like an old fool

A 57-year-old woman is due to give birth to her first child this week, after doctors misdiagnosed her pregnancy as ovarian cancer. The story made me wonder yet again about claims the NHS devotes too much money to older mums. Maybe it does overspend, but I have to say it's not money well spent. Doctors couldn't even get it together to clock this woman was in the family way; the best they could manage was that the baby was a 'hard abdominal mass', a statement of the bleeding obvious if ever I heard one and no doubt uttered in tones of patronising condescension. I was also mildly disgusted at the story. The pregnancy follows attempts by Susan Tollefsen, a special needs teacher who spent most of her adult life looking after her mother (beginning to see a theme here?), to have a baby via IVF in foreign clinics (most UK clinics draw the line at treating women over 45 and the NHS will not fund women over 40). "I just feel incredibly excited," Tollefsen is quoted telling one paper. "I know that when [the child] is ten I'll be 67 and I do wonder how she will feel about that, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it." There'll be other tricky conversations: Tollefsen will have needed to use another woman's egg to become pregnant at her age, something that might also take some explaining ('You see darling, post-Soviet economics being what they are, this obliging Russian lady is, well, um, actually your biological mother, though you know that of course I'm your real mother. So now at least you know where you get those lovely Slavic cheekbones. Now tell me, been having any more trouble with the school bullies of late?'). If I were Tollefsen, a lady whose frumpy wardrobe makes little attempt to hide her post-menopausal status, I could lose my sense of humour at being taken for the child's grandmother. If I were her child, I'd be counting the days till I was old enough to put as much ground between me and her as long-haul flights permitted. Vancouver, California, somewhere like that. Miles away from Mum's sheltered housing complex. And given the health risks to women of repeated IVF 'treatment', some of which are only now emerging, Tollefsen might be wise not to bank on too extended an innings. Having children 'fashionably late' is one thing, turning up after the party's over something else. It's sad that Tollefsen now feels regret at devoting her prime years to looking after her mum (a theme that looks set to continue in the Tollefsen family) but she can't bring back those years when she was meant to be having children. She would have done better to resign herself to that. 

Posted 24 March 2008 12:30

Fashionably Late - the book Older mother

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