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Having Our Cake And Washing The Dishes Too
Why We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
The Number Crunch For Over 40 Moms
Hip News, Features & Facts On 40+ Moms
Do you remember planning to squeeze in popping a kid for two sometime after forty? I don’t.
In fact, back in our teens and twenties, I don’t think any of us could imagine being forty-five, let alone have the slightest notion what we’d be doing at that age.
So, did we just “forget”?
Was childbirth more like afterbirth—the idea we had after we’d finished selfishly living it up, playing the field and lining our pockets with “filthy lucre” during our twenties and thirties, like many would have the world believe?
That’s the trite answer. It might even sell a few T-shirts and fridge magnets for those sensitive souls hankering to make a quick buck, trawling for the lowest common assumptions buried in the mulch of the Swamp of Ignorance.
I believe we are only just beginning to get to the bottom of the truth.
And the truth is that the 1960’s and 1970’s gave birth to an unprecedented tidal wave of liberation for women. During that watershed (while we were babies, toddlers and teens) our primary life goals were restructured for us by the forces of social transformation.
Lo and behold, as we grew up, it was clear that were expected to “do something” with our lives. We were expected not to “settle for less”. We were supposed to “have it all”.
Women who were born in the 1960’s and the 1970’s are the true children of the women’s liberation movement.
We are inheritors of the legacy of hard-won female freedom in a hitherto patriarchal society. For better or for worse, we got to collect the so-called trophies of war. We were carried upon wave of social change and took a ride to an unknown destination.
In reality, we are the ultimate live human study—test cases for the implementation, social consequences and, occasionally, the “fall-out” of the women’s lib movement.
When the bras got burned, Pandora opened her box. However, that’s not the part that befuddles us. We’re taking the good, along with the bad and the ugly, on the chin. And we’re grateful for the chance.
But the fact is, there was no advance scouting party to warn us of the pitfalls and map the terrain that lay ahead.
We are the pioneers.
Having Our Cake and Washing the Dishes Too
For women and mothers, the last fifty years has been a course of trial and error, with only the guiding light of women’s liberty to show us the way.
The sixties certainly augured more for women. It cut a wide gulf through the existing social norms of young women settling down in their early twenties to be a professional SAHM.
And that was a double-edged sword. Today, we have our liberty, alright—we have our liberty to be wage earners and housewives. Yet, we clutch it with both fists even though it cuts to the quick.
Welcome to the new world order: We’re not having our cake and eating it. We're paying for it and washing up the dishes afterwards..
It is for our generation they invented the term “multi-task”. The subtext for that is: “burn-ou't”. We are expected to earn a wage; simultaneously, we are expected to fulfill all of the mothering tasks our mothers did before us.
We are forever striving for the Holy Grail of modern motherhood: Balance. Yet, it always seems to elude us.
Gone is the value of “Quality of Life”. Our raison d’etre has become: “Survive the Strife.”
And no one is coming along with a heaping helping of relief in one hand and a bushel of answers in the other.
Why We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
When we were in our tender twenties, we didn’t just one day up and say: “Gee, I think I’ll party for another thirty years before I settle down, that’s for sure!”
There were much greater forces at work. The delay in having children has much to do with social trends that found their origins in the 1960’s and 70’s.
According to Corinne Sweet, UK author of Birth Begins At Forty—Challenging The Myths Late Motherhood, c. 2001, Hodder & Stoughton (UK):
In addition, advances in modern life expectancy and reproductive medicine have further enabled later life pregnancies:
And the buck doesn’t just stop there. Modern motherhood has much more in the mix than it did when your mom first pushed her bed sheets through a mangle.
In her book, The Hidden Feelings of Motherhood—Dealing with Stress, Depression and Burnout, (c. 2001, New Harbinger Publications, Inc.) author Cathleen Kendall-Tackett, Phd., catalogues a burgeoning laundry-list of burn-out inducing stressors for today’s average mom.
Today’s mom is a long way from the virtual Kansas of the 1950’s. According to Kendall-Tackett, advances in technology, lifestyle and expectations have created a hitherto unknown stress matrix for the moms of the new millennium.
What happens when you cook up modern maternal burnout, midlife motherhood and menopause all in one crock pot?
All hell breaks loose. (Oh, look, dear. Dinner and a show!)
Yet, the answer isn’t going to be found by digging in the dark ages of the ‘50s SAHMs. It’s in the hands of the new breed of mothers: Flower Power Moms.
It is up to us to improve and fine tune the legacy of our liberating foremothers, to make our goals workable and adequately supported from the level of nuclear and extended family, eventually percolating up to society in general.
We need less harsh judgments and expectations (from ourselves as well as our environment) on our mothering performance reviews. We need more compassion, and support that brings tangible value to on our ongoing process of becoming the best we can be.
The best for ourselves and for the future of our children whom we serve.
The Number Crunch For Over 40 Moms
Despite the fear, pain and suffering—the whole panoply of very serious risks—from miscarriage, medical complications during pregnancy, to genetic malformation of the fetus, the birth rate for women over forty has increased nearly threefold since 1981.
In fact, women older than fifty are now having babies—374 children were born to first-time moms over fifty in the USA during 2004. It is further estimated that approximately 100,000 babies are born to moms between 40 and 44 and about 7,000 to women over 45 each year in the United States.
Similar trends are supported in key western countries, including Britain, who have reported that the birth rate for over forties moms has doubled in the last ten years, and rose by a record 6.4 percent in 2006 alone.
In a 2004, Canada reported that births to mothers 35 and older had increased four-fold from the previous generation. And the birth rate for women 40 to 44 reportedly doubled in the 25 years prior to 2005 in Australia.
And the big kicker is Italy where apparently women wait longer to have children than in any other developed country, with nearly 5 out of every 100 babies being born to over forties moms.
The world over, it appears that more and more women are having babies at midlife—well after the pre-existing social and medical standards would have assured that their ‘baby-making factories’ are closed.
Hip News & Features on Older Moms
Older Mothers May Live Longer, United Press International, 5th May 2009.
University of Utah study shows that women who gave birth after 45 are significantly less likely to die in any given year after the age of 50, than women who did not give birth after 40.
There is no right time to have a baby, SPIKE Online, 11 March 2008.
Writer Jennie Bristow challenges the ‘procreational ageism’ that labels teen mums as feckless Vicky Pollards and older mums as selfish career-obsessives.
World's oldest mother gives birth to twins at 70, Daily Mail UK Online, 05 July 2008.
Retired farmer, Charan Singh Panwar sold buffalos, mortgaged his land, spent his life savings and took out a credit card loan so that his wife Omkari (a grandmother) could get IVF to produce a male heir. Proof that patriarchy is not above bending science to its purpose!
California's risky trend: an over-40 baby boom - As one measure triples, experts warn of dangers for mother and babies. The Los Angeles Times, Mary Engel, 03 December 2007.
Interview with Dr. Ingrid Rodi, a Santa Monica fertility specialist, who highlights the risks and pitfalls of later life pregnancy: Older mothers are more likely to develop high blood pressure and gestational diabetes and to give birth to premature and low- birth-weight babies.
Women begin to have fertility problems about 10 to 15 years before they experience menopause. The average age of menopause is 50 to 52, but it can range from 40 to 60. Women have no way of knowing for sure at what point in the spectrum they'll fall.
Corinne Sweet: The Truth About Older Mothers. UK Independent. 7 June 2007
UK author, Corrine Sweet summarizes the causes for delay in having children until we are older and some of the harsh social judgments midlife moms experience.
Breastfeeding May Protect Older Mothers From Cancer, New Scientist, 17 April 2007.
New research conducted in California modifies previous concerns that women who have children after the age of 35 are more likely to get breast cancer. Increased risk of breast cancer was related only to those mothers who had not breastfed. A good reason to work with Mother Nature!
Older mothers 'just as capable'
Dr Patricia Rashbrook became the UK's oldest mother in July 2006
BBC News Online, 23 October 2006.
Women who give birth over the age of 50 are both physically and mentally as "capable" as younger women of being good mothers, a US study has concluded.
Researchers in California found that overall, women in their fifties did not have reduced parental capacity or higher stress levels than younger women.
Mothers in their 50’s “cope as well as young women”, London Evening Standard, 22 October 2006.
The LES argues that: “The research will reignite the debate about the ethics of postmenopausal women using donor eggs to have children - and the growing trend for young women to freeze their own eggs for the future.”
LES Photo: Patti Farrant (AKA Dr. Patricia Rashbrook) became Britain's oldest mother in July 2006 after giving birth to a boy at 62
Over-50s can cope with motherhood, says study. The Guardian (UK), 23 October, 2006.
Features research from the University of Southern California (USC) (Dr. Ann Steiner, et.al.) results on a study comparing parenting skills of younger vs. mothers over 50, suggesting that opposition to older mothers may in reality be based on prejudice rather than scientific evidence. Presented Oct. 24, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in New Orleans.
Older Moms: Issues Beyond Pregnancy—Keeping Up With Kids, Other Challenges Emerge, Brian Dakss, CBS News, 5 September 2006.
Gold Medalist, Marilyn McReavy who had her twin boys at the age of 55, talks about how challenging and, in fact, crazy-making raising young kids in your 60’s can be. It is likened to trying to run a marathon after being a couch potato.
Briton becomes new mother at 62. A 62-year-old child psychiatrist has become the oldest woman in Britain to have a baby. BBC News, 8 July 2006.
Romanian woman gives birth at 66., BBC News Online, Associated Press, 16 January 2005.
Romanian hospital officials say a 66-year-old woman in Bucharest has given birth to a baby girl.
Adriana Iliescu says she expects to live for many years yet
