Certain things simply arrive into your life at 40, inexplicably and unsuspected. Friends—the people who you once slept on timber crates with at festivals or begged for paracetamol during staff meetings or who held your coat as you kissed a rando by the large speaker—will start downloading bird recognition apps onto their phones. Women you know—potentially the same women who used to make you meals made up entirely of toast, or colour in the holes in your tights with biro, or hide your cigarettes in a hole in a tree to share—will start watching gardening shows. People from your past—the ones who drove you to the seaside on a Friday night in your twenties to kiss local bar staff and eat chips—will start buying waterproof coats.
One thing that people at this stage in their life are less expected to do is have a baby. Or have another baby, as in my case. And yet some of us do. Sienna Miller, I see, is pregnant again with her third child. Congratulations to her, and no, I did not look like her or Katrina Kaif when I was pregnant in my forties. During my pregnancy last year, I had grey hair, wore a lot of black tracksuit bottoms and put on so much weight in my face that I had to adjust my bike helmet just to see. I was not found on the Fashion Awards carpet in Givenchy; rather, on the side of the ring road getting to school in the dark for 8.30am registration.
There is so much to celebrate about having a baby in your forties. In so many ways—tangible and abstract—I was happier, more confident, more content and better resourced than I think I would have been two decades earlier. I knew myself and my body. I had established a career (of sorts). I was in a stable relationship with a man I loved and trusted. I was no longer renting. I had watched many of my friends and contemporaries raise their own children. I felt able to be open and vulnerable with other people when I was struggling, and knew where and how to ask for help when I needed it.
Also—and this is a huge thing that rarely gets talked about when it comes to having a baby in your forties—I did not feel like I was missing out on a formative stage of my life. I had danced in warehouses and lived alone and had flings and stayed up working all night and travelled a bit and gone to great parties and been on the radio and all that stuff in my twenties. By the time this recent pregnancy rolled around, I was delighted to sit in my two-bed 1970s semi and eat mashed potato with my family. FOMO wasn’t just irrelevant—it was a punchline, to be sniggered about as I watched my son read a comic in the bath or turned out the lights at 8.32pm.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
