on "advanced maternal age" pregnancy, large (ish) families, and changing your mind

What I wish I had known much, much sooner.

I’ve had this topic on my heart for the last few years and I hope I’m able to express it well. I have found that whenever the topic of motherhood comes up, people feel the need to give many caveats to not offend anyone and I often feel that nudge. My thoughts on this topic certainly include extreme sensitivity and care for those who deeply want to become mothers and have had to release that dream. My heart hurts for that hole that will not be filled. I want you to know that if you are hurting right now, I will pray today for the Lord’s peace for you. Know that you are cared for.

This is only my journey but I hope it might encourage someone out there.

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My daughter Frankie made this watercolor for Meg’s birthday present.

I’m 43 years old and…

• I wish more people had shared with my generation of women how important and sacred children were and encouraged us to not “hold off” on having babies until we had met career or marriage goals.

• I wish our Christian culture took a closer look at the fact that believing families are fewer children (and not predominantly for the reason of cost, either) and there is a decline in families attending church in general.

• I wish Christian circles would encourage women in the art of homemaking just as much as they do in the realm of corporate advancement or self-identification and gratification.

• I wish churches, pastors, and thought leaders would start speaking out against the modern Christian family adopting the “one and done” or “two and through” mantra that secular society promotes.

• I wish women would become more proud to be pregnant, have babies, grow in their motherhood, and ease softly into the idea of taking care of a home.

• I wish that children were welcomed more into adult spaces so they would find friendship and mentorship in intergenerational relationships.

• And I very much wish that women who the Lord blesses with a pregnancy, after the acceptable age of 35, would be embraced, encouraged, and normalized.

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I started thinking about these topics a few years after we moved to Virginia from Southern California. Although our experience in California is anecdotal, we did live there for close to 40 years so we understood the normal familial trends in our circles (and followed the encouraged course pretty closely, because hey….that’s what we knew.)

This is pretty much the blueprint when we were getting engaged in 2001:

You graduate high school and hopefully, you get into college. Don’t you dare meet someone when you’re 19 and say you’re getting married. No. You head off to university and sow your wild oats. You do the things that were unacceptable while living at home even just two months ago (drinking/partying) but now you are on campus so it’s just “college kids being college kids.” Only after you graduate from school can you consider getting married. For sure you were encouraged to get on the birth control pill by doctors and friends. You were usually advised to wait a few years after you were married to think about getting pregnant so you could “enjoy one another, get your job off the ground, and travel.” During that time, both parties should find careers, and get an apartment with their sights set on buying a home (at that time it was possible if both spouses were working.) After you’ve been married for a while, you could then consider having children. But you know, only two….MAYBE three. Because those kids aren’t going to pay for themselves.

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Of course, there were exceptions to this layout. I had some friends get married 2-3 years after high school graduation and become pregnant a year or two after that. I had some friends who dedicated their lives to fostering children. I had some friends who sold their eggs to pay for college and never ended up having their own. I had friends who got pregnant before they were married and had abortions. That wasn’t the norm, though. For every one of those exceptions, I had dozens of friends who pretty much followed the above blueprint.

That means that many of us (my friends and I, that is) found ourselves dipping our toes into the “world of conception” around the age of 26/27, having NO IDEA about the challenges that were coming, the disadvantages we had created for ourselves, and the realizations of how our culture (and even the culture of many churches) withholds this simple truth: that we as believers have adopted a secular view of pregnancy, birth, parenting, and family. We often organize our fertility and family structure like the pagans.

I can already feel some of you shifting in your seats.

It has become highly controversial to talk about the biological reality and gift bestowed by Christ upon women. I’ve asked myself why people aren’t encouraged (especially in Christian circles) to have more than 1.7 children. Why is it generally frowned upon (and not just by doctors) to get pregnant after 35? Why aren’t youth pastors talking about the deep well of goodness that comes from getting married and raising children just as much as they are having the “sex” talk or encouraging high schoolers who are having dating problems?

I think the answer is pretty simple. Secular society seeks to segment and fracture the family around every turn. Our Christian churches have by and large done very little to stem the consequential tide of the sexual revolution and dissolved gender roles inside the home. Society embraced long ago the mandate that women must take ultimate control over their fertility, so much so that women believe they have a right and duty to strictly dictate when they conceive, how many children they allow to enter their family, and how that is all dependent on their personal dreams and desires.

And many churches embraced this by refusing to speak on the topic.

Women are told to have it all, strive harder, and accumulate whatever it is they need to find fulfillment, and only at that point will they be ready to “sacrifice it all” and “lose their identity” for their children. The problem is that we pigeon-hole women so much that they push and push and push for this made-up idea that they might be able to function under the heavy weight of having both a booming career and children that many feel the only option is a small family or procedures like IVF/surrogacy to lengthen the time that they might be able to fit in a child.

The secular world separates women from their children in so many ways and because of that, families can seem like a grouping of autonomous persons, just meeting for dinner each night (maybe) and then retreating to their personal caves. Unfortunately, technology has made this siloing effortless and when I look out, I see this as a problem plaguing Christian and non-Christian families alike.

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About three and a half years ago we found a Reformed Episcopal Church (Anglican) parish that we fell in love with. At the time it was very small (we were one of only three families with children) but it quickly grew and now is bursting at the seams with babies, young people, college students, and large families. I credit that almost exclusively to the adherence to orthodox Biblical teaching (although it should be noted that the members of the parish are quite remarkable as well.) In an age where we are seeing a steep decline in church attendance nationwide, at our little church you’ll find families of 6 and 7 piling into a pew so they can all experience service together. Our pastor unabashedly preaches the Lord’s mandate for marriage and its sanctity. He reminds us often of the role of men and women, their purposes, and that He delights in all of it - how the uniqueness brought forth by the different sexes was in Christ’s plan and that is what makes it beautiful. It’s a reflection of our Saviour and His bride, the church.

There’s not a Sunday that goes by where he doesn’t say something that would make our post-Christian nation squirm. That is when I knew I needed to reevaluate.

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Large families (more than two kids) were abnormal in California. When we moved across the street from a couple who had 7 children one of the first questions I asked was, “Are you Roman Catholic or Mormon?” because it was just that odd to see (fortunately I’ve learned a bit more wisdom when speaking, since then.) Similarly, I don’t believe I ever met someone pregnant after the age of 36. I clearly remember working at a daycare and a mom came to pick up her son (he was 6) and she was in tears. I was told later that she had just found out she was pregnant and it wasn’t planned. All of the teachers seemed extremely sympathetic to this poor woman who “already had three” and now had to “start over,” plus she was “old.”

She was 37.

I certainly wasn’t “against” large families and never thought women were weird for having a deep heart desire for more children, even when they were past the age that medical professionals would give the green light. I suppose I would say that I simply hadn’t given it much thought at all.

When my eyes started opening, this seemed very sad to me and I wondered how many other women came to the realization rather late that they weren’t encouraged to ponder deeply the blessings and treasure of family life (however large or small the Lord determines.)

I was a homeschooling mom of three daughters, after all. My entire life revolved around our daughters, my husband, and our home. I loved that. There’s nothing I would rather have been doing but spending my days, in that season, just as I was. But I guess I rested in the fact that we had “had our three” and that’s how the cookie crumbled and that was that. It was “enough” (certainly by society’s standards - maybe too many!) and after I graduated the last one, I’d move on with my personal ambitions.

That began to shift about three years ago and I’m not exactly sure what specifically prompted it but I started to become uneasy with the way we assumed control over every jot and tittle of our family life. It was always meticulously managed and the plan was the plan.

I started to shed that way of thinking little by little when I watched women of God I knew (and wanted to know more about!) gently but confidently, hand over their control to the Lord and rejoice in the abundance of love and grace that came with each new baby. Likewise, I watched equally Godly women surrender their desire for a baby after years of trying. We witnessed servants of the Lord have their children die tragic deaths and go on to continue in His service and proclaim His goodness. We observed faithful marriages that endured painful heartache when a child went wayward and do so with an assurance like nothing I had seen.

Multiple families we met had many children and yet they weren’t destitute, even when only one spouse was working, and everyone seemed well-adjusted, content, and beautifully intertwined. They didn’t resemble what I had long assumed a family overrun with children would look like. They created a whole new narrative for me and a beautiful one. Additionally, I discovered women who had no children but who carried the mantle of “mother” for so many in our parish. They may not have been blessed with their own children but they didn’t allow that to turn them bitter - they continued to reach out and guide those younger. They babysat and made meals. They tutored and guided. The same could be said about women whose children were all grown. They just kept on mothering. A true testament to the innate nurturing gifts that the Lord blesses females with.

My husband and I started having more and more conversations about how we wished someone would have told us to start having children when we were much younger and have many of them. I don’t believe, aside from my mother, I was ever encouraged to have more children than the standard two. Or even give it a thought. Nevertheless, we found ourselves “old” and yet not feeling like our family was finished growing. I’ve come to learn that I might never feel that sense of finality, even though my body will (sooner rather than later) announce the end.

We began looking at the addition of a new life as something thrilling and purposeful and miraculous and never engaged the idea that a pregnancy resembled a concern or mistake, due to our age or station in life. This surprised some people. But I hope it encourages others.

Encourages others to think outside society’s prescribed family plan and contemplate how the Lord designed our bodies, our roles, our marriages, and our families to reflect Him and His plan for the world and our salvation.

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And so I found myself pregnant at 42. We had a 15, 12, and, 8-year-old and there I was a woman of “advanced maternal age” strolling into the OBGYN to the side-eye looks of many nurses along the way. I could write a book about the bizarre and downright rude questions I received over those nine months. The most common being, “Was this a mistake? Are you ok?”

Now I sit here, on the first birthday of our beloved Meg and I don’t think I’ve ever loved something more than I love our family right this moment. This past year has been the fastest, most joyful trip around the sun that I have ever had. Nothing has filled me with more happiness than watching all three of the older girls push and shove their way into Meg’s room when she wakes from a nap and literally cheer when they see her. Every day. Still. A year later.

It has been so game-changing to have this fourth baby as an “older” mother. I’m not at all worried about the things that concerned me when I was a new mother to my eldest. I don’t care if someone thinks I shouldn’t let her have a pacifier or feed her Kirkland brand formula. I’m not particularly worried about milestones or if she’ll be an early reader. Because those things only serve to eat up the precious moments I have while she is still young. I know how fast it all flies by - hindsight, in this case, is very helpful.

Our lives changed the moment we found out we were pregnant with Margaret. For some that pink line may have been a rather devastating revelation but I hope that perhaps we can flip the script in that regard. We can start telling women that the Lord might have something more beautiful than we can craft for ourselves.

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I’ve realized it isn’t at all about the specific number of children you have, it is all about releasing our idea that we control much of anything.

The lesson I needed to learn, that I wish I had learned so much earlier, is the importance of opening up my tightly clenched fist and saying, “It’s your plan God, not mine.”

What freedom and beauty awaited me.