advanced maternal age Archives - Mothering in the Middle

Cyma Shapiro Interviews the Authors of The Mother’s Wisdom Deck

Q: Good Day, Niki. Thanks much for our time together. As a creator of Mothering with Soul, you have a unique, purposeful message. Tell me a little more about yourself, your collaborators, and your combined mission.

A: Thanks for having us, Cyma. It is an honor to connect with other midlife moms. As I was sharing with you, The Mother’s Wisdom Deck and Mothering with Soul largely grew out of our desire to marry our pre-motherhood life experiences and spiritual growth with the path of motherhood. Co-author Elizabeth Marglin (44), illustrator Jenny Kostecki-Shaw (38) and I (40) have each spent a lot of time traveling, studying with wisdom teachers around the globe, and contributing to the world as professional women.

Speaking for myself, I was totally unprepared for the changes that motherhood would bring. When I became pregnant, I was in the midst of a project to document the wisdom of indigenous elder women and thought that I would be able to continue my work with a baby on my back. My son had other plans. I can laugh now at my naïveté, but moreover I am grateful for how motherhood has enriched my life in ways that I never could have planned. Motherhood is about surrendering to something greater than myself and seeing what wants to unfold. The Mother’s Wisdom Deck supports that process of letting go and tuning in. […]

How to Create Special Family Vacations

Rosemary Lichtman, Ph.D. and Phyllis Goldberg, Ph.D.

“Summertime and the living is easy” – so said George and Ira Gershwin. There’s just something about the warm sun, blue skies and late evenings that makes us want to ease up, have a change of scenery and leave our day-to-day work world behind. […]

Old = Dirty? (A Commentary on the UK’s First Response Campaign)

by Elizabeth Gregory

Dear Reader: This commentary is in response to a new ad campaign in Britain sponsored by the pregnancy testing company First Response, which warns young women that their childbearing years are numbered. You can find related articles on midlifemothers/facebook.

One of the nice things about being an older mom is the friendly comments you get: just this morning a 29-year old I’d just met remarked apropos of nothing in particular that I didn’t look 55. She hoped she’d look like me when she was my age!

Maybe she was lying, but she had no particular reason to. More likely she was just telling me that I looked a lot better than she’d expected for the elderly mother of an 8 year old. It’s not hard to succeed in that territory. Who am I to turn down a compliment? […]

A Community of Mid-Life Mother Bloggers (In Celebration of Mother’s Day)

by Cyma Shapiro

Nine years ago, while sitting in the Moscow Marriott at age 46 with my newly adopted year-old daughter, I realized that I was going to be old when she graduated from college. The “old” was nearly my grandmother’s age – old! This was the very first time I’d ever felt my mortality and had ever even stopped to consider my chronological age. I had long ignored the biological clock theory thinking that it was mere hyperbole.

Although it came as a shock to me that I had not previously become pregnant, on that cold winter’s night nearly 9,000 miles from home, I finally felt my life begin. My age was a nagging problem, but at that moment I was filled with pride, joy and the fullness of starting a new family. I could see nothing but rosy times. Or so I thought. Little did I know that I had just joined a new club – moms over 40 – with no dues-paying members and no glue to bind them. Little did I know that in reality, I was one of them. (Two years later, we adopted our son).

Since then, I’ve made it my mission to expose the world to the group I call “Midlife Mothers” – that is, women choosing motherhood over 40. I have been featured on NPR and written for numerous online sites including Psychology Today and the Huffington Post. MLM entities MotheringintheMiddle.com and NURTURE: Stories of New Midlife Mothers (the only art gallery show dedicated to presenting women choosing motherhood over 40; now traveling North America) are intended to present a voice, face and forum.

Together with other midlife mother/women bloggers, we are helping redefine women in mid-life, dispel myths about who we are […]

Cyma Shapiro Interviews Elizabeth Benedict, Author of What My Mother Gave Me

Q: Mothering is a complex topic fraught with so many aspects and adjuncts. What was the impetus for writing this type of book?

A: Obsession is the impetus for most books, and this was no exception. The last gift my mother gave me was a beautiful black wool scarf with pastel embroidery – quite striking and gorgeous – that she’d bought from a holiday vendor at the assisted living place where she lived at the end of her life. I wore it for many years over the neck of my winter coat, and got compliments on it all the time, and was always asked where I got it. It was always hard to answer, both because I couldn’t direct anyone to a store, and because it came from my mother, with whom I’d had distant and fraught relationship.

After she died, I became silently obsessed with the scarf, and went into a panic when I thought I’d lost it. For years, I thought about what the scarf meant to me – that it kept me warm, that it stood for my mother, that we’d had this distant relationship. After a lifetime of not feeling close to her, I felt an intense attachment to the scarf. I eventually wondered if other women had such a gift from their mothers, a gift that opened the door to the whole relationship. I started asking writers, and the result has just been published. […]

Midlife Mothering – Reinventing Myself and My Mothering After 40

by Kathy Caprino

As a 50-year-old mother of two – aged 13 and 16 – and a coach, entrepreneur and author, my plate is over-the-top full, as is the case for thousands of women today. I work with women who are facing numerous crises in their lives. The top challenge for them? The utter inaccessibility of work-life balance, and the chronic feeling that they’re letting down everything and everyone who matters to them. […]

Advanced Maternal Age: It Is What It Is…

by Peg O’Neill

“I hate to remind you of this, but you do fall into the category of Advanced Maternal Age…” said my obstetrician at one of my early prenatal visits, the one when you’re supposed to discuss options for prenatal testing. Unwisely, my husband started chuckling, but shut up immediately when I glared at him with one of those hormonally-charged looks of scorn that only pregnant and peri-menopausal women can muster. […]