Certain things simply arrive into your life at 40, inexplicably and unsuspected. Friends—the people you once slept on timber crates with at festivals or begged for painkillers during staff meetings or who held your coat as you kissed someone called “Climpf” 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 color in the holes in your tights with ballpoint pen, 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 20s 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 we do. According to the Office for National Statistics, the “Standardised Mean Age” of mothers in the UK is now 31 years old and 33.9 years old for fathers. (In the United States, the average age for first-time mothers was 27.5 in 2023—up about a year from 2016.) For that to be the mean age, you’d better believe that there are a hell of a lot of us in the higher age bracket dragging that number up. Sienna Miller, I see, is pregnant with her third child. Congratulations to her—and no, I did not look like that when I was pregnant in my 40s. During my pregnancy last year, I had gray 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, but rather on the side of the road, getting to school in the dark for 8:30 a.m. registration.
There is so much to celebrate about being pregnant in your late 30s and 40s. 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—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 traveled a bit and gone to great parties and been on the radio and all that stuff in my 20s. By the time this recent pregnancy rolled around, I was delighted to sit at home and eat mashed potato with my family. FOMO wasn’t just irrelevant—it was a punchline, to be chuckled at as I watched my son read a comic in the bath or turned out the lights at 8.32 p.m.