Set your own “best before” date.
By now you know your weak spots and cravings. Whom you fall for, what types you should avoid, as well as whom and what to strive for.
Armed with that knowledge, now is the time to construct a timeline. How old are you? And what do you want? By what age? Whether you want to find a boyfriend or girlfriend before your next birthday, meet the person whom you will marry before you are thirty and have your first kid by thirty-one, or find a new partner in your fifties or sixties to spend the rest of your life with, make a map of where you are right now and where you ultimately want to be. You can, and will, make detours—we are all human after all—but it helps to identify where you are starting from and ultimately where you are planning to get to.
Especially since the old adage “You spend your twenties trying not to get pregnant, and your thirties trying to get pregnant” remains the truth (and oh, the irony!) for so many women as peak fertility is around age twenty-six, which feels quite early for anyone just getting going in the workforce.
The good news is that there are now many ways to become a mother, and it’s worth thinking about what you are willing to consider ahead of time. I know many women in their midthirties hoping they will find a partner to have a kid with—and as many women in their forties and fifties who feel cheated out of motherhood because they assumed they had more fertile years than they did. Several interviewed for this book say that remaining childless was one of the hardest things they have had to face. Others said that they are so relieved that we live in a time where they can admit they don’t want children—and find partners who don’t want them, either.
When Cameron Diaz announced that she was “never drawn to being a mother” for a story in Esquire, she sparked a cascade of stories from women of all ages who were relieved to have a successful movie star say out loud what they were feeling. Writer Sezín Koehler compiled for HuffPost a list of eight reasons she decided not to have children that included sleep, money, and interest. The thirty-five-year-old added, “Between my creative work, a job I love, and a husband I adore who agrees with everything in this article, I am happy, healthy, and the most fulfilled I’ve been in my life.” She also said, “I don’t need to push a real child out of my vagina to be a woman. And I don’t need a child in order to be happy.”
Polly Vernon, an editor at the Guardian, wrote a great piece on being child-free in which she confided that she knew she did not want kids from the age of seven. “By my midteens,” she wrote, “I could quote statistics on the damage that kids would wreak on my career trajectory, finances, social life, and body. Although to be honest, none of that was, or is, as big a factor in my decision to remain childless as my instinctive feeling that I just didn’t want children.” In the end, she finds the cultural obsession with having kids “boring.” She, like Koehler, found a partner who agrees with her. “[He] has never questioned my enduring childlessness,” Vernon adds, “and . . . I love [him] all the more as a consequence.” All this is true for her—and I am glad we are at a moment where women can admit these things so freely.
So what is true for you? Know this yourself first and then know that this conversation must be had early on in any prospective relationship. Not on the first date, of course. But certainly as you get serious. This is not something you want to raise for the first time on your thirty-sixth birthday, having silently nursed the hope for six years that you’re on the same page only to discover that you have different ideas where kids are concerned. I know too many women who assumed they could nudge a partner in the direction they wanted without ever having asked directly and were then devastated to learn that that person was either not ready or not interested in having children. Or even worse, totally interested in having kids, just not with them.
Tanya Selvaratnam’s book The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock should be required reading for women who know they want a family. “The big lie is that we can do our things on our own timetable,” Selvaratnam explains. “We are taught and conditioned to think proactively about our work futures, but not about our personal family future.” An actor and artist, she speaks and writes from personal experience. After marrying at thirty-six, she had three miscarriages before she turned thirty-eight. “The experience of having that first miscarriage felt so privately painful,” Selvaratnam says. “I didn’t realize that they are so incredibly common. My partner at the time did not find out that his own mother had had a miscarriage until I had one!” She started in vitro fertilization (IVF) only to discover during the process that she had gastrointestinal cancer. Her infertility may have saved her life—but also strained her marriage, a well-documented phenomenon of the impact of infertility among married couples.
Now forty-two, divorced, and still without a child, she published her book to rave reviews and lots of attention, but it did not sell as many copies as she had hoped. Granted, infertility and illness are perhaps not the most obvious ingredients for a bestseller, though that didn’t stop When Breath Becomes Air or Being Mortal from taking off. But young women can find it especially hard to confront their desire to have children for fear of not seeming serious about work or of being accused of harboring retro Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasies.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett also learned this the hard way in 2002 when she published Creating a Life, which panicked women by pointing out a stat hiding in plain sight: 40 percent of women earning over $50,000 were childless at the age of forty-five. One of the first books to talk honestly about the incongruity between women’s fertility and women’s ambitions, it sold very few copies in comparison to the amount of media attention it received, which suggested that women did not want to face the painful truth about fertility: that the older you are, the harder it is to get pregnant, no matter how successful you may be. Hewlett—who has five children, the youngest conceived when she was fifty after years of trying—was stunned by the response. “In my reporting, I stumbled on the fact that the more successful you were as a woman, the less likely you were to have a partner and children,” she explains. “Whereas for men, it’s the mirror image: the more successful you are, the more likely you are to have at least one if not more wives, and several children.”
While it may not have become a bestseller, Hewlett’s book did alert women to their fertility fallibility. It’s now much more widely understood that fertility drops as women age. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that a woman’s fertility gradually begins to decrease at thirty-two and then more rapidly at thirty-seven, which coincides with the number of eggs a woman has throughout her lifetime: from 300,000 and 400,000 at our first menstrual cycle to somewhere between 39,000 and 52,000 by age thirty. By forty, that decreases to between 9,000 and 12,000, and not all are viable. And so women who put off childbearing in their more fertile twenties to focus on their careers need to know that it is harder to get pregnant in your less-fertile thirties. “I call it a creeping non-choice,” says Hewlett, referring to the fact that 30 percent of women who are either on track in their careers or have a degree don’t have children at age forty. “I don’t like the word childless as it denotes a deficit, and not all women feel that way,” she adds. “But I can say that career success leads to all kinds of great choices for men. For women, those choices are less generous.”
The booming billion-dollar fertility industry has also enticed women to believe that we can still drink in the last-chance saloon by turning to tech to become mothers. IVF has become—for women who can afford it—a fallback. It has created the assumption that even if you started trying late and nothing’s yet happened, you can always make it happen with IVF. Yes, you can try, but there are no guarantees. And just because it’s starting to get lots of sexy press coverage, don’t hold your breath for in vitro gametogenesis, the latest development in the infertility field, which creates eggs or sperm from “pluripotent” stem cells found in a person’s skin, male or female. Yes, this super sci-fi, and ethically challenging, procedure has been successful in mice—but it has a very long road ahead before it’s a solution for humans.
Just as age is a factor for getting pregnant without assistance, it is also the most important factor influencing the success of IVF, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Just under 40 percent of IVF cycles result in babies for women ages thirty-two and younger. At age forty, that success rate is cut in half to less than 20 percent. I know one close friend in her late thirties who did five rounds of IVF—and spent upward of $250,000—and got nowhere. The toll—physical, mental, and financial—was excruciating.
And yet, the good news is that many children are now born this way. One of my oldest friends—having endured multiple miscarriages in her early forties with IVF—carried her first baby at fifty-one after the clinic where she had stored her remaining fertilized eggs wrote saying they would be destroyed within the year. With some distance on the grueling series of miscarriages, she felt she had nothing left to lose by having the last eggs implanted, and nine months later she gave birth to a gorgeous and healthy baby girl whom we still refer to as a miracle. But you should know that the science is still young, and though the clinic brochures are glossy, statistically the odds are against you. Only 40 percent of all IVF rounds in which the mother’s biological egg is used will end in a live birth. So to be clear, 60 percent don’t work.
The answer to the question, “Do you want kids?” will affect any relationship you have with a partner. . . . You must know where you stand on this issue—even if you are ambivalent—to avoid feeling sideswiped later.
While the emotional and physical toll is intense, the financial impact can be debilitating for many, too. Costs, which are not covered by most insurance companies, average $12,400 per woman, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. One study found that 70 percent of all women who sought some form of assisted reproductive technology went into debt in the process.
So ask yourself, “What do I want?” The answer to the question, “Do you want kids?” will affect any relationship you have with a partner—he or she will want them, already have them, or have no interest in parenting whatsoever. You must know where you stand on this issue—even if you are ambivalent—to avoid feeling sideswiped later.
Dedicate space in your notebook to this subject, and start by answering the following:
Do you have kids?
If not, do you want them?
If so, how many? By what age?
What’s your family fertility history?
And finally, how do you want to have them?
I ask this because there are so many ways to become a mother these days. And so Hewlett’s description of the “creeping non-choice” of age-related infertility has been countered with a multitude of options. Adoption, for starters. Surrogacy. Sperm banks. Looking for someone who already has kids. Or how about finding a friend you want to have a kid with? This may sound radical, but it certainly takes the pressure off your love quest. “Fifty percent of people do not raise their children with the person they had the child with,” says Esther Perel, who also suggests, “So why don’t you pick a friend, with whom you can actually raise a child?”
In tech parlance, it’s a disruptive idea, one that an Israeli organization called Alternative Parenting has pioneered by pairing single men and women, both gay and straight, who were ready to have a child but didn’t have an intimate partner to do it with.
I love this proactive approach. The most joyful piece I ever commissioned when I was the editor of Marie Claire was a story called “I Had a Baby with My Gay Best Friends.”
Kitty was thirty-three when her first marriage ended. By then, she was running a successful restaurant, had a wonderful group of friends, and felt ready to become a parent. Her next boyfriend, however, was not, and felt pressured by what to her felt like a ticktocking fertility time bomb. Fast-forward to thirty-eight, she implemented her own version of Alternative Parenting by asking her two gay best friends to be the fathers of her child. One provided the sperm; the other, his last name. Contracts were drawn up, and a turkey baster was used. Olive was born in 2009, and while their coparenting is not without its issues—the dads don’t approve of refined sugar and a sometimes-exhausted Kitty has served Chef Boyardee for dinner—they all agree Olive is the best possible result. Kitty writes that the arrangement has also made dating easier: “Lots of women my age have children with exes they hate, so the fact that I love Olive’s dads and they’re involved in her life is refreshing to guys and takes some of the pressure off.” She adds that working “Olive’s dads” into first date conversations has led to a few hilarious double takes.
I love her problem-solving approach to this issue. I can’t count the number of women who have said to me, “I just never imagined I would find myself in this position. I’m in my late thirties, I really want kids, and there is NO ONE around.” Acknowledging there are alternate ways of becoming a mother can open up all sorts of possibilities.
Thirty years ago, most women were dependent on marrying someone who would support them financially. That is no longer necessarily the case, but no one will dispute that it’s easier to have someone to help you care for a child.
Even if one had perfect control over it, figuring out when to have a family is one of the most complicated challenges for modern women now entering the workforce with such gusto. Work environments—especially big corporations, until recently mostly male conceived, dominated, and directed—have not built in enough supports around working motherhood. I would like to say “parenthood” here, as we crawl toward a day where the onus falls upon either parent, regardless of gender. But currently the dominant dialogue in the culture is fixated on women “juggling” or “balancing” or “having it all,” which adds to this looming, dreadful sense that it is such a struggle to have a job and raise kids. Yes, that is true, but it is really difficult to have a job and be going through IVF, too. And it is also really hard to be happy at work if you left it too late to have kids and you really wanted them. We need better-paid family leave and family-flexible work policies. We also need more positive stories of women who are happy with their working-mom lives.
Elizabeth Gregory set out to do just that in her book Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood, in which she interviewed more than one hundred women who had their first child, by birth or adoption, at or after age thirty-five. “It’s not new for people to have children late in life,” she says. “What is new is that they are having their first child later.” She writes from experience, having had her first biological child at thirty-nine and having adopted her second child at forty-seven. She wrote her book as an antidote to all the scare-tactic stories urging women to have babies in their twenties. “It’s always about how women should hurry up and have kids sooner than later or they will be sorry,” she says. “They seem to sabotage women making advances.”
Meanwhile, delayed parenting is women’s response to the advances of birth control, as well as to the gains we have made in education and the workplace since that historic day in 1960 when the first contraceptive pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Add improved public health to women’s growing opportunities—which means more babies survive birth and people live much longer—and you see how women have responsibly adjusted to these changes. It’s societal support that is still stuck in a patriarchal past. “Women today delay childbearing until they can afford quality childcare,” Gregory says. “There’s nowhere to put children for the first five years, and then they get out of school at 2:30 p.m. and are off every summer. It’s a social system set up to make women fail.”
For this reason, Gregory warns against encouraging women to have children in their twenties unless they really do feel ready to become mothers. What Gregory also found through her research is that while older mothers may not have anticipated becoming mothers so late—and may have fewer children than they envisioned as a result—they do have more stable marriages, greater confidence, and financial security, which has a direct and positive effect on their children. She also shares the many ways in which women can become mothers later in life. “The oldest woman I spoke to was fifty-six when she started her family by adoption,” Gregory says. “I also talked to people who had no problems, including one who had five kids between thirty-five and forty, and many women who went through unsuccessful fertility treatments before adopting.”
I, too, waited until I felt ready to have kids, having assumed the best thing I could do was be financially stable and see enough of the world that I wouldn’t resent being grounded with babies. I was thirty-six when our first son was born and thirty-nine when I squeaked in with number two. Given my odds, I still feel so grateful I managed to get pregnant with no fuss. But if I had my time again, I would do it earlier and have tried for three or even four. At thirty-six, I had no idea how tired I could be—I remember once being too tired to reach the bedroom and instead lying down on our hardwood floor and falling straight to sleep—or how much love I could feel, or how much worry I could take, but far more important, how much fun and how fascinating being a parent would be. That’s because no one really tells you the good stuff anymore. Their father remarked one evening that having our boys was like going from living in black and white all his life to suddenly living in color. It was the most romantic thing he could have said.
Throughout the years, we have passed the baton of responsibility for them back and forth depending on who was traveling, working on deadline, or earning the most. I cannot tell you how many times I am asked by earnest young women, “How do you balance being a mother and holding a job?” I always say, “There is no balance. I don’t even know what that would feel like. I don’t mind extremes and there is only borderline chaos. You have to embrace the chaos.”
So, if you want kids, then whatever age you are, own your fertility. Have a frank conversation with your gynecologist. We get our cars checked before long trips—top up the tires with air pressure, make sure the brake pads are not worn out, and change the oil. Treat your body the same way, because the road to becoming a parent—whatever route you take—can be winding and expensive. Be prepared.
IF YOU DON’T WANT CHILDREN
Know this is something to discuss with future partners as men and women have such strong feelings on the issue. Finding a partner who wants the same thing as you do when it comes to kids is key to having a healthy and fulfilling relationship. You don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s regret.
IF YOU ARE AMBIVALENT
Do your research and know there are lots of options down the road should you decide later in life you want to be a mother.
IF YOU WANT CHILDREN
Research your own fertility options. Talk to your mother and sisters and aunts. Ask about their ability to get pregnant, if any of them had a miscarriage. Research other issues surrounding fertility that may be hereditary.
Talk to your gynecologist about getting a fertility workup, including a basal antral follicle count, which tells you the number of eggs available for pregnancy, as well as a hysterosalpingogram, which is an X-ray of your uterus and fallopian tubes to determine their condition. “A woman in her thirties may have fewer eggs than another woman in her forties,” Selvaratnam explains. “The experts themselves cannot explain how it works because every woman is different. Everyone has to be their own advocate and seek out the answers and information.” On that note, for those women who think that they will get pregnant in the future because they have been pregnant in the past, know that your age is the number one indicator of your fertility prospects.
Consider egg freezing. Knowing that egg viability declines in your thirties, don’t wait until you are thirty-eight. But if you do decide to do it in your twenties or even early to midthirties, take into account that it is expensive and can involve serious side effects, including hyperstimulation syndrome, which can cause rapid weight gain and painful bloating. Not terribly sexy if you are also dating. And then there is the psychological impact—what happens if that egg does not take when you do decide to fertilize? Or the ethical dilemma of what to do with those eggs if you wind up getting pregnant naturally?
The bottom line is that the longer you put off resolving the issue, the harder all options are: The older you get, the more difficult it is to conceive naturally, to conceive through IVF, to freeze your eggs, and even to adopt. Whenever I hear that someone is pregnant and older than forty-five, I am astonished at how often people marvel at the miracle of it. The truth is many women who get pregnant for the first time at the age of forty-five or above likely used egg donors. “People lie about it all the time,” Selvaratnam says. “We have made it abnormal for women to acknowledge readily when they have not used their own biological egg.” This is one of the last taboos.
Frankly, I am sick of taboos around this topic. It is time to talk openly about all the possibilities around becoming a parent—or about knowing you don’t want to be a mother—without any shame. “The best reaction I had to my book was when young women said they could finally have conversations with their partners about this,” Selvaratnam adds. “People don’t know how to talk about this stuff.”
CASE STUDIES
Maria*, 49, on wanting two kids by the time she turned 35, not three at 33.
Maria was newly married and had just turned thirty when she and her husband, Stefano, decided they were ready to have a kid. “I wanted at least two by the time I was thirty-five,” the now forty-eight-year-old marketing consultant says. “A boy and a girl, three years apart.” Thus far, she had achieved all her other life goals—including a handsome Argentine husband and an MBA from Wharton. “My twenties were all about living abroad, working abroad, getting my MBA and my first real job,” Maria says. “I met Stefano at twenty-one and knew he was my partner for life—but there was no talk about children until our early thirties.”
She was so sure she’d get pregnant quickly that she called Lisa, her sister-in-law who was also just married, and the two made a pact to get pregnant together. “We wanted the cousins to be the same age,” she says. Six months later, Lisa called to say that she was pregnant. “I felt a knot in my stomach,” Maria says. “I was happy for her, but also slightly jealous as I was still not pregnant.” Maria decided to “use her type A, MBA personality” to laser focus on that goal: She bought fertility books and a calendar, as well as a special thermometer that indicated the best time to have sex based on her body temperature. This put a strain on her marriage. “If Stefano could not have sex for whatever reason during my peak window, I’d get really upset,” she recalls. And still, she did not get pregnant.
After a year, her ob-gyn started running tests and discovered that her uterus was webbed with adhesions, which blocked her fallopian tubes as well. “I had severe endometriosis,” she says. “That explained why my periods were always so painful.” She started hormone therapy to force menopause, which would help eradicate the adhesions that were causing her infertility. “I was thirty-one and having hot flashes—often in the middle of pitch meetings at work,” she recalls. “And sex was really painful because I was so dry.”
She was thankful that Stefano was both patient and supportive. “For the first time in my life, I felt like a failure,” she says. “If he was anything but positive and loving throughout this period, I am not sure I could have done it.” None of this was part of her fantasy of motherhood. The treatment worked—but she was still not getting pregnant. Stefano had a good job, which meant Maria could quit her job and add acupuncture, meditation, visualization, and even emotional free flow painting to her regimen. Still nothing. Lisa had already had her baby when Maria’s ob-gyn finally referred her to a fertility clinic.
Any fantasy of an easy or natural pregnancy was replaced with blood tests and self-administered injections. “I remember getting a box of syringes, and my heart sinking,” she recalls. “Stefano got really good at administering shots.”
Then they got the first bill—$12,000. They had budgeted for this—but Maria got ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. “Instead of producing twelve eggs, I produced thirty-three,” she says. Her doctor warned that removing them—necessary for the IVF—was perilous, as the cavities would fill with fluid and that could potentially lead to a blood clot. “I asked about the risk, and he said that a gynecologist’s daughter had recently died that way,” she recalls, but that the risk was probably less than being in a plane crash. She was given the choice: risk the removal or cancel the cycle. “I had been doing this for months, and it was incredibly expensive,” she says. “But the question was, ‘Is this worth dying for?’”
She and Stefano stayed up most of the night debating what to do and decided to have the eggs removed—as the chance of dying was so slim. They did not tell her parents. As warned, the cavities filled, and she left the hospital with a catheter emerging from her abdomen and attached to a bag clasped around her leg. By then, she was back at work at a boutique PR company in marketing, where she had to empty the bag throughout the day in the ladies’ restroom and wear thick white tights to prevent blood clots. “No one at work knew what I was going through,” she says. “It was incredibly stressful.” Her doctor attempted to fertilize all thirty-three eggs that were retrieved, of which thirteen took. Of those, their doctor recommended they pick three to implant because he was worried, she says, “that they would not all make it.”
Another late-night discussion: The couple decided to have three embryos implanted and freeze the remaining ten.
Finally pregnant, Maria was astonished to learn that all three “took.” She was still lying on the exam table when her doctor suggested “reduction”—an issue neither she nor Stefano had ever heard of before then. “Carrying triplets to term was considered very high risk,” she says. “The big decision was, ‘Do we save the lives of two by killing one?’” Yet another sleepless night, and they both decided to keep all three.
And Maria, who at five feet eight weighed 120 pounds, went on a high-calorie diet and was put on bed rest when she hit 180 pounds. “My cervix could not hold the weight of three babies,” she says. She had a cerclage—“they sewed my cervix where it was tearing,” she explains—but that was only a temporary fix. The staples gave way when Maria was twenty-six weeks pregnant—she had an emergency C-section the first day the births were considered viable.
Each weighed less than two pounds and stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit, where machines literally kept them alive for the first few weeks. Maria spent the entire day, every day, at the hospital, and Stefano came immediately after work. “They looked like miniature monkeys wrapped in plastic tape and wires,” she says. “Their arms and legs were the size of my fingers.” They were finally released three months later to go home.
The months that followed were a blur—and then a letter arrived in the mail from the fertility clinic asking what Maria and Stefano wanted to do with the remaining frozen blastocysts. “We could donate them to science, or to an infertile couple—or discard them,” she says. “Another quandary.” They decided to donate them to science.
In the fall of 2017, Maria was asked to sit on a panel at the corporation where she worked as VP of marketing. “We started a Lean In chapter at work and the first panel was called ‘Can We Have It All: Mothers Who Work,’” she recalls. When Maria announced that she had “triplets and a singleton” the audience of seventy-plus women gasped. Oscar*, her fourth son, was an accident. “I did not realize I was pregnant for three months,” she says. Her triplets were five years old by then and learning to read in kindergarten. “I was still so traumatized by the first birth experience that I did not think I could handle another.” Instead, Maria and Stefano got the experience of a scheduled cesarean with no complications. She agreed to sit on the panel because, “I never talk about how hard it was for me to become a mother and now I see what a disservice that is to all the young ambitious women, in their twenties, who likely want what I wanted: to be a mother who works!”
Maeve*, 54, on finally becoming a mother at 50.
Maeve met Sean on a blind date when she was thirty-eight. “He wasn’t my type at all,” she says. “I pictured myself with a metrosexual architect or some lean college soccer player turned graphic designer.” At the time, Maeve was working her dream job for a boutique photo representation agency with photographers in New York.
She had spent her early thirties living in San Francisco with someone who felt like her soul mate but was not the right fit. “He was a master craftsman who built gorgeous custom furniture and loved the art world and the outdoors as much as I do,” she says. “But he couldn’t seem to get his act together.” She felt that she had to encourage him constantly and worried that being his constant cheerleader would both be exhausting and make her bitter. Maeve still loved him when she moved to New York for work, which eased the inevitable separation. By then, she was thirty-six.
She spent the next several years focused on her career and put her love life and motherhood on the back burner. One of six siblings, she knew she wanted to be a mom one day. But no one—not her own mother or her gynecologist—raised her age as an issue. Admittedly, she says, she was in denial about the realities of her biological clock.
And then she met Sean. “He was not my type at all,” she says. “A big suburban New Jersey guy—with the biggest heart around.” Sean pursued Maeve, and she realized that she did not need a partner who could go to galleries with her or wake up on a Sunday morning and say, “Let’s go on a ten-mile hike.” Sean was a “solid, great guy,” she says, “the guy you want on the Titanic. Stable, loving, and always makes the right choice.” She chose him for his honesty, his integrity, and his dependability. “I realized that all I needed was a good guy who loved me and who I loved. We could be very different people, but we shared common goals and values. And he was as enthusiastic and supportive about what made me happy as I was about what made him happy.”
They dated for a few years before Maeve brought up children. “I wanted at least two kids,” she says. She realized, at forty-one, that it was time sensitive and told Sean that she was not sure if she needed to be married, but she knew that she wanted to have a child with him.
At forty-two, she started trying to conceive. “Shockingly I got pregnant quickly. And Sean proposed.” She was two months pregnant when she miscarried. “I was devastated, but still delusional,” she says. “I thought since I did it once, I could do it again.”
The two married in Ireland at a fly-fishing lodge when she was forty-five. “I was still fantasizing that I was superwoman and would get pregnant again,” she adds. When she did not, they went down the path of fertility treatments, with several rounds of intrauterine insemination. When these did not work, the obvious next step was IVF. At that point, she says, “We had to look critically at the costs and the risks. It was clear that adoption was the best way forward.”
By then, her sister brought home her first baby—Jessica, whom she had adopted in China as a single mother. “The second I met Jessica, my path was crystal clear,” Maeve says. “Sean’s sister was adopted domestically, so he was already there.”
The two switched gears completely and decided to pursue an adoption in Ethiopia as well as in China since Maeve knew either could take a long time, and she wanted two children. They thought they would adopt first in Ethiopia because it on average took less time than China, but after three long years filling out paperwork and working toward that goal, their agency informed them they were pulling out of Ethiopia. “I have never cried so hard,” Maeve recalls. “We were virtually at the finish line, and so it felt at that moment like a miscarriage at nine months.” While they respected the reasons for the agency’s decision, the news was devastating.
Thankfully, they were 90 percent done with the paperwork for the China adoption and were able to focus on that once the dust settled from the “Ethiopian bombshell,” Maeve says. “We shifted gears, focused on China, and were swiftly matched with a child who was identified as ready for adoption.”
Maeve and Sean flew to China to meet their son, Dylan, on December 23, 2015. On December 24, it was official: Maeve was a mother. They flew back to New York on January 3, and six days later, Maeve turned fifty-one. “It truly was the best birthday ever,” she says.
She was so thrilled that she started the paperwork on a second adoption in China. “I knew that due to my age, we wouldn’t have the benefit of getting one child and then seeing how it was before deciding to have another one,” she explains. Tim, Dylan’s brother, joined the family right before Maeve turned fifty-four.
“Sean told me years after he met me that he knew we were going to wind up adopting,” she says. “If he had told me then, I would have been shocked. Now I know, I picked the right partner.”
Rachel, 44, on deciding not to wait around for someone to marry before becoming a mom.
Rachel had always assumed that her life would unfold “the way lives unfolded,” she says. “I would find the person, have the wedding, bear the children.” But the lawyer and entrepreneur who cofounded TheLi.st, an online network for successful women, and Change the Ratio, an earlier nonprofit, said that she was having such a great time in New York, focused on her career and living what she calls “the dream: an exciting, whirlwind, fun, wildly free, independent life,” that she never thought about her age or its implications—until her midthirties, when people began to ask, “So don’t you want to have kids?”
“I’d respond, ‘Of course I want to have kids, why is that your default assumption?’” she recalls. “That was thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight. By thirty-nine, I was starting to get a little bit tense.” That’s because she did not have a partner who made sense, and she felt that her fertility was “a ticking clock.”
When she turned forty, she started dating an older man who had an almost grown child and did not want more. “I realized that dating him was tantamount to a decision I had to make,” she recalls.
That was 2014, and one of the threads on TheLi.st was about egg freezing, which Rachel described as “incredibly robust and useful.” Women were matter-of-factly sharing the particulars of their experience, including their treatment and doctors and how much it all cost. “I was on a business trip sitting on the edge of my hotel bed weeping silently as I read all these messages,” she recalls. “I was totally confronted with the enormity of the conversation, which I had not begun with myself. If you are a woman in want of a reliable supply of sperm to even see if you can get pregnant, that actually takes some doing.”
Rachel realized that getting pregnant in her early forties was an odds game. “Basically, I needed to have sex,” she says. This was a challenge as she was, in her words, “very single.” She had no plans to start sleeping around with men willy-nilly—and even less opportunity, considering she was about to spend a month putting on musicals at a children’s summer camp. Not the greatest timing for a woman who wants to get pregnant! (Nor, as most parents would hope, for anyone going off to summer camp.) But it was just a month. She’d think about it when she got back.
Rachel went up to the camp, which she’d attended in her youth back in Canada. Everything was familiar, including another former counselor from her hometown of Toronto who had also returned to direct a play. He and Rachel hit it off, as two forty-somethings directing musicals at a children’s summer camp might do. Fast-forward to the end of summer—the relationship didn’t last, but it had left a souvenir: Rachel was pregnant.
Single and forty-one, the decision to have the baby was a no-brainer. According to Rachel, there was never any other option. “This kid was a miracle,” she says. “I knew the challenges, I knew the odds. No one could plan for this. But I got lucky.”
Two years later, Rachel is happily a single mom to a busy, happy toddler. Her daughter’s father lives in Toronto but is involved in her life and visits frequently. They are one of many nontraditional families in their New York neighborhood. “I’m pretty normal,” Rachel says. “When I was forty, I was afraid I would never get pregnant. I felt like an outlier. But I’m not. Not by a long shot.”
Being a single mom has changed her life, Rachel says, and she has no regrets. “There’s no way around it—parenthood is hard, and doing it alone is even harder,” she says. “But I have an amazing support system, great friends, and family. And this is what I wanted.”
Her advice to single women looking to have kids is not to wait. “Do as I say, not as I did,” she jokes. “Think about what you want, and what you will want. I got lucky, but luck isn’t a strategy. Being prepared is.”