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OLDER Children

My thirty-three-year-old friend Liz was enjoying a close Personal relationship that didn’t exclude the possibility of marriage and, eventually, children. Since her personal life Looked promising, when she went in for her yearly checkup. she asked her OB/GYN to reaffirm that all motherhood systems were go. His reply? "Everything looks fine, but my advice to you is do it now." Sure. Right. She re-upped her pill supply, pushed the now-deafening tick of the biological clock toward the back of her brain pan, gr
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my friend Anne, also thirtythree, laments the lack of aqualified partner and fan-tasizes about where babyfurniture might fit into herhouse and whether the cats would be jealous.She buys a jacket at The Limited and thensegues toward the Limited Too area where she spends an hour fondling the small-frycouture. I sympathize and advise the Garpmethod.

Both friends have been busy about their careers and their lives, in and out of relationships like everyone else, looking for the elusive cosmic partner. Both are successful professional types and are relatively happy. And both adamantly refuse to attend another baby shower.

Michael, a friend who’s thirty-nine, is married to a woman of the same age who came with two small daughters. He loves the girls, but would find lasting contentment if only he could father a child of his own.

The quest for a bambino. It’s a big topic all over. Tons of women who’ve helped change the female role in our society are deciding: it’s Time. As Holly Hunter put it so succinctly in Raising Arizona: “Honey, I got to have me a toddler.”

As the thirty-eight-year-old mother of a twenty-year-old son, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and, most recently, a sixteen-month-old son, I’ve exercised my maternal option. Plenty. Still, I know that what these people feel up against, more than finding the perfect partner, more than locating the dream house or taking that junket to Tahiti, and more even than thoughts of financial security, is the Big Thirty-Five. The maternal magic number when the chances go down and the risks go up. Or so we’ve all been told. There’s a tacky name for it: elderly primigravida. An ugly phrase for a woman thirty-five or over who is pregnant with her first child, but fermmes born during the post-World War II “baby boom,” women who spent the last twenty years searching for Mr. Goodbar and dressing for success and who are hitting twenty-seven to forty now, will have to grin and bear it. The fact is, during the last decade, more women than ever before who were thirty-five, even slouching up toward forty, gave birth to their first baby. And the Nineties will mean maternal bliss for even more of these old ladies. So is it really a problem, or not?

The biological clock thing seems to be taking a beating. New superstar moms like Susan Sarandon (forty-three) and Sigourney Weaver (forty-one) are not bad as examples go: both look pretty great, and according to the OB/GYN scorecard, both are elderly and primigravida. But it’s hard to know who to believe: the lady at church whose mother had all ten kids before she was thirty, or the Clairol ads. Mirabella, and Lear’s, who are all banking on our getting better, not older.

My own OB/GYN, Jeffrey Thurston, is the newest partner in one of the largest OB/GYN practices in North Dallas. In 1989, the practice had 750 maternity patients. Eighty-eight percent of those women listed a work number as their daytime telephone contact. Nineteen percent of those women were thirty-five or older. The practice delivers its patients at Presbyterian Hospital’s Margot Perot Women’s Wing. There, in 1989. about 4,200 babies were born, an average of 28 percent of those to women who were at least thirty-five years old, compared to 3,400 babies born to 18 percent elderly primigrav-ida delivered at that same hospital in 1969.

“Is there an emerging obstetrics consumer over age thirty-five? Absolutely.” says Dr. John Bertrand, one of Thurston’s partners. “In the last year I’ve delivered vice presidents of banks, chemistry pro-fessors, partners in law firms, lots of women who have come to a certain point in their mid- or late thirties and don’t want to wait anymore. And women who have changed their minds about motherhood and family. Maybe in her twenties she didn’t really think she wanted children, but as she approaches her mid- or late thirties, suddenly she wants to try it before it’s too late. And there’s also an older patient who may have had a child earlier in life, and is now in a new marriage and still within her late thirties, early forties, who wants to have a child,”

In my own opinion, we’re all chumps on the birthday bus. You’re as young as you feel. As old as you look? Perhaps something in between. There are days when I do indeed feel like the old lady in the shoe, but then I’m no elderly primigravida. I’m helping to shove the other trendy stat up, the one where people embarking on a second or perhaps third or fourth attempt at marital bliss are deciding to parent a second generation along with the new spousal unit.

On a rare mom’s night out during the holidays, I saw computer consultant Jack Vroom, forty-five, standing across a crowded room of revelers flailing to a disco version of “O come, all ye faithful.” We managed a hug and exchanged seasonal grunts. “How’s your baby?” he asked. “Have you seen this?” He thrust his ring finger my way, where what to my wondering eyes should appear but a glimmering gold band.

“You and Ginger?” I ventured.

“Yes! And did you know we’re pregnant?”

Will wonders never cease? Jack Vroom had been, for the last fifteen some-odd years, one of this city’s most valuable bachelor types. He stood before me now positively beatific, radiating happiness and good cheer. Jack’s previous pregnancy was years and another marriage ago, resulting in son Bunky, now nineteen, almost twenty. The new Mrs. Vroom is Ginger Reeder, age thirty and a perky primigravida. The new baby is due May I, 1990.

I asked Ginger if she could see beyond the glow of matrimonial and maternal bliss toward reality. Taking a cold, analytical look at just the numbers, she could be raising a teenager solo.

“I don’t think about things like that,” she said emphatically. “When and if Jack goes, it’ll be rafting down a river in Borneo or something, and it’ll have little to do with his age, or mine, or this baby. That’s just Jack.”

Jack Gosnell, forty-five, another oft-lamented bachelor type, has been married for three years to the lovely Leslie Darden, thirty. Their first child, son Grayson Darden, was born January 22. “We’ve always planned to have more than two,” says Leslie. “I’m going to be the oldest living Indian Guide on record,” laughs Jack.

Older dadism is cute, but not really the news. It’s never been a problem for a man of fairly advanced age to father a child.

“When I was at Baylor, Dr. Michael DeBakey had a little boy when he was something like seventy-two,” reports Jeffrey Thurston. “Of course, he thinks he’s going to live forever.” Insider medical humor, but the fact remains that a normal, healthy human male produces a new sperm supply every 180 days, throughout his life.

“Women are born with all the eggs they will eventually ovulate,” says Thurston. “That number diminishes and/or dissolves as she gets older, but by the time she’s forty-two, she’s ovulating an egg that’s forty-two years old, one that’s been exposed to ultraviolet rays, radiation, chemicals and additives in what she’s eaten, and all sorts of environmental influences. So for women, time-age-is a factor, but just one of them that has to be considered.”

had my number one son when I was but a mere child. Perhaps you saw it in the Enquirer. Donovan and I enjoyed one of those mother bear and her cub kinds of things: instinctual earth mothering and perseverance. I was twenty-four in 1975, a pseudo-adult at least, when I was blessed with a daughter, Erin.

Now, remarkably somehow, after serving as stepdad to my two for five or six years and weathering teenage angst by my side, my husband, I found, still harbored thoughts of a namesake, a babe he could call his own. I had never really thought of my childbearing years as over, but this was the end of the Eighties. I had places to go. people to see, things to purchase, and it definitely had been fourteen long years since morning sickness. But we were both staring hard at thirty-seven, so it seemed time to do more than practice if a small one were indeed the goal. To our astonishment, two months later, we were pregnant. In shock, 1 recounted horror stories I’d heard about its taking as much as a year to conceive after any length of time on the pill. I assumed after more than a decade of popping one a day, it would be, you know, a while. Thurston laughed and simply asked: “Why do you think we tell you to take two pills, should you ever happen to miss one?” Apparently oral contraceptives became amazingly low-voltage when they got rid of most of the scary side effects.

We made our familial news known at home. After initial impact, Donovan, a senior at Woodrow Wilson, thought it was “Cool!” and wanted to know if he could be in attendance at the big event. We watched as his face registered the departure of whatever Oedipal complexities remained. He shook my husband’s hand. There were smiles and hugs and he went off to bombard a few peers with the news. Erin went into kind of an emotional shock. “What? Are you kidding? Gross! Mom! Oh my God! When? Mom, are you okay?” Tears, laughter, all at the same time. Then, a need for reassurance that I was going to live through labor and delivery and that the family really could expand to include a little person without putting constraints on her wardrobe and social schedule. Finally, she rushed to the telephone and sent the news out over the J. L. Long Junior High hotline.

Erin’s fears echoed some of my own. Could this body that huffed and puffed through aerobics survive labor and delivery? Would I ever again resemble someone other than the Pillsbury doughboy? Could all of our disparate schedules, commitments, and vices accommodate the little tyke?

“Physiologically, your body is most ready to have babies when you’re eighteen to twenty,” says Bertrand. “People used to feel when they had finished college was a good time, when you were twenty-two to twenty-six. But now people are postponing marriage, postponing thinking about families, until after grad school, after mortgages are made, and after they’ve done the big European trip. In the Twenties and Thirties, for people to start having their children late in their teens and keep having them into their forties until they had, oh, a dozen or so wasn’t unusual.” Bertrand has ten lovely children of his own.

“The only magic about thirty-five, really, is that’s the age when the risk of having a child with Down’s Syndrome exceeds the risk of miscarriage due to the amniocentesis procedure,” agrees Thurston.

This was something I knew about. Thurston advised me to have amniocentesis during my sixteenth week of pregnancy. Advised, not insisted. The physiological imagery of the procedure really put me off: using the technology of a level 2 sono-gram as visual guide, a long, hollow needle is inserted through the mother’s abdomen and into the amniotic sac so that a small amount of amniotic fluid may be withdrawn for testing. The big EXCRUCIATING PAIN sign flashed furiously just to the left of my cerebral cortex at the mere thought. And the numbers were terrifying. One out of every 250 women over thirty-five has a ’ child born with a , genetic disorder. One out of every 200 women has a spontaneous abortion attributable to the amniocentesis procedure itself. Jeez. I’d always been pro-choice, but felt abortion was something I could not do. My husHe and his wife Robin, who’s forty, only old bags in this position, we were younger and more experienced than a lot of our fellow prospective parental units. Vincent Perini, fifty-one, is a successful Dallas attorney.

He and his wife Robin, who’s forty, are expecting their first child in May. Vincent has a twelve-year-old, Elizabeth, from a former marriage. Robin left a lucrative career in New Orleans as a financial planner three years ago, when she married Vincent and moved to Dallas.

“V and I had wanted to have children ever since we got married,” says Robin. “It was a new feeling for me. Children had never been a big priority in my life. I was kind of lonely as a teenager and I thought then that I wanted children, but as I grew older I realized it wasn’t the keenest desire in my heart. But I think when you’re older, when you know yourself a little better, and when you can love someone unselfishly and are ready to teach and pass on some of the things you know to a child, then I think it’s right.” The Perinis chose not to have amniocentesis.

“When a woman is forty and primigravida we tell her she’s clearly at risk for increased genetic problems. We would recommend amniocentesis or other tests,” says Thurston. “But if her family history looks good, she has normal blood pressure and cholesterol, is not obese, doesn’t smoke, is well nourished, and is otherwise healthy, I tell her the risk of very few problems is involved.”

“We’re so very happy and excited about this baby,” says Robin. “I have so many friends who are pregnant now and are forty, or who have had beautiful babies in their forties. I think a lot of people are actually healthier, calmer. One virtue of being older is that it’s a lot easier to kind of roll with things. I’m emotionally more prepared for a child.”

Some of the other risks that begin to climb steadily at thirty-five and curve sharply as a woman reaches forty are toxemia and gestational diabetes. There’s also a slightly higher incidence ofmiscarriage, of lower birthweight and premature birth,and of the necessity for delivery by Caesarean section.

“We watch blood pressure closer, make sure there’s no anemia.” says Thurston. “If anything looks the least bit off toward the end of the pregnancy, we will give modified bed rest, tell her to decrease activity around thirty-four weeks [babies TICK. . .TICK. . .TICK

Never mind the homeless, never mind the drug war; who cares that our environment is crumbling beneath mounds of garbage? The searing dilemma facing the able-bodied, career-consumed, female baby boomer is “Do I have a baby or not?”

A popular T-shirt shows a woman slapping her head and saying, “Darn, I forgot to have a baby!” In my case, I didn’t forget, I was a good soldier, marching to the trends of time. I followed a career, delayed marriage, and denounced that conspiratorial trap called motherhood. But now the trends have changed and that agonizing biological clock keeps me awake at night.

So what’s a girl to do? Especially when she’s, uh, not exactly a girl anymore? Some of my co-workers (sweet, bright, twenty-five-year-old twits) have offered consolation. When I lamented reaching my thirty-fifth birthday, one earnest young lass had this advice: “Being thirty-five is not old, as long as you remain active.”

Sure, thirty-five is not too old for jogging or working twelve-hour days. But is it too old to be a mother? I’m not just talking about the physical risks that the statisticians say are lying in wait for the babies born to older mothers.

No, I’m concerned about life after the baby arrives, beautiful, healthy, and with all working parts. Aside from the expense of child-rearing, the greatest sacrifice is, of course, time.

Between two careers, keeping up a home and yard, and all the rest, my husband and I actually treasure those “boring,” quiet weekends at home. Where will we ever find the time for bringing up baby?

Some nights we sit up and talk about it. The next morning, my husband likes to play this little game with me:

It’s 6:30 a.m. and I hit the floor running to get ready for work. As I race to my car, he shouts from the garage, “Honey, you forgot! It’s your day to take the baby to child care!”

I know that a baby would mean a hundred adjustments and sacrifices. And yet, with all the logical reasons that my left brain can muster againstmotherhood, I simply cannot help fantasizing and ’ romanticizing about this miraculous experience. When you have a good marriage and a good life, it’s not difficult to imagine that offspring would only enhance your lives that much more.

I think of the delicious thrill of pregnancy almost like science fiction: growing a humar being, my own little human being, inside my body. I fantasize about this precious little girl (ye5, girl; it is my fantasy), looking up at me with outstretched arms and saying, “Mama.” And of course, I imagine that my perfect child will adore me just as I adore my own parents.

But, there’s a darker farce that pulls me toward motherhood: regret, the most common fear of aging wannabes. As I turn the corner away from young adulthood and head toward middle age-albeit “early” middle age-I am stricken with panic. Sure, my life is not missing anything right now, but what If, at forty-five or fifty, when it’s really too late, I finally make up my mind? -Ann Colwell

WHAT’S IN



Aprica strollers (been in, still in)

Handmade paper baby books from Two Women Boxing Dr. Spock (still) Electric baby swings Crash Lamaze courses (one weekend and a hotel room for two instead of six weeks)



Op Art mobiles (graphic geometrcs in block and white)



Paternity leave Traditional birth announcements and name cords Breast-feeding A recycled crib with a new innerspring mattress



WHAT’S OUT



Walkers (an orthopedic no-no) Toddlers on leashes Disposable diapers (think of the planet) Pre- or postnatal aerobics (walk, don’t run)



Stuffed animals with maternal heartbeats



Day care at six weeks (give the kid a break)



Store-bought baby food (use the Cuisinart)



Thematic kids’ rooms -R.O.

THE NANNY



If there’s room in your budget for in-home child care, the latest trend in Dallas (Manhattan moms have relied on them for years) is hiring a nanny to take care of the kids. (Whether you want live-in or live-out, prepare to spend $150-$300 a week.)

Finding just the right nanny to handle your home front can be time-consuming, but we’ve found six nanny placement agencies prepared to tackle the task for you. The agencies we contacted charge placement fees ranging from $120 to $3,175 to handle all the legwork, from interviewing the candidates to performing extensive background checks.

● Wilks & Associates, Inc. 747-4044. Specializes not only in nanny placement but also in locating all types of child- care solutions.

● Child Care Answers, 631-CARE.

CONNECTI

This nonprofit arm of Child Care Dallas and Child Care Partnership educates parents on what to look for in a nanny, how to verify references, their responsibilities as an employer, etc., and serves as a referral service to area nanny placement agencies.

‧ Brookhaven Community College’s Nanny Program, 620-4725. Although the college does not serve as a placement agency for its nanny graduates, they do provide a job board where parents can place an ad, free of charge.

‧ Nanny Services Ltd. Inc., 824-4750. Performs all the perfunctory tasks plus psychological testing by a licensed Ph.D. on request.

Au Pair Home Stay USA, 291-3625, Matches families with European au pairs in host family fashion. Two drawbacks: the au pairs have a temporary one-year working visa and you pay to get them here.

Professional Nanny of Dallas Inc., 661-1296. Recruits, screens, and performs psychological and personality assessment tests on its nannies.

-Lucie Nelko

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