LATE MOTHER

★ ★ ★ ★

By Kristina Reinstadler

Most of us think we consciously make choices in our lives, but often we are led by the invisible strings of fate taking us along a predetermined path. How much of what we do do we really control? Having a child, whether and when we, as women, get pregnant, or even the sex of that child? In the past one would say the hand of God was involved. Did I choose to become a late mother? After many broken relationships in my late twenties and a voluntary redundancy from my job, I decided to leave my home country at the ripe old age of 33. It’s now or never, I thought, relocating to Germany, a country where I knew few people and could not speak the language. Family and friends in Australia thought I was crazy and it took me many years to form a shallow but stable foundation in my chosen new home.

I met my partner when I was 36 and we were both sure about wanting a family of our own. He, being younger, had time on his side, but I did not. It took time to get pregnant. Doctors looked at me sternly and told me it wasn’t going to be easy at my age with my hormones falling. Should we use medical intervention in the form of IVF? What if it doesn’t happen? I was 39 by the time I fell pregnant naturally and Geriatric Pregnancy was stamped in my Mutterpass, the personal medical notebook that all mothers get in Germany to chronicle each pregnancy.

At about 30 weeks of pregnancy my cervix had started to shorten to 1 cm. I was advised to rest and take high doses of magnesium to avoid early contractions. I followed instructions and everything was going fine until 36 weeks. It was a Saturday night around 10pm, I’d been chatting away on the phone to friends, my husband was working, and I was just about to settle down to Nirvana Unplugged on MTV but padded off to the toilet first. There I heard a distinct pop, like the clicking of fingers, and felt a trickle of water.

I couldn’t stop it, so it wasn’t urine, and I knew it must be amniotic fluid. I grabbed a towel and rang my midwife. I knew it was still too early for a full term baby. There would be no stopping it now, I realised. My child would be born the next day on my sister`s birthday, almost a month too early.

At this stage I was trembling because I realised I was alone, lying on the floor, with water still seeping out. I knew that I myself had been born two and a half months early almost 40 years ago and was frightened by the prospect of a premature birth.

I called my husband who arrived shortly, and he was followed by the fire brigade and ambulance. A large, motherly midwife took care of me at the hospital.  The labor was considerably short for a first birth taking only seven hours. I refused painkillers during this time in spite of experiencing excruciating contractions.

Then the most amazing thing happened at the moment of birth. At the moment my baby left my body I was completely clear and all pain was gone. This is what people talk about—“It was the happiest day of my life! It was beautiful!”— conveniently forgetting about the rest. I would more honestly say it was like the best drug, everything was luminous and I was calm and apologised generally to everyone for being in such bad humour earlier. Over the next days, I stayed on a natural high. The crash, like always, came later.

I swore after the birth that I would only have one child. But of course, one should never promise anything. One child could be a lonely child. Wouldn’t it be better if he had a companion?

The second child came 20 months later and it felt like it was without conscious planning. By now, I had actually turned 41! It ended up being an emergency caesarean. I heard the midwife whispering to the Oberarzt “She is an older mother and quite small build. Her other child was delivered naturally but that was almost two years ago.” My daughter had turned her head while entering the birth canal and become “stuck like a plug in a sink”.

Over the next years, I was “40 plus” and had two babies under 2 years of age. I actually wasn’t so nervous with the second child as I’d done it once before. I bought an expensive bicycle with a carriage at the front and whisked my toddlers through Berlin. I also had an enormous double pram with the older child at the front and the smaller baby behind. I felt like other, younger, mothers looked at me disapprovingly. But, you see, it wasn’t a mistake to have two children close together—it was an enlightened choice. They played together as they grew. They shared a room. They were brother and sister. They became our family.

Years later, I went to the parent evenings at the school, and being the oldest mother present, I was also sometimes the same age as another child’s grandmother. Thank God I look younger, I thought. I wasn’t so quick to run off to the playground with my children or chase after a ball over the years but I’ve never been the sporty type and my husband did this gladly.

The one thing that was missing, though, was the social network you have when you deliver and raise children in your country of origin. I had no grandmother there to jump in and help out, no aunties and uncles or cousins nearby for my children. My mother had passed away just before I fell pregnant with my first child. There was just a black and white photo of a beautiful Sicilian girl in her teens to show my kids. “That’s your grandma,” I would say. But the larger family network was not there. They were far away in Australia and only reachable by phone. Berlin had once again become an island for me where my husband and I cradled our little family.

On the other hand, I never regretted the choice I made to become a “late” mother. Perhaps unlike younger mothers, I didn’t feel like I had been robbed of my youth. I wasn’t dying to get back to my career. I didn’t want to get back to my former body. I didn’t regret not going to techno parties. You see, I had done and had all those things. It was a conscious decision and at the same time, fate had allowed me to have these things—children, motherhood, family and Geborgenheit, a warm sense of security. I wasn’t looking anymore. My new Heimat had given me the things that my former homeland couldn’t.  So being a mother, in the end, was never too late.