When Being a Granny isn’t Enough

Yesterday, my mother celebrated her 57th birthday. With three grown children, three grandchildren and another one on the way, she has both affection from young children and the freedom from direct responsibility for them. For a growing number of her contemporaries, though, being a granny is not in the cards.

Instead, they’re enjoying first time motherhood. Today’s Guardian, features an interview with one of these women, but she is far from a single case:

• In Britain, more than 20 babies a year are being born to women over 50 following IVF treatment with donor eggs harvested from much younger women. The psychiatrist Patricia Rashbrook is about to become the country’s oldest mother at the age of 63. In North America, according to the most recent statistics from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, 323 babies were born to women aged 50-54 in 2003 – more than double the figure of 144 born to the same age group in 1997.

True, the woman profiled is a former Olympic athlete, but whose to say a woman of 50 can’t be as energetic as a woman of 30? After the first 6 sleepless weeks of motherhood, we all feel about 100.