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.
Of course, having a child early can be brilliant for your health, your career, and your long-term ambitions, too. With my creaking hips and sleep-drained eyes and softening middle, I am definitely less physically exuberant than I was even just eight years ago, when I carried my son through London in a sling. By the time my baby is going into secondary school I will be in my 50s; I will know precisely zero about youth culture, I’ll have been edged out of all social media, and I’ll probably also look like some sort of hagfish from the deep sea. It makes me think of Jess Phillips, raging through a political career in her 30s, 40s, and 50s precisely because she’d got her mothering out of the way. There’s a lot to be said for that, of course. But then again, who ever credits women for making the wise decision to have children young? When did you last read a headline saying anything along the lines of: “Women in late teens and 20s improve chances of late-life career satisfaction and physical recovery by having babies before they lose their Young Person’s Railcard”?
The truth is, there is no right time to have a child, or more children. You are probably, at some point, going to be criticized, scrutinized, or dismissed at whatever age it happens. Which is all good training for the lifetime of criticism, scrutiny, and dismissal that parenting entails, I suppose.
But before I go: So the standardized mean age of a mother in England and Wales is 31, is it? Fine. We’ve all heard about women “leaving it later” and “gambling with their fertility” and “prioritizing their careers” and all the other fluff that clogs up our washing machines. But what was that statistic about the average age of fathers again? Was it 33.9? Nearly 34? That’s right. The standardized mean age of a father in the UK is more than two years older than it is for mothers, with all the health implications, career implications, and other baggage that number suggests.
If men are leaving it later than ever to become fathers, could we perhaps stop boring our attention into people’s uteruses and maybe dig into that a little more for once? Please?