Never too late

THE intelligence is alarming: reports of sequinned shorts on mums over summer at the kindy end of school, bare shoulders, cleavage.

THE intelligence is alarming: reports of sequinned shorts on mums over summer at the kindy end of school, bare shoulders, cleavage.

That instead of meeting for coffee they meet for ... walks. Brisk ones. In gym gear. And in five short years, among all this effulgent youthfulness will be ol' grandma here, dropping off wee Jago on his first day. Yep, the one who began her career with typewriters and cassettes. So old she no longer recognises the starlets on the cover of Vanity Fair - such a painful barometer of middle age - and not only doesn't recognise them, but buys the magazine not for the cover story but the boring articles around it. The joys of ageing.

A year ago, I wrote about having a baby at an obscene age. The affronted rallied. A Perth obstetrician, Dr Barry Walters, wrote most sternly that planning a pregnancy beyond the age of 39 was "entirely self-centred". Why is it so often men who are enraged by the very thought of older mothers; women who dare, perhaps, to desire careers and autonomy before settling into parenthood? Surrounding all the late mothers I know is nothing but gobsmacked, soaring shock - of the joyous kind. For these are often mums who've been hampered by years just slipping away, or a

Mr Right never quite materialising, or an unimaginable grief involving futile attempts to conceive, or repeated miscarriages. Oh, it hurts. I've lost two babies. The pain was enormous, ragged, yowling. "Cry and cry again," said a sensitive radiographer, "it's a bereavement." Yes.

So, a year in, a report from the coalface of late motherhood. We're not advocating leaving it so late but for a lot of us, it felt like our body's last hurrah before the wintriness of menopause set in, like an Indian summer bursting into miraculous, shocking, gleeful warmth. Was it the Pill's introduction that caused this modern unease over older mothers, combined with a reproving, mostly male medical fraternity? Before this, women had babies right through the years of fertility because that's what they did. Charles Darwin's wife had her last at 48.

Of course I'm tired, but I was tired with the firstborn 12 years ago. And then it was all compounded by the shock of the new. I was less in control; horrified at this other, exhausted woman who occasionally slipped out; despairing at the vast shunting-aside from a former self that felt almost rude, shocking. Now I'm no longer trying to fit it all in and getting frustrated when I can't. With us older mums the relationship's often settled, as are finances and, crucially, career. We're more empowered. In the words of a fellow oldie-mum, "We've got balls now." We're calmer. More confident. More resilient emotionally and more relaxed. It only helps the child. My parenting attitude now is, "Whatever feels right." Increasingly, that's what chimes with nature.

At Jago's birth I was classified as hugely at risk because of age. Would be induced on the due date for the child's safety. Was reluctant to start that day on a drip being pumped with hormones. Tried a cervical sweep, which made me think of nothing so much as being in the back of a Cronulla panel van - painful, intrusive, awkward. It didn't work. What was my body telling me? To walk. I did, on the beach. And Victorian women used to clean floors to bring on labour - I ended up on all fours, miming scrubbing. Reader, I scrubbed that baby out of me. The contractions started soon after. Jago was born in less than an hour, half an hour before his due date. I was 44.

The affronted say it's too risky, selfish, stupid, that we're no role model. But don't be talked out of it if you're trying. I'm giddied by the thought of Jago, eating him with kisses just to hear that giggle, so life-affirming, wondrous, miraculous. He's keeping me young. Dr Walters, take note.