Last Minute Mothers: Selfish and Narcissistic?

"Imagine I'm pregnant again!" My friend beamed. I was stunned. All too well, I remembered a holiday together in which we rummaged in a car without air conditioning, the entire Italian Riviera Riviera, in search of pharmacies and a specific hormone preparation. She had forgotten her pills against hot flashes at home. "Crap, when you get so early in the menopause and one of your own body turns off the juice," she had moaned - 46 at that time, while her sweat ran down his face.

So with medical help she switched on her body again, turned back the biological clock. At 49, she got twins. Very cute guys by the way, but also very wild. "My little aging spurt," my girlfriend calls her late offspring tenderly-ironic, because in fact she has not looked a day younger since the delivery than she really is. Sleepless nights, chaotic apartment - toddlers have a constant urge to move. When I accompany them to the playground, which 15 years ago devastated our then small children, we raise the average age of the mommies present for at least a decade.

"Do not you think we're both a little too old for that?" I asked her recently, as we crouched shivering on the edge of the sandpit and watched raging kids fight over the toy, "so I'd rather be on the sofa sit and read a thriller. " She just sighed.

Life suddenly seems full of promises

Of course, he feels good at first, this end of 40 unusual hormone boost. And nothing calls "Young woman!" louder and more convincing than a round belly that just is not the fat loop that otherwise nestles so stubbornly around the middle of the body when you start your second half of life. Consciously getting pregnant at an age when other women are thinking about hormone replacement therapies for menopausal osteoporosis and depression is like back in time. The already slightly dried out skin of the last-minute mummy is again juicy and well supplied with blood, the breasts are also rounded without silicone implants, life suddenly seems full of promises. Being young, new life, future.

Meanwhile, I see her in my home-style Hamburg quarter more often: high-medieval pregnant women in skinny jeans, from the open zipper a round fertility ball swells and in their blond hair suspicious gray shimmers, because colored streaks could possibly harm the embryo. A caution, by the way, the hairdressers for exaggerated.

"Late pregnancies, when consciously planned, are like a narcissistic boost," says psychologist Heide Gerdts. "It means: I still have everything, everything still works for me, I'll come through the TÜV!" No wonder the age limit keeps pushing higher and higher. 40 is the old 30, 50 is the old 40. Women decide later on for a child, because they often do not start professionally before the early 30s or the partner with papi potential only appears when their most fertile period is over. In addition, there are prominent women like Annie Leibovitz, who at age 51, or Gianna Nannini, who had their first child at the age of 54, a trend that is due to the progress of high-tech fertility medicine, which is rapidly increasing.

In the US, one in five mothers is between the ages of 35 and 45 years old, according to The New Yorker magazine. The number of women over the age of 50 is now well over 500 per year. Germany is following suit: Birgit Schrowange, Bärbel Schäfer, Cordula Stratmann, Susanne Holst, they are all in their 50s when they buy the school bag for school enrollment. Singer and actress Ute Lemper got in 2011 with 48 her fourth child. "Like a blooming blossom" she had felt during pregnancy.

Old parents are more patient, they say

But postnatal, late parents often feel like wrung out and then what my American friend Susan calls "weathered adults with dimple baby". That gray-haired Opis, who often push double-occupied children's carts through the streets thanks to her husband's hormone therapy, are not recognizable by her female companion, who is not a granddaughter, not a daughter, but a second or third wife.

The fact that men like Fritz Wepper become fathers again at 70 plus does not excite anyone any more because, when they are about to graduate at the age of 90, they are probably supported by a decade-younger partner. But what happens if women also deny their transience and become mothers in later and older years who, with only luck, at least as old women, become the 30.Experience the birthday of their children?

We still want to see old women less as sexual beings than men

Older parents are more patient, it is said, pensioners have more time and leisure than young career fathers, yet he is getting used to, the sight of 50-year-old mothers who breastfeed their babies in public. "This is due to the images we have stored," says Heide Gerdts, "Maria was young, Joseph was old, and fertility is also related to sexuality, so we do not want to see old women as sexual beings anymore than men."

The Romanian professor Adriana Iliescu, who was artificially fertilized at the age of 66 and now organizes children's birthdays at the age of 66, is still an exception. A cautionary tale is the Spaniard María del Carmen Bousada, who even gave birth to twins at the age of 67: In the gynecologist at the Fertility Clinic, she had said to be in her mid-50s. Two years after the birth of her children she died.

"20 years ago, I warned my patients, who wanted to be mothers by the end of 30," a gynecologist recalls, "I've alerted them to potential dangers like Down's syndrome or premature and abortion." Well, and now send I am in the late forties for donation of donated eggs to Warsaw, because there is no embryo protection law in Poland, I do not like doing it, but should I play God if a woman desires so much a child? "

But why does a woman want to have a child at an age when biology has stopped planning it? "Above all, it is the desire for new love," says Heide Gerdts, "for symbiosis and tenderness, because they often lack a partner or older children."

Children are conservative - they do not want special care

It is quite selfish, on the one hand, to want the magic of beginning and on the other to long for a nap when the child asks for games. Because in the length is the burden, as it is called beautiful, and a fit, attractive 50-year-old with baby or toddler feels very different than a 65-year-old with rebellious teenage daughter who kifft tattooed and her the door in front of the Nose slaps. Or a 70-year-old pensioner with a 25-year-old son who just wants to change his studies for the third time.

"Wanting late kids is also a bit selfish," says Heide Gerdts, "because you're telling your kids to handle their shame and fear that their parents will die and leave them alone." Children are conservative, they do not want special care, and old parents are one. And the day comes when old parents are too old for their young children.

Sure it is nice, this young life, where everything is poled on the beginning. The social network, which consists not just of early retirees with Zipperlein, but of young, hip parents, all the playdates, children's birthday parties, Sunday afternoons at the bouncy castle, where you just have to take care that you as a parent with his rotten bones and his higher degree of exhaustion is not unpleasant.

Not visually either. But if you're trying to be cool, squirming in high heels and tight skirts to avoid embarrassing your kid picking you up from school, you're often the only one. Because the other, the younger mothers, come in casual jeans and T-shirt and are cool and young without any effort. But do you have to be cool with 50 and 60 plus? "If I'm honest," says a 51-year-old mother on the playground and gives her five-year-old daughter a muesa sauce, "then I would most like to be her grandmother, to have love and give it over, that's it."