You keep at it, old boys! Breed away! I just wish people weren’t so antsy about the old girls, now that we’re doing the same thing.
We may be a few years behind Sir Paul, but we’re catching up. Western women, as has been widely reported, are becoming mothers later in life every year. In fact last year, for the first time, there were more first-time mothers aged 30-34 than there were aged 25-29.
Perhaps I’m oversensitive, due to the fact that I have a very young baby myself, and at 39 — though significantly younger than Stewart or McCartney — could hardly be described as a spring chicken. But it seems to me that where the old boys get a nod and back slap, the old girls are more likely to be gently encouraged to worry.
We are fed a constant drip of negative, alarmist stories about the dangers of “delaying motherhood”, and I can’t help it, I smell a rat.
For example, there was that pernicious report in the British Medical Journal last year which complained that women who put off having children until their late thirties were “defying nature”. But given the vast numbers of women who are doing just that — and with great success — it can’t be the case, can it? Thirtysomething women and nature are clearly getting along just fine.
The BMJ authors were led by a certain Dr Susan Bewley, consultant obstetrician at St Thomas’ hospital. “Women want to have it all,” she announced sanctimoniously, “but biology hasn’t changed.” And yet the old bags are still breeding, aren’t we. How very dare us. Perhaps it’s because we were always meant to.
Last week, we were told that babies born to older mothers are almost half as likely to live to 100 than babies with mothers under 25. Like a lot of mothers, I felt a lurch of guilt when I first read that. Until it occurred to me that even if it were true (which I doubt: famously, there are three types of lies . . .) who the hell wants to live to 100 anyway?
More worryingly, last month came another report, this one claiming that the daughters of older mothers were more likely to wind up infertile. “With every year that a woman delays childbirth,” panted the author of said study, “it becomes more difficult for her daughters!”
On closer examination, that particular study turned out to have been drawn from a minuscule number of women, all of whom were already having fertility treatment. More lies. More statistics. “We need data on the general population to confirm this,” the author finally conceded, “but we think we’re going to get it.”
What’s the matter with them all? The fact is we are having babies older, and in the vast majority of cases they’re absolutely, wonderfully, perfectly fine. And okay, maybe at 62 Patricia Rashbrook was pushing it a bit. Maybe that was not ideal. But then, if only ideal people ever had babies, the human race would pretty quickly come to an end.
We should ignore the doom-mongers. Laugh at the statistics. And lie back and think of Madonna. If she can do it — at fortysomething and all scrawny and driven — then anyone can.
- I became aware that Father Christmas didn’t exist at about the same time, and with the same slow dawning, that I finally realised my friend’s deceased father hadn’t, in fact, “taken too many pills by mistake”. Unhappy truths have a way of surfacing eventually, however hard our good parents may try to bury them. And the funny thing is, in both instances I didn’t care much anyway. Children don’t. They don’t care much about anything really, the lucky things, except the instant they happen to be living in.
In any case, I distinctly remember pretending to believe in Father Christmas for several years after the slow dawn broke, for fear that if I didn’t an excellent source of presents would almost certainly dry up.
And who knows if my parents believed I still believed; or if I believed they still believed, er, I still believed? Crikey. I mean to say, what a lot of lies we tell each other at Christmas, and isn’t that about the only thing that makes it bearable?
There’s a teacher in Berkshire who found herself in terrible hot water last week after she broke that final parental taboo and told a class of nine-year-olds that neither Santa nor his reliable friend Rudolph were for real. According to the parents (which category, as we’ve established, don’t always tell the truth about these things) many of the children came home wreathed in tears.
But they must have been crocodile, if they existed at all, because no nine-year-old could possibly believe in Father Christmas. We all know that. Nevertheless the parents of these particular nine-year-olds were beside themselves with rage — and I don’t blame them.
Christmas had been ruined, they said, though for whom they didn’t specify. An emergency meeting between teachers and school governors was convened and a new policy regarding Santa quickly announced. From now on, when a child asks a member of staff at Calcot junior school about the veracity of said fantasy figure, they have agreed to respond: “I’m not sure . . . go home and ask your parents.”
Funnily enough my six-year-old son did just that only the other day. And I found myself lying through my teeth. Not only does he exist, I said, but he takes monumental offence when people suggested otherwise — so much so that any child claiming not to believe in him stood a very strong chance of being struck off his present list.
My son hurriedly assured me of his own conviction in the matter. And I had a nasty flash of the torture scenes in 1984. Tell me little boy, I said, dangling my hairdryer over his bathtub: how many fingers am I holding up? Most sane, intelligent adults find Christmas excruciatingly depressing, but they put up with it — all the effort and expenditure, the misery-eating, the idiots with Santa hats in the street — out of some obscure compulsion to indulge that peculiar addiction all children have to unwrapping things.
The Christian theme, for many of us, has long since failed to have much resonance. But thanks to the legend of Rudolph and the magical fat man in the sweaty red hat, exhausted adults can persuade themselves that Christmas is about more than gluttony, sloth and picking up bits of broken plastic off the floor. It’s about fantasy. Though whose, I wouldn’t like to say.
daisy.waugh@sunday-times.co.uk
