Why I love being a Geriatric Mother
When I was 13 or 14 I dreamt about being a grandma.
I was a grandma and I had grey locs and I was happy.
From the moment I woke up, I knew I had to get locs and that what I dreamt would happen. That dream is literally the reason I have locs now. My parents made me wait till I was 18, assuming I'd grow out of it or change my mind, but I never did. I went to my freshers ball with a messy afro because I wasn't allowed to wash my hair or put anything in it before they put the locs in.
So my first thought was get the locs but not really thinking about the fact that I would have to have a baby in order to have grandchildren to fully achieve the dream.
I spent most of my 20s in an awful relationship. It never really occurred to me to want kids with him - I thought that we maybe could once we had settled into a healthier dynamic but that time never came.
After we ended, I had to rebuild myself and my life, not thinking about the future. It never occurred to me to worry about a ticking biological clock - how could I care about my maturing womb when I could hardly look after myself, was living with my nan and often struggled to sleep without drinking? It took more than 2 years to recover, to find my feet and finally have the room to just work on getting myself to a good place for the first time in my adult life, really.
And then the seizures came. Three months before my 30th birthday. I’ll never know how many grand mal seizures I had as they happened in my sleep. I would have complex partial seizures at my desk at work and just disregard them as anxiety attacks (the fact that I would just brush off anxiety attacks as nothing to worry about is so indicative of the ridiculous place I was in emotionally, even at a time I thought I had sorted myself out). So the rebuilding began again and at a much deeper level than before.
And then I met Jack
Writing about Jack and what he has brought to my life would be my Infinite Jest: a work of pure love that most people wouldn’t be able to finish but those who did would be changed forever. So I’m going to resist the urge and will just say: any good that I had built for myself in my life at that point increased exponentially when I totally opened myself up to him. I didn’t know how to be scared or insecure about my feelings when it came to him. I loved him instantly and that made me brave and loud and happy.
And all I really cared about was being a great partner and doing as many cool things together as possible. We always say it's a shame that we didn't meet when we were younger (I'm glad we didn't, I was a nightmare) but I think we met at the perfect time. I was far away from my previous relationship, I’d lived the life I should have been living as a young woman in my 20s living in London and I wasn’t looking for anything - I felt like I was whole and was open to meeting someone that would complement me, not complete me.
We weren't in a rush. We were just going to enjoy ourselves and if it was too late when we were ready to start a family then so be it. We loved each other to the point that we wondered if bringing someone else into our dynamic would ruin it - we wanted to be selfish and not have to share each other with anybody else.
But then I had a miscarriage and, if nothing else, it revealed just how much I did want children. I already had a family - a husband and 2 cats - and a child would be lucky to have us. I wanted to know that love that all parents talk about; that ‘nothing else in the world is like it’ love; that ‘it makes no sense’, ‘how can i be joyful, scared and tired all at the same time’ kind of love. I wanted all of it.
And so here she is. And Ramona is so much cooler than any of us could have anticipated. But so am I and so is Jack. We’re so much better now than at any other point in our lives; there is no better time for us to have become parents. We’ve done so much and understand so much more than we did in our 20s. I have failed and soared and loved and lost. More importantly, I’ve done all of that and I’ve processed it emotionally. I have a foundation that, even if parts of it existed before, has never been this strong.
I could never have had the baby before now, or before I was 35. My life was insane but also I wasn't the strong and happy person that I am now. Even the miscarriage taught me things about myself and revealed issues that I hadn’t realised were there. If I’d had a baby in my 20s, that child would have been born into my emotional chaos and nobody deserves that. The gorgeous babies clambering all over the happy, grey haired woman in my dreams don’t deserve that.
