By LISA HURT KOZAROVICH
I never thought I’d say this, but if I want to fit in, I may just have to move to Hollywood. My husband and I adopted a baby just before my 40th birthday. In the celeb world, I’d be chic. Here at home I’m just an old(er) mom.
I’m almost positive Brooke Shields and Marcia Cross have never been asked if their children are their grandchildren. It’s happened to me three times in 10 months.
Granted, I don’t live in Southern California, where it seems some combination of plastic surgery, good genes and a tan halt the aging process. I haven’t had Botox and it seems my roots are in perennial need of a salon visit, but seriously, grandma?
C’mon people, it’s 2007, I want to scream at those who have made the assumption.
Madonna, Juliane Moore and Annette Benning were all 41 when they first had children. Jane Seymour had twins at age 44. Susan Sarandon gave birth to her first child at age 46. Mimi Rogers, 45. Holly Hunter, 47. Geena Davis, 48. And Cheryl Tiegs was 52! The list goes on and on.
And it’s not just celebrities. In the United States, births to women over 40 have doubled since the 1970s. And between 1980-1995, the birthrate for women 40-44 increased by 81 percent.
The average age of first-time moms is at an all-time high in the United States, even if it’s still only 26. In other countries, it’s higher. In the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia and Canada, the average age of first-time moms is now 30 years old, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics. In fact, in Britain, there are now more first time moms in the 30-34 age group than in the 25-29 range.
Why, then, have two waiters and a retail clerk, assumed my tot is my grandchild?
My friends, God bless ’em, assure me it’s because my husband and I are white and blonde, while our daughter is not. That doesn’t necessarily fly, though, because on two of those three occasions, my daughter and I were alone. How did these curious observers know my child’s father wasn’t African-American, or consider that she was adopted?
The fact that they jumped to the wrong conclusion no doubt bruised my ego. I don’t consider myself vain, or particularly concerned with how others view me, but still, no 40-year-old woman wants to have someone assume she’s a grandmother, even if she is.
Being a first-time mom at my age has enough aggravations. Rudeness abounds. Strangers have asked how I plan to cope with my child’s embarrassment of my age as she grows older. I don’t know; how does your child deal with your embarrassing big mouth I stifle myself from blurting out.
The other issue, or so I’ve been told, is that moms over 40 don’t have the energy to deal with young kids. Does anybody really have that kind of energy? The twentysomething moms I know are just as exhausted as I am when they’re up all night with a baby.
And the best, and only, baby-sitters I have aren’t the neighborhood teens — they are my 53-year-old cousin and 76-year-old mother, both of whom crawl on the floor, dance through the house and generally carry on with the energy of someone a half their age. My own mother was 36 when I was born, and she played baseball, rode bikes and stayed up for all night slumber parties much more often than my friends’ younger moms.
So give us over-40 moms a break, and instead of assuming we’re our child’s grandmother just assume we’re members of the growing ranks of women who have waited until motherhood was right for us.
