Why It’s Not So Rare to Get Pregnant after 45

Hope for Older Women Trying for Healthy Babies

Current conversations about fertility are failing the millions of women world-wide who are over 40 and trying to get pregnant. When we talk about the best time to conceive or  how much fertility declines with age, we talk past a huge community of women who are hoping to become mothers after 40.

I remember the recurrent sorrow and crazy-making frustration of trying to get pregnant, starting when I was first ready to become a mother—not until I was 41—and lasting until I was lucky enough to conceive my first child at age 45. Our child was born when I was 46 and is, I’m incredibly grateful to report, now a healthy, happy 4 and a half year old. I also remember how unhelpful much of the discussion around fertility and age was, during those years when I was trying and failing to get pregnant or to carry a pregnancy to term, a time I’ve written about in my book, The Good Shufu.

Because here’s the thing: Women like these, and like I once was, are not in the position of deciding when to have a baby or whether they should try before reaching “advanced” or “very advanced maternal age.” The ship has sailed on that one. The reality is, they are already in their 40s, and the teeth-aching desire to meet and hold their baby has not declined with age.

Surprisingly, for women over 40 who want to conceive, the most relevant—and most hopeful—information isn’t even found where people usually look during discussions of fertility. Instead of focusing on studies comparing fertility at various ages or surveys of ART successes and failures, we should look to US census data on births and, perhaps paradoxically, to statistics on abortion, menopause, and sterility.

To be clear: I’m not arguing women should wait. I’m not arguing they shouldn’t. I’m saying that if a woman happens to be in her 40s and trying to conceive, she should know there actually is some hope, tempered though it may be. The chances are certainly smaller than when she was 25, and even 35. But that’s immaterial now. And it doesn’t by any stretch mean there is no chance. This point bears stressing and examining in the absence of comparisons with younger women.

Besides having given birth to a healthy baby conceive naturally when I was 45, I’ve also been unusually lucky to have heard from almost 1,000 women, aged 40+ who are trying to conceive or who are already pregnant and who have found me through this blog, then gone to my book’s website to contact me. I love hearing from all of you and am grateful to be privy to some of the uncensored thoughts, concerns, questions, and emotions being shared among this population.

Especially for those women 42 and older who get in touch, I hear frequently that they’ve either heard or just feel they have “no chance,” a “0%” likelihood of becoming mothers with their own eggs. A significant number also tell me they feel ashamed, have been told they’re “crazy” for thinking they might have a shot. These are the women I’m writing this for now. (And you go, ladies, for trying!)

Overlooked Stats Show Hope for Women 40+

Census statistics on live births & medical abortions

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/report002.pdf: According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2016, there were 111,848 births, (1.1% of population) to women 40-44. This covers all births, not just births to women who were trying to conceive, suggesting that if all 40-44 year olds in 2016 tried to conceive every month, the percentage of women in this age group who’d had babies would be considerably higher. To women between 45-54 (with the great majority falling between 45-49), 9,025 babies were born.

Combining these stats with those on abortion in 2015 for the 40-44 age group, (20,962)–the latest age group and last year in which statistics were collected–and then dividing this number by 3 (accounting for expected 33% miscarriage rate in this age group), we could expect to add around 7,000 babies, totaling close to 120,000 births. This number would actually be a low estimate, since many miscarriages occur before scheduled abortion dates.

All together, we could expect between 125,000-130,000 live births in 2016 to women 40-49. Put into context, that’s a population of babies likely greater than the total population of most of our hometowns.

Perhaps most significantly, these statistics hold steady or decline only somewhat when viewing births before egg donation was available in the US (See births 1933-1998 @ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/natality/mage33tr.pdf.)

Sterility & menopause

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12268772: According to a review of the literature pertaining to declining fertility with age, the likelihood of permanent sterility at age 40 is about 40% and at age 45 is about 80%, meaning one of out every five 45 year olds should be able to become pregnant at some point during their 45^th year.

http://www.healthline.com/health/menopause/pregnancy#1: As explained by executive director emeritus of the North American Menopause Society Dr. Marjory Gass, pregnancy even in the mid-to-late 40s is not impossible for most women. “Never assume, ‘Oh, I’m too old to get pregnant,’” Gass has said. “Unless you have gone a year without a period–the technical definition of menopause—pregnancy remains a possibility.”

Birth defects & miscarriage

I get a lot of questions over email and on this blog about whether getting pregnant in the 40s, especially in the mid-40s, guarantees a miscarriage or a child with a genetic abnormality. Many women, myself included, field questions from family members about whether it’s even wise to get pregnant or hope for a positive outcome given the dire statistics on Downs, etc., for older mothers.

When viewed from the perspective of high the risks are compared to pregnancy at 25, the numbers do look grim. But when viewed from the perspective solely of the chances for a healthy baby at various ages throughout the 40s, the numbers are much more hopeful (and again, relevant):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071156/: “For women at 42 years of age, more than half of the intended pregnancies (54.5%) resulted in fetal loss…The risk of spontaneous abortion [was] 84.1% by the age of 48 years or older.” So yes, these are scary statistics, and they aren’t great, but they are better than many people fear and assume, especially if we look at them in reverse, from the perspective of a positive outcome rather than negative: a 45% chance of success for a 42-year old to carry a pregnancy to term, and even a 15% chance of success for a 48-year old.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6455611 & https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Genetic_risk_maternal_age : The estimated rate of all clinically significant cytogenetic abnormalities at age 40 is 15.8 per 1000, meaning we can expect between 98-99% of all babies will be born genetically healthy. For age 45, it’s 53.7 per 1000, or between 94-95% of babies. Even for women giving birth at 49, only 12.5% of babies will carry a genetic abnormality, meaning 87 out of every hundred babies will be born genetically average.

So if you’re out there now and are trying to conceive in your 40s, please know that I’ll be keeping you in my thoughts and hoping you have the same good luck I—and almost 9,000 other women aged 45-49 in the U.S. last year—had. And please know that I and thousands of other women are out there, pulling for you.

Note: For more about trying to get pregnant, you can also see An Honest Take at Getting Pregnant Naturally at 45, Getting Through to Getting Pregnant at 45 and On Delivering My First Child at 46, other blog posts I wrote in the hopes of supporting people slogging through infertility, although some of the content from these is reproduced in this post.  Based on requests in the comment section of this blog and through email, I’ve started a new online group, New Mothers at 45 and Up, and I welcome you to join us there. Finally, if you’re still interested in my path to motherhood later in life, the story of how I met and fell in love with my husband and then went through years of IVF and finally got pregnant naturally, is in my book The Good Shufu. 

Navigating a Safe Pregnancy in Your 40s

I’m so touched by all the emails I get from women trying to conceive in their 40s and from people interested in pregnancy at a later age. One person I loved hearing from through this blog is reporter Kristine Crane, who writes about women and health for US News & World Report‘s Wellness section. Her latest piece is “Navigating a Safe Pregnancy in Your 40s,” and it starts with our story, then goes on to look at those of other women, couples, and doctors involved in later-life pregnancies and the quest to conceive in your 40s:

At age 45, Tracy Slater, an American expat writer living in Osaka, Japan, resigned herself to the fact that she might never be a mother. After a few years of failed fertility treatments and two miscarriages, she and her husband continued trying to have a baby – but shifted their focus to Slater’s husband’s dying father.

So when Slater developed what they assumed was a stomach bug, they figured she had picked it up at the hospital while visiting him. But it turned out she was seven weeks pregnant. “They already saw a heartbeat,” Slater says. “And I’d been drinking one or two glasses of wine a night, and a cup of coffee everyday.” In addition to drinking alcohol and caffeine – not advised for women trying to conceive – Slater was also overwhelmingly stressed over the prospect of losing her beloved father-in-law.

In other words, she was not in ideal fertile conditions – and yet, she had become pregnant. “I still have dreams they made a mistake. I still can’t believe I carried to term this healthy child,” says Slater, author of “The Good Shufu.”

While Slater’s outcome is certainly not the norm, and one she attributes to good luck, it’s increasingly common to see women in their 40s have successful pregnancies – through IVF, egg freezing, donor eggs or more rarely, as in Slater’s case, natural conception.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pregnancies among women in their 40s has increased by about 2 percent per year since 2000. In 2014, there were 10.6 pregnancies per 1,000 women in this age group.

Read the full article here at US News & World Report

 

When parents are in the majority, kids in the minority

Grateful to the Wall Street Journal‘s Expat Blog for publishing this piece focusing on some of the issues I’m trying to work out about race, privilege, and identity as a white parent married to a native Japanese man and raising a mixed-race child in Japan.

From ‘Blind Spots’ and Other Problems in Globally Blended Families:

As a woman in a multicultural, multinational, and multiracial couple, I’ve sensed how some people assume I must be uniquely open to cultural differences, and thus uniquely equipped to raise a mixed child. But this assumption betrays a flawed logic. Globe-trotting parents in mixed marriages who grew up in the majority may be aware of racism and may even have faced it themselves, but most still lack a deeper understanding of racism during a child’s formative years.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal online.

An Honest Take on Getting Pregnant Naturally at 45

If you’ve landed on this page after a random web-search, you aren’t alone.  The topics of “natural pregnancy at 45” and “getting pregnant at 45” draw more visitors than any other to this blog, I only have  few other posts on this whole blog solely devoted to trying to conceive in my 40s (a topic I also write about it my book), and together they’ve gotten almost a half-million views and have encouraged almost 1,000 women to reach out directly over email to share their stories, fears, and/or frustrations. So if you’ve landed here because you are struggling with infertility, I hope this post gives you some comfort and especially helps banish any guilt you may be feeling about what you are or are not doing to have a baby. Please know that although I (probably) don’t know you personally, I’m keeping you–and the many others out there struggling with trying to have a baby, especially at a later age in life–in my thoughts.

The Basic Story

I got pregnant naturally at 45 and a half, and I delivered a healthy baby four months after I turned 46, our first and only child. I conceived this child after more than four years of IVF and other fertility treatments in Japan, where we live and where my husband is from. During this 4 years, I’d had 2 miscarriages and a whole slew of diagnoses for my infertility.

“How did you get pregnant naturally at 45?” people often want to know. Here’s how, I’m assuming: We got really lucky.

My husband and I both longed for a child, but we didn’t consider using donor eggs or surrogates, because they are not approved in Japan, and because we desperately wanted a child that came from both of us biologically (a feeling I wrestled with and felt very conflicted over, but that was true, and that I wrote about for the New York Times). I’d been diagnosed with high FSH, a luteal phase defect, a blood-clotting disorder, low progesterone, and inconsistent ovulation. As well, of course, as being old. I tried acupuncture, herbs, fertility yoga, and multiple fertility diets and dietary restrictions to try to make my maternal age “younger.”

When I turned 45, we decided I’d stop all medical treatment, because the statistics on pregnancy at or past 45 with a woman’s own eggs were so dire. (My husband is 5 years younger and was in good procreative health, according to our doctors, so the issue was me, I felt sure.) I stopped all the fertility diets and acupuncture, too, as well as the special fertility yoga, although I continued to do regular yoga. I started drinking wine again and coffee whenever I wanted. I felt freer in some ways, but also very sad.

I had a deep, gnawing yearning to meet our baby, and I felt sure that our baby existed somewhere, but I was trying hard, after my 45th birthday, to adjust to the fact that I was probably never going to meet our baby or hold our baby, because of my age and all of the factors my doctors had said would prevent me from getting pregnant and giving birth to a healthy baby.

Still, my husband and I continued to try to monitor my body’s cycles and to try to conceive a child naturally, mostly because my husband is an optimist and he convinced me there was no reason not to keep trying, and I couldn’t find a reason to disagree with him exactly.

When I was 45, my father in law got very ill. I loved him deeply, and I spent every day at the hospital in Osaka with him. My husband and I were both stressed and sad and very, very tired, so when I thought I might be ovulating, we tried to conceive but were so exhausted and overwhelmed we only managed to try once or twice a month for a while.

But one of those months I got pregnant. And now our child is 2, and perfectly healthy.

How My Pregnancy Contradicted Some of the Myths or Rules You May Be Struggling With

I’d be lying if I told you now that I know how I got pregnant naturally and delivered a healthy child after I turned 46. And, no offense to anyone, but I’d guess that most people are lying–or at least are wrong–when they say they know the key to getting pregnant at an advanced age.

I tried really hard to be a good fertility patient–to eat the right foods and to avoid all the wrong ones, to stay healthy, to do the right things and not any of the wrong ones, etc.–and I always felt every month like I was failing. I was never 100% perfect with my diet, and of course I was never pregnant, or pregnant for long.

I can’t say for sure that none of the acupuncture or fertility exercise or diets I followed had no impact, because I did end up getting pregnant with a healthy baby eventually. But I wasn’t following any of this for at least six months before I ended up conceiving, so I certainly won’t say that any of these myths or rules proved true for me, either, at least not for the month I got pregnant and the half-year or so leading up to it:

• If you’ve never had a child or carried a pregnancy to term, you can’t get pregnant naturally and deliver a healthy baby after you turn 45.
• Drinking coffee will stop you from getting pregnant.
• Drinking wine and/or beer will stop you from getting pregnant. I’ve never been a heavy drinker and I hardly ever have hard alcohol, but I drank a glass or two of wine or beer almost every night from my 45th birthday on, up until I was about six weeks pregnant–until the moment we learned I was pregnant, or actually about a week before that, when I started to feel nauseous (which at the time we attributed to a stomach bug I assumed I’d picked up visiting my father-in-law in the hospital).
• Being stressed out will stop you from getting pregnant. As I write above, I got pregnant during one of the most stressful times of my life. And seriously, who isn’t stressed out when trying to conceive after, about, the first month or two of trying.
• Thinking negative thoughts will stop you from getting pregnant. Let’s just say I’m not an optimist. I had negative thoughts all the time while I was trying to conceive and I always felt irked by the advice to think positively (more about this below). Struggling with infertility sucks and is incredibly hard, so go ahead and forgive yourself a negative thought or two–or two thousand.
• You will get pregnant once you stop trying. As I write, we were still trying every month, just not with medical intervention anymore.

Resources & Ideas to Support You if You’re Trying to Conceive

Although I don’t know exactly how or why I got pregnant at 45, I do know what helped me get through my years of infertility and losses, and get through it with my marriage enough intact that my husband and I were still happy to keep trying naturally after my 45th birthday. In the hopes that some of these things may help or at least give solace to some of you, here they are:

1. Accepting both the sadness and the freedom that corresponds with realizing I didn’t have much control at all over my own body: The number one thing that helped the most was actually something my dear friend Jenna said, which was roughly something like, “The most important thing to remember is that you have basically no control. Your body is just going to do its thing, and there is not much you can do to affect that one way or the other.” When she first said it, it sounded harsh and maybe even a little hopeless, but then when I thought about it, I realized both how true and also how freeing it was to accept that, for the most part, there was very little I could do to control–and thus very little I could do to ruin my chances of–getting pregnant. This may not be true for people who have structural impediments to conceiving or carrying a baby, but for many of us, whether or not our body produces a healthy egg and releases it at the right time and nurtures it the right way is something we cannot master. As I’ve mentioned, my doctors had so many reasons why I couldn’t produce or release or implant an egg normally without shots, pills, weeks of medical preparation, or another woman’s eggs, but in the end, my child’s first little cells formed, released, and took hold all by themselves. I didn’t even know about it until my child was 7 weeks past conception.
2. Accepting some negative or sad thinking while balancing that with an effort to take good care of myself as much as possible. Plus a podcast: I could never deal with the “positive thinking” movement–something else I write about a bit in my memoir.  First of all, unbridled optimism just isn’t my thing. But even more than that, it felt crushing to me to force myself to think happy thoughts about how an embryo was implanting or how I’d be pushing my baby in a carriage soon, and then every month to not get pregnant again.But I was able to find a resource that helped me combat negative thinking, which in turn helped keep me grounded in a space that balanced honesty with the tough odds I was facing, with solace and assurance that I was doing everything I could to stay healthy–and that I could feel good about that. I used podcasts by Belleruth Naparstek (especially the ones on fertility, anxiety, and general well-being). I liked these because they didn’t force false hope down my throat but enabled me to focus on staying healthy, but I think you could use anything meditative and it would help.
3. Keeping up with my yoga as much as possible: Related to this, I did yoga almost daily, sometimes fertility-centered yoga but mostly just whatever kind of yoga routine I felt like I needed to feel best at the moment. I’m not saying that helped me get pregnant physically–or emotionally, for that matter. Plenty of people do yoga and still don’t get pregnant, and arguments about doing certain kinds of exercise (or diets, or thinking regimens) in order to get pregnant are specious at best, I believe, and dishonest at worst. But the yoga helped keep me strong and as relaxed as possible (which of course wasn’t very relaxed at all, especially not during treatment).Perhaps most of all, when I turned 45 and started to try to accept that my odds of getting pregnant with my own eggs had statistically dwindled to zero, the yoga really helped provide solace while I mourned. It also left me feeling like I hadn’t completely lost 4+ years of my life to infertility, because one thing the experience had given me was the ability to do so many more yoga moves than I’d even been able to do before. That, of course, wasn’t nearly equal to the pain of thinking we’d never be able to meet our baby, but it was something I was still grateful for, and finding anything I could be grateful for, at that point, helped.
4. Keeping my focus on the love in my marriage, and on how lucky I was to have found my husband–child or no–also really helped me. Even after my husband and I gave up trying medically, remembering my love for my husband enabled me to know that we would be OK, that I would be OK, even if we never got to meet our baby. This was hugely helpful especially as I started to mourn the idea of having a child, when I turned 45 and we stopped all medical treatments and I thought my chances were basically nil. And if I hadn’t been able to get through all this with our partnership intact, then essentially I would never have been able to have my baby, because we wouldn’t have still been trying naturally.

I tell the story of how long we waited for our child, and all the ups and downs this waiting entailed, in my book, The Good Shufu. But I post this now in the hope that it gives some comfort and encouragement to anyone who reads these words and is struggling to get pregnant or feels guilt about whether you are too stressed or doing the wrong thing to conceive. And I wish the same incredible good luck for you too.

Note: Based on requests in the comment section of this blog and through email, I’ve started a new online group, New Mothers at 45 and Up, and I welcome you to join me, and many other readers of this blog, there. 

The Trailing Spouse’s Guide to Surviving Expat Re-entry

Fun having this piece on trailing spouses, accidental expats, and re-entry blues in the Wall Street Journal‘s Expat Blog today, co-authored with a new friend who is a military spouse based in Tokyo, the blogger Susan Dalzell. In it, we give a series of tips for surviving the dreaded “re-entry” phase back into your expat country after even a short trip home.

We start,

For those of us who are trailing spouses or “accidental expats”—drawn abroad not necessarily for our own careers or sense of wanderlust but for a partner’s job, family or nationality—global life presents unique challenges and sacrifices. Western culture in particular glamorizes expatriate existence, suggesting a life of global travel, international panache, and a social circle of like-minded explorers: a slightly more multicultural, perhaps sober, version of Hemingway and his brood.

Reality can hew a little rougher, though…

My favorite tip we include is this one, drawn in part from the struggles I explore and the lessons I learn in The Good Shufu:

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t always (or even ever) love your expat “home.” As a trailing spouse–especially if you’re married to someone from the country where you live–you may have asked yourself when you’re going to fall in love with your overseas home just as you once fell in love with the partner who brought you there. If you’ve recently been back to your native country, you may have heard friends and family comment on how exciting your expat life must be and how lucky you are to live abroad. But don’t let this guilt you into thinking you always–or frankly ever–have to love the land you’re in….As long as you’re fascinated by it, or even continually learning from it, you’ll have an expat life worth its weight in yen or euros or…

See our handful of other tips for surviving the re-entry blues in the full article at the Wall Street Journal online–and add some coping strategies of your own, if you have any new ones!

 

My Father-in-Law Made Me the Mother I Am

So happy & honored to have this piece up on Brain, Child Magazine‘s homepage. It’s about how caring for my beloved father-in-law as he died made me both a sadder and a bigger person, about how he “convinced me I could care for a child, that I’d grown big enough in the shadow of his decline to be a mother.”

It begins:

My Father-in-Law Made Me the Mother I Am

By the time I married my husband, I’d already fallen in love with my father-in-law too. Not in any weird way, but alongside all the passion and love for my husband was a deep affection for the man he lived with, the man he called Otousan.

My husband, Toru, is Japanese, and in Japan, it’s not uncommon for people to live with their parents until they marry. Toru was chonan, the oldest son, the one who should care for his parents as they age. When Toru’s mother died in a car accident, he left his company-backed MBA program at the university in Boston where I taught writing, and he moved back to Osaka. Soon after, I went too.

We moved into an apartment a few blocks from Otousan’s. Most nights, I’d cook dinner either at our place or Otousan’s, and we’d all eat together. My father-in-law spoke little English, and like many older Japanese men, he wasn’t what you’d call a loquacious fellow. But in between his silent welcoming of me as family in a country where marriage to foreigners can spell shame; his kind laugh at my dismal attempts to learn his language; and his grateful head-dips towards the tea I poured him after every meal, I grew to love him.

I may have loved my father-in-law, but I was terrified of having his grandchildren—or any child, for that matter. Not because of who or how Otousan was, but simply because having children is terrifying if you go into it with eyes-wide-open. At age 40, the year Toru and I wed, my eyes were pretty wide open.

I knew it was a myth that every mother bonds easily with her baby. I knew people who’d never bonded with their child, and one who said that, if she had to do it all again, she might choose not to procreate at all. I could imagine becoming one of these mothers.

Read the full piece at Brain, Child Magazine online,

My Piece in Washington Post on how Writing & Giving Birth Have about Zero in Common

Excited to have my first piece in The Washington Post‘s “On Parenting” site, one of my favorite new columns. I originally titled the post “Let’s Keep Books & Babies Separate,” although it’s been renamed by On Parenting’s wonderful editor, Amy Joyce, to “Writing a book is like giving birth? No, not at all.”

Here’s how it starts:

As any reading parent knows, a common claim made by writers—female and male—is that ‘writing is like giving birth.’

As a woman in my 40s who couldn’t sustain a pregnancy but who finally scored a memoir deal, few comparisons rankled me more. Now, as a 47-year-old new parent with a spanking new book to boot, I’m still frankly baffled by the equation.

When, after nearly five years trying and failing to have a baby, well-meaning friends tried to cheer me with, “Well, at least you’ll be giving birth to your book soon,” I wanted to respond, Really? But I bit my tongue. I was thrilled to have a book deal. Who I was to complain? (Out loud, at least.)

But truthfully, the book deal didn’t come close to compensating for, or even seem relevant to, the experience of turning 45 and hearing doctors tell me I had statistically a zero-percent chance of ever getting to meet my baby.

Then I became pregnant naturally at 45 and half. I live in Japan, where my husband is from, and at four months past my 46^th birthday, I gave birth in Osaka to a healthy baby girl. So I suppose I had one more chance to compare the experiences—the incredible good luck!—of creating a book and a baby that would both live to see the light of day….

See the full piece here at The Washington Post online, and learn why I think the experiences of pushing out a book and a baby have about zero in common.

I kissed my student. Then I married him.

Here’s a short video clip from my reading at the Tokyo launch party for The Good Shufu at Four Stories Tokyo.

It narrates what happened just before my first kiss with the shogun.

PS. Apologies for the background noise. We like the Four Stories events to be festive so we encourage eating and drinking even during the readings. The upside is the funny, tipsy questions we get at the end. The downside is the occasional background noise!

Getting Through to Getting Pregnant at 45

I started this blog because of my book, a memoir about marrying someone from another world and then giving up my world (the US) for his (Japan), but I’ve noticed that the #1 search that leads people here involves pregnancy at or past 45.

The latter part of the book is where I tell the story of how long and hard I tried to get pregnant, and then how I somehow managed to get lucky enough to get pregnant naturally at 45–after 4+ years of infertility treatments (in a language I barely speak) and 2 pregnancy losses. But I wanted to write something quick and easy to access here, for all of you who come here searching right now for more information on the topic.

I remember sharply the sadness and disorientation of not being able to get (or stay) pregnant, the incredible endless-seeming limbo of it. So although of course I don’t know most of you personally, I’m keeping you all in my thoughts, and I hope you know how brave you must be to be wading through the pain of being not-pregnant.

I’ve written before about some of the myths of getting pregnant that my own pregnancy seemed to contradict. I’d be lying if I told you now that I know how I got pregnant naturally and delivered a healthy baby girl after I turned 46. And, no offense to anyone, but I’d guess that most people are lying–or at least are wrong–when they say they know the key to getting pregnant at an advanced age.

But I do know what helped me get through my years of infertility and losses, and get through it with my marriage enough intact that my husband and I were still happy to keep trying naturally after my 45th birthday. In the hopes that some of these things may help or at least give solace to some of you, here they are:

1. The number one thing that helped the most was actually something my dear friend Jenna said, which was roughly something like, “The most important thing to remember is that you have basically no control. Your body is just going to do its thing, and there is not much you can do to affect that one way or the other.” When she first said it, it sounded harsh and maybe even a little hopeless, but then when I thought about it, I realized both how true and also how freeing it was to accept that, for the most part, there was very little I could do to control–and thus very little I could do to ruin my chances of–getting pregnant. This may not be true for people who have structural impediments to conceiving or carrying a baby, but for many of us, whether or not our body produces a healthy egg and releases it at the right time and nurtures it the right way is something we cannot master. As I’ve mentioned, my doctors had so many reasons why I couldn’t produce or release or implant an egg normally without shots, pills, weeks of medical preparation, or another woman’s eggs, but in the end, our child’s first little cells formed, released, and took hold all by themselves. I didn’t even know about it until our baby was 7 weeks past conception.
2. I could never deal with the “positive thinking” movement–something else I write about a bit in my memoir.  First of all, unbridled optimism just isn’t my thing. But even more than that, it felt crushing to me to force myself to think happy thoughts about how an embryo was implanting or how I’d be pushing my baby in a carriage soon, and then every month to not get pregnant again. But I was able to find a resource that helped me combat negative thinking, which in turn helped keep me grounded in a space that balanced honesty with the tough odds I was facing, with solace and assurance that I was doing everything I could to stay healthy–and that I could feel good about that. I used podcasts by Belleruth Naparstek (especially the ones on fertility, anxiety, and general well-being). I liked these because they didn’t force false hope down my throat but enabled me to focus on staying healthy, but I think you could use anything meditative and it would help.
3. Related to this, I did yoga almost daily. I’m not saying that helped me get pregnant physically–or emotionally, for that matter. Plenty of people do yoga and still don’t get pregnant, and arguments about doing certain kinds of exercise (or diets, or thinking regimens) in order to get pregnant are specious at best, I believe, and dishonest at worst. But the yoga helped keep me strong and as relaxed as possible (which of course wasn’t very relaxed at all, especially not during treatment), and when I turned 45 and started to try to accept that my odds of getting pregnant with my own eggs had statistically dwindled to zero, the yoga really helped provide solace while I mourned. It also left me feeling like I hadn’t completely lost 4+ years of my life to infertility, because one thing the experience had given me was the ability to do so many more yoga moves than I’d even been able to do before. That, of course, wasn’t nearly equal to the pain of thinking we’d never be able to meet our baby, but it was something I was still grateful for, and finding anything I could be grateful for, at that point, helped.
4. Keeping my focus on the love in my marriage, and on how lucky I was to have found my husband–child or no–also really helped me. I’ve written about this in the past too, for the New York Times online, but even after I wrote that article, and even after my husband and I gave up trying medically, remembering my love for my husband enabled me to know that we would be OK, that I would be OK, even if we never got to meet our baby. This was hugely helpful especially as I started to mourn the idea of having a child, when I turned 45 and we stopped all medical treatments and I thought my chances were basically nil. And if I hadn’t been able to get through all this with our partnership intact, then essentially I would never have been able to have my baby girl, because we wouldn’t have still been trying naturally.

If I think of other things that helped me get through infertility, I’ll post them. In the meantime, I am wishing each and every person who reads this post the same good luck that somehow the universe delivered to me when I delivered my healthy baby girl at 4 months past my 46th birthday.

For more about trying to get pregnant, you can also see An Honest Take on How I Got Pregnant Naturally at 45 and On Delivering my First Child at 46, other blog posts I wrote in the hopes of supporting people slogging through infertility, although some of the content from these is reproduced in this post. Based on requests in the comment section of this blog and through email, I’ve started a new online group, New Mothers at 45 and Up, and I welcome you to join us there. Finally, if you’re still interested in my path to motherhood later in life, the story of how I met and fell in love with my husband and then went through years of IVF and finally got pregnant naturally, is in my book The Good Shufu. 

Later-Life Parenting, TV, & the World’s Youngest Democrat

The mini, 11 months old now, has a new favorite activity: clapping. She spends a lot of time each day clapping along to her musical toy cell phone. (Yes, we bought her a toy cell phone. Actually, two, but that’s another story.)

The other day in our living room in Japan, CNN on was on satellite TV, playing in the background while the mini and I went about our morning routine. I like to leave CNN on sometimes during the day so I can hear English–it makes me miss home a little less. I know some experts say children shouldn’t even look at any screens until they are at least two years old. But I think the extra exposure to English for her and my need to stay sane and rooted in my own culture as an expat in Japan, both outweigh any argument against her seeing a screen. As older parents, we tend to sweat the small stuff a little less, I think. (Thus, the two toy cell phones, one could argue…)

In any case, that day CNN was showing live coverage of the State of the Union address in the US. When Obama was introduced, Congress burst into applause. The mini enthusiastically clapped right along.

So proud that she already identifies as a Democrat.