Posted on 10/13/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Eurotwit
Women who put off getting pregnant until past their mid-thirties are ‘defying nature and risk the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage or other complications,’ began an article in my morning paper a week or so ago. I put down my toast and read on with the grim fascination of someone who turned 30 this summer and is beginning to feel the first twinges of anxiety about the vigour of her own ovaries.
The piece quoted a woman called Susan Bewley, a consultant obstetrician and one of the authors of a report on fertility in the British Medical Journal. ‘Women want to “have it all” but biology is unchanged,’ said Bewley. ‘The best time to have a baby is up to 35. It always was and it always will be. Paradoxically, the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility.’
Bewley went on to talk about the whopping cost that older women having less healthy babies is putting on the National Health Service, and concluded that women must be persuaded to have babies younger. ‘I don’t want to blame women or make them feel anxious or frightened,’ she said. ‘The reasons for these difficulties lie not with women but with a distorted and uninformed view from society, employers and health planners.’
How nice of Dr Bewley not to blame us for what she calls ‘the epidemic of delayed pregnancy’, but I think she has the wrong end of the stick. Women of my age have not been lulled into a false sense of fertility. We aren’t yet frightened — I hear outright fear kicks in at 40 — but we are well aware of the dangers of trying to have children once we’re past our reproductive prime. We’re informed and beginning to be concerned.
We’re also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having children — and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a collective failure of nerve among men our age.
How many young women do you know, happily married or the equivalent, who are wilfully refusing to have children now at the risk of running the gauntlet of IVF in five years time? Quite.
Dr Bewley accuses women of ‘playing Russian roulette’ with nature, but the point is we’re only interested in having babies if they are fathered by men we love and who are going to stick around and enjoy bringing the little brutes up. By the time they hit their mid-thirties even the most dedicated career women are ready to do some nesting — even if that means grudgingly accepting that our careers are more likely to suffer than our mate’s and that we’ll probably end up changing most of the nappies. The trouble is that very few of our male contemporaries are what you might call twig in beak.
There’s many a slip betwixt having an amusing, attractive boyfriend and the pair of you committing to the long haul of marriage and children. I know dozens of delightful men of my age and considerably older who say they want to get married one day. They will even go as far as talking about how comparatively young their own fathers were when they sired them, and fret about how geriatric they’ll be by the time they have a son of their own to kick a ball about with. Yet they are careful to preserve the idea of getting married and/or settling down as purely hypothetical and entirely out of their control — as though a meteorite might hit the earth one day and when they come to they’ll be at the altar. In the meantime they concentrate on having as much immediate fun as they can and dodge thinking about next month or next year for as long as possible.
And who can blame them? If our biological clocks didn’t jump-start us into wanting babies, I think many women would do the same. Ours is a generation that has grown up with the luxury of being able to pretty much please ourselves — especially when it comes to our romantic lives. The power of parental pressure and societal disapproval has all but evaporated. Nobody is made an honest woman of anymore. These days the only reason to marry or commit to anyone is because you really, really want to and you think you’re going to carry on really wanting to. Yet the whole art of pleasing oneself is remaining free to do just that — something to which the arrival of a small child could prove an obstacle.
No one ever said biology was fair. I have accepted that in real terms I am suddenly much older than my male friends. When a great friend who turned 30 within weeks of me came round to discuss our shared milestone, it emerged that I was already bracing myself for my 40th birthday. He, needless to say, still thought of himself as being in his early twenties and claimed to have never considered a future with his girlfriend of two years’ standing because he ‘wasn’t ready for all that’. Of course not every man his age is in a state of prolonged adolescence, but a critical mass of them are. I recently went to a wedding where the presiding vicar actually congratulated the groom on having enough ‘backbone’ to commit to marriage while his spineless contemporaries squirmed in their pews.
I don’t know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die, we have little option but to wait, busy ourselves with making the most of our careers and hope that Mr Non-Phobic Right eventually makes himself known to us before our ovaries pack up completely.
As I finished my breakfast and contemplated my chances of a decade of heartbreak, I wondered whether women will be the only losers in this epidemic of delayed pregnancies. Isn’t it possible that, just as I have no interest in a relationship with someone significantly older than me, when the men of my generation get to the dark side of 40 they’ll tire of dating girls who are now revising for their GCSEs? They’ll still have a fighting chance of producing a few nippers, of course — but will they do it by settling for a much younger companion who falls far short of the intellectually equal but by now hopelessly barren soulmate they went out with in their thirties?
What can Dr Bewley and co. do to get them ready for fatherhood before their mid-forties? I fear that even Jane Austen wouldn’t have the answer to this one.
Women work for a few years, get married, and THEN decide whether they want a FULL career or raise the children. My sister will be out of the workforce until her kids hit elementary school. Even then, I'm sure she will have less time to focus on a career as my brother-in-law will.
Heh. Hubby will never be that, no matter what his communication skills - he just doesn't think that way. When I speak of communication skills I don't mean talking more - I mean developing more of an awareness of what you actually say, and of learning to make sure you're heard.
If someone is raised on a "shame-based" family that depends a lot on unspoken rules, they may not know that what they're saying is not what they mean, or that you actually have to articulate certain things for the other person to understand where you're coming from (and quite often, when they realize what they actually mean, they also realize they don't believe what they're saying...).
Some families literally teach their kids to not notice that they're regularly contradicting themselves - that they're saying two things that can't both be true, and that they're trying to function as if both are true. And they raise the kids to NOT say what they mean. Learning communication skills doesn't mean to give up judiciously considering your words - it means developing an awareness of how your words will sound to someone without your pre-conceived notions.
Can't be always sure you're understood by everybody, but in terms of marriage you can at least learn to speak much the same language, or to develop systems of feedback so you're alerted to the fact that communication has failed to occur. :p
We are entirely of like mind. I hope you read my parody of the expressive man, and get a laugh out of it! :-)
Are you a student of NLP, Neuro Lingusitic Programming by any chance? What you describe is a classic rapport and calibration issue. And you are 100% correct.
OK, we're in complete agreement on what the ideal time-course is. That's what I did--I got my education, got married at 27, and didn't resume work until many years later. But somehow the woman who gets educated and has to get a job because she doesn't find a husband right away is automatically considered the monster feminist sow from hell, as if she coldly and ruthlessly castrated every man who crossed her path just so she could accumulate money and power. And if she stays home to take care of the kids the men on this forum consider her a lazy leech. So Freeper women can't win.
I don't view it that way at all. A woman has to make a choice a man doesn't have to face. Either you devote time to your children, or you focus 100% on moving up in the world. If there was no such thing as a biological clock, woman COULD have it all.
Couldn't relate to 80% of what that couple's doing (dictating who your spouse can be friends with? Ack!), but this one part has been true of my husband:
It seems like it's never enough and your criticism is endless sometimes, and I feel no matter what I do you are going to come down on me, which really inspires me to do nothing so I can at least avoid some abuse, and....
That's pretty much what hubby said once when he was stressing at work (the project he'd spent tens of thousands of the company's money on wasn't coming together the way he wanted it to - although it did shortly thereafter :) ). I have said much the same to him as well - but in both cases, we realized it's more our impression of where the spouse is at than reality. In both cases, what we considered criticism was unspoken - we were indulging in mind reading - so either one of us saying we felt this way meant that we found out we were wrong. We were both projecting on our partner what we were actually thinking - he was feeling he'd failed and figured I was angry at him about it, when really I didn't think he'd failed at all.
Learning communication skills may not mean you talk any more than before - but it often means you quit miscommunicating. If a woman complains because her husband doesn't talk to her enough, and she actually wants him to chatter with her when he's not a chatterer, more communication skills aren't going to solve that problem.
Yep, I agree. The thing was a parody, of course. But it's not too far off the mark. I do think women in long term relationships exert more infleunce on their men, than men do on their women, on balance.
Forbidding friends? All my married friends have had their better halves 'nix' people from their lives. They did so. I don't entirely blame them.
Never heard of it. My parents were constantly doing the "you must accept two contradictory things at once" routine, which made me crazy, and I was always getting in trouble for demanding they pick one or find coherence or something, because for whatever reason I'm just highly tuned to that sort of thing. When I edit stories I'm most likely to catch stuff like the fact that the blonde on page five is suddenly a brunette on page 247, even if there's been no mention of hair color in the pages in between...
The screwy way shame-based families communicate (or work at not communicating) is discussed in a couple of Jeff VanVondern's books I've read; he may be bouncing off that system, I dunno. But I latched onto those concepts the minute I saw them, because I'd been dealing with them so long and he laid them out so well.
BZZZZZT! You are NOT allowed to speak the truth in the midst of a great battle in the war of the sexes. Sit down and shut up or you might take the fun out of all the whining on both sides.
Interesting. Hubby was just as happy I let some friendships lapse, but he's never ordered me to do so, nor have I ever heard of that practice among my friends. And he admitted that part of the reason he was just as happy to see those friends gone is that they reminded him of stupid things he'd done (they were his friends at one time as well), not that he thought they were bad people. Generally, I like his friends and vice versa.
But they have a built in excuse, they get PMS. but read what Dolly says:
Pms Blues lyrics
Eve you wicked woman, you done put your curse on me
Why didn't you just leave that apple hangin' in the tree
You make us hate our husbands, our lovers and our boss
Why i can't even count the good friends i've already lost
Cause of pms blues, pms blues
I don't even like myself, but it's something i can't help
I got those god almighty, slap somebody pms blues
Most times i'm easy going, some say i'm good as gold
But when i'm pms i tell ya, i turn mean and cold
Those not afflicted with it are affected just the same
You poor old men didn't have to grin and say "i feel your pain"
Pms blues, pms blues
You know you must forgive us for we care not what we do
I got those can't stop crying, dishes flying pms blues
But you know we can't help it
We don't even know the cause
But as soon as this part's over, then comes the menopause
Oh, lord, oh, lord
We're going to always be a heap of fun
Like the devil taking over my body, suffering, suffering, suffering
Everybody's suffering, huh?
But a woman had to write this song, a man would be scared to
Lest he be called a chauvenist or just fall victim to Those pms blues
You know we'd kill for less than that
Pms blues
You don't want to cross my path
Cause a pitbull ain't no match
For these teeth a clenchin', fluid retention
Head a swellin', can't stop yellin'
Got no patience, i'm so hateful
Pms blues, premenstrual syndrome
Got those moods a swingin', tears a slingin'
Nothin' fits me when it hits me
Rantin', ravin', misbehavin'
Pms blues
It's the only time in my life i ever think about wishing i'd been a man
But you know that only means one thing
If i'd have been a man, i'd be somewhere right this very minute
With some old cranky, naggin', raggin' hateful woman
With those old pms blues
Pms blues
I don't want to talk about it, we both could do without it
Got those treat your kids bad, don't you talk back
Gone ballistic, unrealistic
Awful lowdown, bitch to be around
Pms blues
You got it.
I was aiming that part at the other guy, who was exhibitng classic "scarcity mentality" symptoms.
And don't tell anyone about NLP! You'll give the Game away...LOL! ;)
Some families literally teach their kids to not notice that they're regularly contradicting themselves - that they're saying two things that can't both be true, and that they're trying to function as if both are true. And they raise the kids to NOT say what they mean.
I don't know how you hid the camera in our living room while I was growing up. ;)
That Game book you mentioned to me is indeed a riot! Kudos!
Happy anniversary. :)
I'm grateful for my 18 years of marriage as well.
Generally, I think that's the way it usually works.
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