What’s really annoying is people who find it so extremely odd that I have a 19-month-old kid at my extremely advanced age that they feel the need to ask me about it several times in a row.
“So. . . you’re saying she is your daughter?”
“She is.”
“Daughter?”
For just in case my language skills are so poor that I don’t know what the word means.
“Yes, my daughter.”
“Huh. And she’s how old?”
“Still 19 months old.”
“Huh. I guess I just didn’t know you had such a young kid. Your daughter, eh?”
One would think that academics, at least, would be more acquainted with the possibility of 40-year-old women having kids, but no such luck. I’m not in the least self-conscious about my age. But this is boring to me because I only like to repeat things in the classroom where I get paid to do it.
I have a colleague who gave birth at 47. I’m thinking of sending these folks to her so that she can give them a coronary with her late-life fertility and lighten my burden.
Maybe I should get a T-shirt that says, “Yes, I gave birth at 39. You mind?
Clarissa's Blog 
You overrate people with high I.Q.s and advanced degrees. My mother was 40-years-old and my father was 48 when I was born, and nobody back in the small Tennessee town where I was born asked any questions. Perhaps that’s because it was a small town where everybody knew everybody else, anyway.
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Thank you for sharing this! I’m currently very much into such stories.
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Wait….. did I miss something? You mean to tell me that this charming littel girl that you sometimes post pictures of….. is your DAUGHTER????
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This must be a regional thing because in my NYC neighborhood, which has a lot of professional women, it seems to me that everyone I meet had their first child between the ages of 35-42. The ones who were younger are anomalous.
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js
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Exactly. My new friend who just moved here from NYC is pregnant at almost 42 and found it completely normal and unremarkable that I was 41 with a toddler. It was a great relief.
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I don’t know why your colleagues are so shocked.
My grandmother had my last aunt at 37. This aunt claims that if my grandmother hadn’t had a heart attack at my age she would have kept on having children, and I would have an aunt that’s my age. (My mother actually has a couple of aunts and uncles that are her age or younger because her mother’s mother had 10 children.)
I also read somewhere that <a href=’http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24128176″>people derive fertility statistics about conceiving after 30 from one study of 17th century French peasants, who didn’t have modern medicine, nutrition, electricity, or reliable birth control.
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The link again: The 300-year-old fertility statistics still in use today
Also important: they didn’t use germ theory.
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Agreed. In my small California city, even parents in my toddler’s preschool are in the 35-45 age group. The youngest is 35 (had her kid at 32) and the oldest 44.
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