Thirty years ago this week, I was holding my first child in my arms for the first time.

I was thirty-five years of age, already the veteran of two failed marriages, and considered by my doctor and my gynaecologist as an ‘elderly mother.’  It was last century (the 90’s) and the gestating mother’s age was a biggish deal back then.  Fertility options were way more limited than they are now in the 2020’s, and this pregnancy had only just met my own personal parameters for becoming a mother.

What were these limitations?

That I had to be in a stable relationship: I had NO desire to be a single mother!  I wanted my child to have the option of two parents, two engaged and accessible parents.  The second was that it be before I hit the age of 35: I didn’t want to be a physically OLD mother – for both my sake and my children’s.  (There’s a whole minefield to be explored here, I know, but that is not the purpose of this article.)  These, then, were my criteria.

As the youngest child of five, I had no experience or practice with younger siblings.  When I held other people’s babies I was stiff and awkward, the babies would cry and slip out of their singlets and I would pass them back to their parents with relief.  So, it is true to say that I was not a ‘natural’ in terms of becoming a mother.  My own childhood memories were not happy ones for me and certainly not populated by positive parenting role models.

Despite this, by the time I hit my thirties, after a somewhat unstable and undirected life – I had decided that being a parent was something I wanted to do.

Having children seemed to be one of the few non-ephemeral experiences that we as living beings could have. I was not career driven (never a fervent feminist, always a fervent humanist) and I had too often seen high salaries and high fliers fade very quickly into the all too rapidly receding past.  (We’re talking about the late eighties early nineties here, so there were plenty of examples to draw upon!)  Depending on the high opinion and kudos from others about my ‘achievements’ was not a driving force for me in determining the way I spent my life.

And I was fortunate to have a pretty good pregnancy and delivery despite my ‘elderly’ status.  There was one incident though, that I still cringe and chuckle about to this day, and it happened during the week of my 35th birthday and just before we knew I was pregnant.

To celebrate my big ’35’ my husband planned a surprise dinner at the very chic revolving restaurant at Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower.  There I was, slim, coiffed, dressed to the nines in my Anthea Crawford black lace cocktail frock, seated by the window in the revolving tower, just a few bites into my rare steak, when it began!  Overwhelming nausea!  I  spent most of the evening communing with the white porcelain in the restaurant bathroom, either with my head in the toilet bowl, or cooling my flushed face on the floor, praying for the vile tide to recede.

Eventually I made it  back to the table, where my husband had made a valiant attempt on my meal as well as his, relying on the waiter for conversation – but of course the atmosphere was understandably frosty!  A few days later we found out we were pregnant, but we NEVER went back to that restaurant!

As our marriage staggered on for just a few more years through all sorts of external forces, another wonderful child arrived, two more sadly, were lost, and we went on and made the best of it given our humanity and our brokenness.

As I look back over the years I have come to believe that all of the difficulties around conceiving and bearing of children are as nothing, NOTHING , compared to that of the responsibility we bear them as they grow into adulthood and as thinking, feeling, SEPARATE human beings, they start questioning us and holding us accountable for our actions as ‘parents.’

I know now that I carried over the experiences of my own youth and upbringing, into the lives of my children as they grew and created their own lives and relationships. I created patterns, and sowed seeds that flourished for better or worse in my children.

I feel always incredibly lucky that  my children do care for me, and mostly forgive me for my failings.  There are plenty of instances where children do not and can not.

Of course the title of this article begs the question that, given the choice to become a parent, in hindsight, would I still take the same path, go past that point of no return?

Choice only really became a viable option for a woman in my lifetime with the easy availability of the contraceptive pill – for me as a very young woman, I was able to obtain this, and this was in strict contrast to my parents’ generation.  I’m pretty sure that if my mum had this choice, I would not be here, let alone several of my siblings!

So, would I do it again given my history and years of hindsight and watching my children grow into young adults, seeing who they are today?

I will answer in two ways, and then you the reader can decide.  Firstly, whatever I say doesn’t really make a difference because my/our children are here and are most decidedly and emphatically their wonderful selves.

My first impulsive reply is the selfish one, and that is NO. Not because of who my children are, but because I am not now, and was never, fit to be a parent.  I was too damaged, mentally broken and self focused to be able give kids a psychologically healthy parent to ‘bang heads with.’  I know this as I see their pain and trauma derived from my patterns as they have matured over the years.  It is reflected in their own experiences and I can see the difficulties it causes them.  As parents we witness that pain in our adult children, and may even selfishly appropriate it and make our children’s crises all about US.  Which of course can aggravate the divide between parent  and child.

The second answer is YES.  I  can see the challenges they have grown through and survived over the decades since their birth.  Their dad always said something along the lines of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ and I believe that I see this in both of them.  My hope is that they will choose to take their experience of our parenting to make them stronger and lift them up, rather than choose to adopt a ‘victim mentality’  to restrict them to a ‘less than’ life.  And I do get the latter – I battle with it constantly.  This answer is probably still a selfish one, in that I can see my kids are so much better than me, and I do feel great pride in having brought them into the world!

This latter then, is the hopeful answer.  The answer that demonstrates our  faith and trust in the child, that he or she will choose to survive their parenting – to take the best, understand and forgive the worst, and enable and use that gained understanding in parenting their own children, should they decide to choose that role in their own life stories.

And, as I write,  I now realise that this ‘yes’ is my over-riding answer.  Because I do have, abundantly, that faith and trust in my own children as I see them now in their 30th and 28th years.  I know they have the humanity, the compassion, and the intellect to make the choice that I was so ill-equipped to make before I spent that first day, with my first child in my arms.