I am forty years old. It’s the age when doctors designate a pregnancy as “geriatric” or refer to the mother as a woman “of advanced maternal age.” It’s the age when the older generation jokes that you are “past your prime” and you can almost feel your dwindling supply of ova shrinking inside you.

I was thirty-six years old when a fertility doctor told me I was incapable of conceiving children on my own, that I should look for an egg donor. I was thirty-seven when I decided I wasn’t going to let one man decide that I couldn’t be a mother. I would find a different opinion, a different way.

I started my fertility journey late in life so I always knew the struggle was partially my fault. Part of it was stubbornness – my mother had told me I was meant to be a mother so of course, I had to prove her wrong. I focused on my career, I traveled the world, I lived my thirties as if I was still in my twenties. I wanted to show her – I was meant to be all these other things first. But also, I didn’t meet the love of my life until later on… the one I was truly meant to share my parenting journey with. And then, when pregnancy didn’t happen right away, I thought, maybe it was too late for me?

I never told my mother when she was alive that she was wrong, that I’d been trying and failing for years, and it didn’t look like I could be a mother after all.

I battled my grief over losing her alongside my grief over my perceived infertility. A blend of a life lost and a life never to be, an oil and water mixture that turned my insides into mush. A loss of identity as her daughter and the inability to attain identity as a mother myself.

I’m not going to pretend like I made it through that dark period of my life with grace. My therapist often referred to my tendency to sink into the depths of my emotions as my “deep, dark, swirly place” and that is how I picture that season of my life now – the deepest, the darkest, the swirliest place I had ever been. I had started to believe I deserved to be in the cavernous, isolated hole I found myself in. I almost gave up, almost couldn’t see a way out.

Nevertheless… (you know the rest). Persistence. Grit. My stubbornness came back, this time with more powerful motivation. Turns out, I had a lot of fight left in me. There were others I needed to prove wrong this time. For starters, that fertility doctor with his indifferent shrug and casual hands lifted, palms-up to the air. And everyone who told me you couldn’t have babies this late in life, that you would be too old when they were still so young, that it wasn’t the right way to do things, that perhaps it was time for me to let that dream go.

At thirty-seven I gave birth to my daughter. And now, at forty, I am pregnant again. This one also didn’t come easily – I lost a pregnancy last year at twelve weeks gestation, just when I had let my guard down that I was out of the woods of the first trimester. After I thought I’d healed, an ultrasound revealed a growth in my uterus that my doctor suspected may be cancerous and I had to have surgery. It was benign, but my recovery dragged on.

But this time I was prepared for battle – I was bolder, stronger, hardened from what I’d been through; I would not give up so easily. When the deep, dark, swirly place beckoned, I refused its grasp, shedded its grip on my ankle and kicked, hard.

Still, it was a shock when I quickly became pregnant again, just a few months later, just before my fortieth birthday.

I thought, “okay, I won’t get my hopes up, and if I — when I — get past twelve weeks, I can relax, we can celebrate.” My first pregnancy I was one of those annoyingly happy, glowing, peppy mamas-to-be. This time I kept it a secret, sharing my fears along the way only with my husband, who received them with tenderness and solidarity. Even when we found out the baby’s gender, it didn’t feel real. I wouldn’t allow myself to buy maternity gear, to plan out the baby’s room in the house, to imagine life as a family of four. My little bump grew and I hid it under flowy dresses and extra long tops.

The twelve weeks of the first trimester came and went but my anxiety did not relent. “If everything’s okay at the next doctor’s appointment, we can tell people,” I would say. And the next. And the next.

It wasn’t until I was almost twenty weeks along and felt my baby boy kick for the first time that I fully exhaled. I laid still, hand to swollen belly, for hours after feeling him move that first time, feeling my breaths move in and out with his little body alive inside me.

Finally, this once-deemed-infertile, geriatric pregnant mama was ready to breathe, to love this little boy, to name him, to allow my hand to cradle that little bump in view of strangers outside my home, in my fearless proclamation to passersby in a Walt Whitman-style yawp of an exclamation: I am forty and I am pregnant. 

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in this series “Bold.”