FamilyI know what your life will be like, Eliza
Last week, a 66-year-old Romanian became the oldest woman ever to give birth. Coco Gillespie, who knows first hand what it's like to have elderly parents, predicts misery ahead for Adriana Iliescu's babyShe is only a few days old and I have never met her, but I could already tell Eliza Maria Iliescu a lot about her life. Eliza, an only survivor of triplets, was born in Romania on Sunday by caesarean section. Her mother, Adriana, will be 67 in May - making her, as far as we know, the oldest woman ever to have given birth.
I, too, am the child of an older mother, and in my day I was almost as remarkable. When I was born in the late 60s, my mother, aged 50, was just beaten to the "world's oldest first-time mother" spot in the Guinness Book of Records by a 52-year-old.
In the late 60s, the fertility treatment that led to Eliza's birth was not available, of course, but although I came into existence in very different circumstances than Eliza - by accident, not design - our lives will in many ways be similar. It is almost inevitable, for instance, that she will suffer a heavy burden of childhood worry and sadness, and quite probably also resentment, and loneliness.
While my mother had always wanted children when she was younger, it had not happened, and she certainly was not trying to get pregnant when I came along. In fact, she thought she was going through the menopause when her periods stopped - and was devastated when she found out that she was actually four months pregnant.
It was a terrible shock for her. In her 50s, with her contemporaries planning their retirements, my mother had to find the energy to wash nappies and run after a toddler. One of her clearest memories is of breastfeeding me in the middle of the night in floods of tears as she contemplated the terrible thing she had done by bringing me into the world when she and my father would doubtless be dead by the time I was 10.
In fact, my mother (whose own mother died at 65) is still very much alive and well at 85, and my father (whose father died in his 50s) died only last year at 83, though after a very long and distressing illness. Despite my luck in not having been orphaned as a child, however, the offspring of elderly parents are always stalked by the spectre of death, and this will be even truer for Eliza than it was for me.
For years as a child, I was plagued by recurring dreams about my parents dying, or of how I would manage to care for them if they became incapacitated. Despite Iliescu's claims to come from a family with a remarkable history of longevity, a long life does not necessarily equate to long-lasting physical or mental health, and no young child should have to consider how they would cope with putting their parents into a home or organising a funeral.
Another huge issue is the toll taken on the elderly by teenage hormones, and I wonder just how Iliescu, assuming she reaches the age of 81, will cope with a 15-year-old daughter. My parents, who were born just after the end of the first world war, were in many ways liberal and even bohemian for their years, but they had vastly different ideas from my friends' parents when it came to child rearing in general and corporal punishment, boyfriends, access to television, the playing of my "inane" music and use of the telephone in particular.
Then of course there were their attitudes to homosexuality, race, the royal family, the "youth of today" and other issues likely to inflame the heart of a pompous teenager spoiling for a row.
The huge gulf in age and attitudes made conversation often impossible and upsetting rows frequent. I took the adolescent mantra "It's not fair!" to a whole new level. But I even felt cheated of fully enjoying my self-righteous outrage, because the rows were followed, for me, by a sickening sense of guilt at my behaviour given the loss I was sure to suffer sooner rather than later.
Probably because they were less physically able to protect their child than other parents, my parents also worried, incessantly it seemed, about where I was, who I was with, and when I was coming home. Bringing up a child on a pension cannot have been easy either, so there was little in the way of pocket money and we only ever had one family holiday.
In my 20s I went abroad in search of adventure, but the insistent background worry caused by my parents' increasing age-related ailments eventually meant that I couldn't think straight or sleep properly. I had to return home.
Much earlier in life, I recall the excruciating embarrassment at school when teachers or fellow pupils would announce that my "grandad" had arrived to collect me. The irony was that most of my grandparents had of course died long before I was born. The only exception, my father's mother, died when I was nine.
Worse than lacking grandparents to spoil me was missing out on having siblings, and even cousins of my own age. Growing up in a small village, I also had few child friends. My parents' friends' children were already adults, so a lot of my socialising was done at grown-ups' cocktail parties.
Today, at the other end of the scale, it is my parents who have been cheated. My father died just before I found out I was pregnant for the first time and, while it is wonderful to see the joy in my mother's eyes when she holds my baby, it is mixed with great poignancy because there is so little time for her to see her granddaughter grow up, and for my daughter to know her grandma.
Being the child of older parents had its plus sides too, of course. With both being retired, I never came home to an empty house, and always enjoyed home cooking (hearty and English, of course. I did not experience the new-fangled taste of garlic or other exotics until I left home).
I was also bewitched by the tales my parents told of their long lives before I came along. Both were in the forces during the war and had consequently travelled the world, notching up incredible experiences along the way. But the best parts of my childhood were definitely in spite of, not because of, my parents' age, and I resolved at a young age not to have children late in life.
Most people at some point will have to worry about, care for, and grieve for their parents. But usually this is at the end of the full process of parenthood, which allows time for children to cause their parents heartache and disappointment - and then to make up for this in later decades of getting to know and appreciate each other as adults. We do not usually have to undertake this responsibility - as Eliza will have to - as children. And she of course will be trying to do all this under the full glare of the media spotlight, which is going to make it harder still.
Today, as a new parent myself, I am finding it hard enough to deal with the sleep deprivation, mood swings and general exhaustion of caring for a newborn infant. No matter how fiercely she loves little Eliza, can Iliescu really cope with the physical and mental demands of bringing up a child?
My mother's reaction to the news from Romania is probably more telling than mine: "It's just selfishness on the part of the mother and absolutely awful for that poor little girl," she says. "What was that woman thinking of, deliberately bringing a child into the world at that age?"
ยท Coco Gillespie is a pseudonym.
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