do you think that it's possible to have a sensible conversation about awareness re falling fertility in the light of the other thread....

[Heathcliffscathy]

sorry about the humungous thread title...

but do you think we could talk about the question of putting off career to have babies/being aware of falling fertility as you age without resort to handbags at dawn?

i know it is a terribly emotional thing for all of us (me included massively). but is there room for discussing whether there should be a cultural seachange back to having your children younger...to avoid the pain and heartache of waiting til you're in your forties to start and struggling?

Bumper - i conceived ds1 within a couple of months but ds2 took nearly 2 years and we'd just been referred to the assisted conception clinic.

Really don't know what caused the problems as we were doing everything we could ie, lots of sex at the right times but it just didn't happen until the Dr decided to refer us.

But then when bf ds2 i unexpectedly got pregnant with dc3.

For me fertility has been such a lottery.

I'm very open about the problems we had conceiving ds2 (although i know that nearly 2 years is not that long compared to lots of people) and am always surprised by how many people then tell me about the problems they also had.

Good luck to all those ttc.

In theory i agree but I started at thirty and it was not easy to find a man to have a baby with- let alone a decent man!

I do agree that we can't have it all though. That is a myth.

countessdrac, just wondering what makes you feel you don't want ivf (don't worry if too personal a question)?

Even though I left it late biologiaclly my career ois still shit!
The thing is I don't miss my career whereas I'd miss not having dd.

I'd always actually assumed my sisters and I would have low fertility, since both my mum and my gran and my great-aunt did, and that I shouldn't assume I'd be able to have children.

My sister is a doctor and strongly warned me about having children earlier - she tells me that all her friends from medical school started to try to concieve at age 29, as they knew the stats of IVF.

When I met my DH, I realised that if I was going to marry him, it would need to be on the understanding that we wouldn't start trying for children until later in life, and that if I wanted to make surer of having children, I needed to find someone else.

There is no right time to have a baby imo. I think that it is a case of making hay while the sun shines and conditions are ok rather than the so-called ''perfect'' we have come to demand in the West.

Yes that's right posh, I have a girlfriend who told me 'I'm waiting until next month to stop the pill because we would like a spring baby, and I don't want to get pregnant before or after the months of August/September'. She thought that you'd just have to try one month. It was 2 years ago and they are still trying. Part of it is, I think sometimes, that some people are so used to having what they want, when they want, and might have problem accepting that it doesn't always work that way. (that includes me sometimes)

Absolutely right Poshsinglemum, when we started TTC DD we were living in a rented flat, had debts, not hugely well paid jobs and has not been married long, but due to DH's age more than mine we decided to do it anyway, and I would rather have her than not, despite the fact that I have had to change 8 squitty nappies in the past 2 hours while still recovering from D&V myself - bleugh!

The financial insecurity is tough though. DH and I work part time to share care of DD so every month we hit the edge of our overdraft, it's depressing. If we had waited 3 or 4 years we could have paid off our debts (mostly DH's from uni) and would have been able to save a bit but then DH would have been 46 or so and I was vaguely aware that fertility can decline in men, and have recently become more aware of the quality of older men's sperm affecting risks to pregnancy and the baby.

This is starting to become a large weight on my shoulders. I am 30 soon, am restarting a whole new career (including 3 more years of trainins), am living in a whole differnt country, and have no one at all on the horizon partner wise. My biological click is ticking loudly. I have taken myself off the pill after being on it for 16 years straight and am wondering if I should have a fertility test? Can you get one even if you are not planning on TTC in the near future?

Blueberry, TBH I was like your friend when TTC DD and I probably still am, although this thread has started to change the way I think. It was said earlier that we are conditioned from teenagehood to think that the minute a man comes near us with his willy we are going to get pregnant. I must admit it was a shock to me to not be pregnant after the first month! My mum was surprised too, she said she only had to look at a man to get pg, all three of us were 'accidents', and thought I'd be the same.

This has certainly made me think a bit more about starting to TTC, I wouldn't mind if I knew it would take six months or 1 year, but if it did end up only taking 1 month I would feel it was too soon.

hi all ok ive skimmed the thread and im admit im a bit ignorant on statistics around fertility.....
i have 7 children 3 when i was a young mum i was 18 years to 24 years
i had to have fertility treatment with two of those as i had problems ovulating.
when i hit 33 i had my son, thought it was a fluke really 11mths later i had my other son
i went to only having 3 periods a year i had another son in 2004
i turned 40 in 2008 and i hadnt seen a period in a year so thought ok its now safe and my new baby is nearly 1
my doctor said in some women they can be very very fertile around the 40 mark.
im a very lucky woman i count my blessing every day even though my baby is terminaly ill, i woudnt be without him.i know sadly this isnt the case for all women and i have considered being surrogate mum but im getting on a bit now....

9

I believe you can have some sort of test Lou. Someone I work with had one and found out that her ovaries were failing so I don't know what test they do but they must be able to test for something.

Re what I said ealier and my career - one thing I think is that you can only know the impact with hindsight. I didn't plan to have my children but it happened to work out for us. And I really do believe, that despite most people's intentions, it is impossible to plan these sorts of things!

Haven't read whole thread but want to put in my tuppence.....

It's not all women who are putting off having children until their 30's is it? It's mainly middle class, educated women. And of course middle class educated men.

I look back on my 20's and can't believe how immature I was. I had an incredibly extended adolescence, as most middle class people I know do. So much angst over my identity. So much time wasting. So many crap relationships. I don't think I could have married and had children much earlier than I did as the men who formed my 'dating pool' were even more immature than me, and not wanting marriage or children while there was the possibility of a decade or so of expensive holidays, clubbing and self-indulgence ahead of them.

Actually DH was drawn from outside my normal dating pool - he's a bright working class man three years younger than me, who didn't come over all faint and panicky at the thought of getting married at the age of 27 and having children shortly after.

I wonder if more men took advantage of family friendly policies then there would be less pressure on women to get their career established first.

Apart from Maternity leave which I take (because I bf) me and DP split childcare equally. We both work part time, if a child is sick we take turns to have the time off work to look after them. Not one of my work colleagues use a similar arrangement. It is always woman = part time man= full time. In our office (roughly 50:50 men to women) there have been no flexible working requests from the dads whereas there is at least 1 a week from a woman and they always take the time off to care for the kids when they are sick. Our policy is to ask if the other parents can take time off as well and we always get the same answer- no, they won't. These men work in a range of jobs, from office to building site but not one shares the juggling of childcare and job. Perhaps if society adapted to the extent that responsibility for children was shared equally between parents it wouldn't be a children/career decision but accepted that both parents could combine the two.

I know that if I had been thinking about having children and DP had not been willing to do things this way then I would have left ttc til later as I did want to pursue my career. Luckily he did & I'm so glad he did.

Career is obviously just one of the factors in the trend for later childbirth but it is one where I think there still is a genuinely uneven playing field.

We seem to fall for so many "big fibs" that we lose sight of what might be important to us. We want EVERYTHING to be perfect!

• home-owner!
• career!
• Perfect husband to be withforalleveryeternity!
• Two children and cricket in the park every weekend!

Along with the idea that some things are terrible:

• single parenthood!
• early parenthood!
• getting divorced!
• a shitty job!

I think if having a family is really REALLY important to you, you may need to compromise on the entire package somewhere.

Life isn't quite so Disney. There must be a balance between being responsible (i.e. perhaps not having 18 kids if you are on benefits, no offence like) but also accepting that all we have is TODAY! And you might well get knocked over by a bus in a year or two...

Well, I joined MN partly because we were considering and wanted to have a better idea of having kids really entailed. I guess we were still under the 'do not get pregnant - it's a bad thing' message.

Although MN has opened my eyes to the joys of having children it has also confirmed my fears that having a family is not cheap, working long hours and having kids is not good and going back to work can be really challenging (not wanting to leave the baby and having a job that's compatible).

So we both did some serious thinking and decided that we would want to be in a position were DH has is on business (which would be difficult and unfair to try to achieve after kids) and I can work part-time earning what I now earn full-time. This has mean further studying and re-training for both of us.

I wish we could be in SIL and BIL position who had children in their early 20s and now they are flying the nest and they can pursue their own interests (hobbies/work/etc). But they have the advantage of living in a country where the cost of living is reasonable and even someone with a very modest job can afford to provide for their children and have a good quality of life.

Being 26 (DH is 30) it feels like we're stuck in no man's land: we've missed the have kids early and build your career afterwards; if we have them now it will be very difficult financially/career wise and if we leave it later we might not be able to have kids at all

I thought maybe we were being too idealistic in terms of lifestyle but there's no way we could afford £400/week for a nanny on our current incomes and not work terribly long hours.

CountessDracula What type of job pays enough for you to pay £1600/month for a nanny and have plenty left over without working long hours? It's a genuine question because I've given a lot of thought to possible careers but don't think many people achieve that in their 20s.

veryfragile, i think you're right it's mainly a middle class problem. we were/are being encouraged to spend our 20s "finding ourselves," and many of us are digging into our careers and relationships fairly late in the game.

i treasure many of my experiences from my 20s - living in NYC, dating lots of different men, travelling the world, then deciding to go back to study for a different career at the age of 30 - but my reluctance to ever settle down and grow up meant children were my last priority.

I married my husband at 31 but he is 5 years younger so that gave me even more time to pretend i wasn't really grown up!

I was 22 and had just finished Uni when the almighty ache to have kids took hold, but I wasn't ready and Dh certainly wasn't.
We waited until we were 26 to start a family, with me initially wanting to not have kids in my 30's due to the associated risks of decreasing fertility and risks to the foetus etc.

It took 10 months and 2 gynae trips to conceive our first child and whilst it did occur naturally (we were awaiting an appt for tests) and isn't really as long as some have tried, it was a torturous 10 months all the same.

I was advised to have another child, if I wanted one, asap. The gynae said we would be more fertile in the first year of Dd1, so we did try and fell the first month (when she was 10mo)
It has to be the best bit of advice I've had I'll be honest.

I have a few friends who wanted to have a 3/4 year gap to make things easier, you know one in Nursery & concentrate on the baby, and sadly all but one is still trying
The youngest of them is now 33 and about to start IVF.

I was aware I'd be putting my career on hold and didn't train as a doctor simply because I knew it wouldn't be child-friendly and I didn't want to train, then start a family in my 30's.
Sadly, for me, it did feel as if it was one or the other.

I think that both men and women have been sold a bum deal in a lot of ways. DH and I are professionals (well, I was!) and it was really drummed into us that this was our vocation, and that if we really wanted to succeed that we would work all hours, and that we should have enough dedication to earn a lot less money than our long years of education would suggest.

DH was commenting recently about how long it took us to wake up to reality and realise how much else there is to life. I'm now a SAHM and he has taken a sideways move to work shorter hours. We are well aware that our children will grow up faster than we could ever believe and that we'll never get that back. But in our twenties (and even early thirties) everyone around us was throwing themselves into their careers in the same way that we were. I know of women who were back in work a fortnight after giving birth (part time at first) and those who went back full time after 5 weeks (and made themselves ill in the process ). Having children was considered to be throwing away all your hard work, and an inconvenience to your job. Older women basically told us that if you tried to combine children and a career that you would be trapped on a treadmill of exhaustion for years and completely lose any sense of self (while barely seeing your children). What an advert for family life!

But it's very hard to question it when it's so ingrained into your existence. And I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people in "middle class" jobs.

I would like to work part-time/flexibly when we have children and so would DH but looking at our career choices it's likely that I will be the main bread winner. As he'll be self-employed he'll be able to work very flexible hours but have less leeway when it comes to emergencies and looking after sick children...

MTM - but what if you really love your career AND your child? i always knew i'd have a career. i didn't always know i'd have children. now i've got both and i'm getting on that treadmill of exhaustion. (back to work in two weeks.)

By MrsTittleMouse on Wed 17-Jun-09 14:25:57
'Older women basically told us that if you tried to combine children and a career that you would be trapped on a treadmill of exhaustion for years and completely lose any sense of self (while barely seeing your children). What an advert for family life!'

That's what I hear, see everyday and it's both scary and sad.

You can have tests to check your fertility but considering you can have unexplained infertility (when all the test say there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to conceive) I wouldn't trust them. They can give you a false sense that all is well when it might not be...

I do think if we'd have waited until our 30's we might not have had any children. I honestly think it would've been hard to give up an independent lifestyle.

I personally think kids are as expensive as you're prepared to let them be. The main costs for us are me only working 1/7 (simply to prevent me having to effectively retrain) and increased food bills.
When I worked f-time we had a lot more disposable income and duly disposed of it on crap tbh.

We don't really seem to be any worse off, but we do live differently iyswim.

Even the most detailed plans can go horribly wrong. The high divorce rate results in lots of women having first or futher children with new partners, after divorce. I didn't expect to be looking at Universities for my 17 year old and nurseries for my 2 year old, concurrently.

btw I know lots of women who have had babies in their 40s. And I know one woman who had various cycles of IUI and IVF and later conceived witout aid at 43 - and I thought those stories were made-up.

V v sorry to hear some of you are struggling with fertility issues. I can't imagine what that must be like. Is it very bad that I am a little envious of the personal space and freedom that might come from just one child?

A friend said to me just the other day when I was telling her how I work part time: "Don't you want to be promoted [incredulous look on face] or challenged???".

Errrrr no! Well, yes I am challenged in my job but no way for the promotion. I am just not prepared to make those sacrifices to family life that a promotion would inevitably mean. But point is, she is wrapped up in corporate propaganda and career ladder climbing, she can't see that there's nothing wrong with stepping off it/slowing down/staying still.