In January this year, after 30 hours of sucking in Royal Sussex County Hospital’s finest gas and air, at 51 I finally had the family I’d dreamt of. My second son, Jett, was a month premature, but he felt years overdue. When I first embarked on IVF over a decade ago, I never imagined it would take this long.
I started freezing my eggs at 40, met my husband-to-be, Julian, when I was 41 and he was 34, and got married a year later.
It wasn’t until a few months after my 49th birthday that our first son, Phoenix, arrived. The emotional, physical and financial toll of my fertility journey had been immense, but ultimately worth it.
Amanda while pregnant with her first son
Prematurity aside, my second pregnancy was almost identical to when I carried my first son: healthy, mercifully uneventful and on a strict need-to-know basis. Even though I’m a TV presenter, and am used to living in the public eye, we decided to keep the pregnancies a secret from everyone except closest family. I carried neatly both times, and loose clothing concealed my growing bump.
Why the secrecy? After 25 years on shows including Total Wipeout and The Big Breakfast, perhaps I’d learnt to keep certain things private. Following many heartbreaking miscarriages and failed implant attempts, it was easier to try again without too many people knowing. And I wasn’t ready for the raised eyebrows on the subject of whether I could, or should, have a baby at my age.
Now that Jett had arrived safely, Julian and I were ready to share the news. I had my Instagram post ready, with a photo and words written from the heart. But as my finger hovered over the publish button, I hesitated. My mind drifted back three years to when I announced the birth of Phoenix.
I was giddy with excitement at sharing the news and, at first, our joy was amplified by the sheer volume of love we received. Thousands of messages of congratulations from friends and strangers flooded my Instagram feed – most wonderful of all, hundreds of women telling me I was a source of inspiration as they navigated IVF. Of course there was a vocal minority who felt the need to be negative about my age, but they were easy to ignore.
Then, during a 3am feed, I ventured beyond my social media channels into the comment sections of news articles covering the story. That’s when I saw them. Row after row of cruel words that took my breath away. Strangers dissecting my life, my choices, my body, my future. They calculated my age and concluded my son was destined for misery…
‘There’s no way she gave birth to this child!’
‘It is selfish to have a child at 49.’
‘She’ll be mistaken for the child’s gran when it reaches school age.’
‘Her toyboy should do the school run.’
‘Fast-forward 20 years: a young man on the cusp of adulthood with two dead parents. I’m sorry but that’s just a fact.’
I was so angry at the flippancy of the comments. People assumed I had chosen to delay motherhood for my career. The truth?
It took me 41 years to meet someone I truly wanted to build a life with.
I had been engaged in my late 30s but called off the wedding at the last minute –knowing deep down it wasn’t right, even though it might cost me the family I always wanted. When I met Julian, a producer, on a photoshoot in London in 2014, we started dating, married in 2016 and began trying for a baby. And trying. And trying.
Amanda holidaying with her son Phoenix, 2024
Having already frozen some eggs I was aware of the diminishing chances, so we moved to IVF pretty quickly. The retrieval cycles dictated our schedule and became woven into our lives, from injecting myself moments before stepping out on live television, to forcing a smile for the cameras hours after a miscarriage. After every loss we picked ourselves up and kept going.
The most hurtful online comments were from other women, many of them mothers. Suddenly, afraid of judgment, I began to doubt whether I should share my age with others I met at playgroups and parks.
Over time the paranoia faded, and the more mums I met the clearer it became: there is no perfect blueprint for parenthood and life doesn’t come with guarantees. We all know people who lost incredible parents too soon, just as we know people who had long-living but toxic parents.
Along the way, I met older mums, teenage mums, working mums, stay-at-home mums, mums to children with special needs. I met women who had chosen to go it alone with a sperm donor, others juggling toddlers and teenage stepkids. I met refugees who had fled war zones with their babies in their arms.
At the heart of it we were all the same – we found motherhood as tough as it was beautiful, and none of us were thinking much beyond the next bedtime.
When Phoenix was two, we decided to try for a second baby. We consulted our families and doctors. The response: a resounding ‘go for it’. There were more IVF disappointments along the way, but then Jett arrived.
Once I posted the news, the mortality mathematicians, as expected, had a field day yet again, with comments like, ‘How selfish – that poor child is going to grow up with parents older than most grandparents when it starts school and will be mocked for having old parents.’
The outrage didn’t sting this time, though.
I refuse to waste time worrying about what other people think, and even less worrying about what might happen 20 or 30 years from now. Instead, I prefer to focus on the positives of having children later in life. The biggest plus is, ironically, my age itself. Finally I have maturity and wisdom – and these outstrip any traits I possessed in my younger years. So, yes, I may be a silver-haired lady when I collect my kids from primary school, but I’ll be proud of every single strand.
I do my bit by exercising regularly and not smoking, drinking, stressing or eating junk food. There’s even evidence that women who give birth after 40 are more likely to live longer, often reaching their 100s! Maybe a purposeful existence keeps us older mums ticking along. I might be here for decades to come or I might not. That’s just how life works.
What I can control is the love I give and the lessons I pass down. Day and night I hold my children close and remind them they are loved unconditionally. I hope to teach them to embrace life with an open heart, free from judgment and guided by compassion.
Online trolls will always feel safe behind their screens. Maybe writing these words opens me up to further scrutiny, but if we don’t speak up, how can we expect change? The keyboard critics will win, while society will continue to question and condemn the women who – for one reason or a million others – left it late to start a family.
So, let them talk. I’m too busy being a mother.
