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When I heard about the death of Maria del Carmen Brousada, the 69-year-old single mother who made the news three years ago by becoming the oldest woman in the world to give birth, I was transported back to the summer I turned 8.
My family had gone to visit relatives in Israel. For whatever reason, my parents thought I was too young to join them and my sister, then 11, to Eliat, the southernmost tip, so they left me for a long weekend with those relatives.
The day they left, my relatives — who barely spoke English — did what most relatives would do to entertain a child they couldn’t say much to: we went to the movies. I can’t remember the name of the movie anymore, but I remember the opening scene. There was a house fire that kills a young boy’s parents, and he is left an orphan. That night, I had a nightmare that my parents died. I woke up screaming, and my great-grandmother, in her 90s, came in to soothe me. “Vas ist los, kind?”
Needless to say, she didn’t help much. I wanted my parents!
It’s hard to lose your parents at any age. I’m fortunate that mine are — at 79 and 85 — still alive and relatively healthy. I can’t imagine what it will be like to lose them, but many of my friends have in recent years; we’re at that age where death starts becoming more of a reality.
But for some of us whose parents had us when they were older because they remarried or because we were so-called “miracle” babies, the losses have occurred much sooner. My dearest friend lost her father when she was barely 21, and even now — at age 48 — she has complicated feelings about it. His death affected a lot of her decisions, including when she got married and to whom. When her mother died a few years ago after a long battle with dementia, her loss seemed overwhelming.
I'm not saying we cope much better in our 50s and 60s — I remember watching my father cry at his mother's funeral, the first time I had seen him cry. A grown man, he was devastated.
So I am thinking of Brousada’s 2 1/2-year-old twins, conceived through invitro fertilization, and now orphans. They are expected to live with her nephew, but that wasn’t the plan. Brousada, sounding like an obliviously “immortal” teenager, said she expected to be around a long time — her own mom lived until age 101.
I guess it didn’t turn out the way she planned it, as many things in life don’t.
The decision to have children is a rather selfish act, although it’s the only way we, as a species, can survive (and I sometimes have my doubts that we should!) I remember when my first son was born, the moment that the doctor laid him on my breast. My then-husband and I burst into tears, joyful tears, but also heavy with the enormity of our new responsibility. We created this miracle; he’s ours to care for, and ours alone.
There is a huge debate over whether there should be limits on who receives IVF or not — not only older moms such as Brousada, but mothers like Nadya Suleman, the single mother on disability who added eight babies to the six she already had.
Those kinds of moms are still — thankfully — rarities.
But it does make you think about the burdens many of us are putting on our children by our decisions, especially people raising children alone, either because of divorce or, like Brousada and Suleman, by being choice moms.
Should that be a factor in our decisions to become parents?
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