Shownotes:
Pregnancy and motherhood for older women is the proverbial 'elephant in the room' in all societies but more so in cultures, where deep rooted patriarchal socio-cultural practices mean what women are supposed to be a married at a certain become mothers by a certain age.
My guest Manjari Thakur Gohil, my guest in the 29th episode is a regular trooper, she gave up a successful career moving to the UK for a fresh start when she found love. I have seen her navigate the journey to motherhood, opening herself to vulnerability, heartache but also hope. We share a unique bond of friendship, she is also the younger sister of a close friend Yasmin. I say the name aloud - lest we forget (and that is a conversation for another day).
In this episode we talk about the stigma around pregnancies in older women; fertility treatments and IVF; the trauma of being judged by family, friends and society; coping with mental health, and the need for education and awareness amongst girls and women on reproductive choices......
Her Twitter bio, is poignant but reflects her mantra in life, "On a Journey of a road less travelled. Have lived three lifetimes in one and am not complaining..."
If you want to know more listen here👇🏾
Memorable passages from the episode:
👉🏾 So, Sudha I know you since my childhood in Poona and my father was in the airforce. So we moved around a lot. And we finally settled in Poona, and then my education was in Poona and then I moved to Bombay to do my social media studies. After that I continued to work in Bombay in TV. When I joined TV, it was very nascent. So it was not a very deep career. It's not like becoming a surgeon or becoming a nurse. So you didn't have that many role models, either women or men that you wanted to aspire to be. And I felt okay, so where do I go from here? And I thought, I really want to settle down and, find a partner. I had a conversation with my brother and he basically said, don't worry about my mom.
So, I started talking to my husband and we got really close and yeah and then marriage the next year and I moved to the UK. So it was not intentional, it just happened. But then when I came to the UK before we got married, I said, okay, this is a place where I can rebuild. I can get a career in another field or maybe in television, again. I really wanted to continue to work and to be part of the working culture. So I thought this is something new. It's another community to be a part of.
👉🏾 Yeah, 15
👉🏾 Yes, I have a strong sense of identity. And I think it's my overall experiences in life that have shaped the identity. A lot of people say they identify themselves with their career, or you know, when you say who are you?
They said, "Oh I am a nurse or a doctor ? Or who are you? I'm a mother of four". Those are the responses you get. So when people ask me, who am I? I said I'm Manjari. And this has been my response since I think I was 12 and my dad got a bit miffed with me, he said, why don't you say you're Manjari Thakur, why don't you say that? I said because i'm just, Manjari. So my sense of self was always me, and my brand and over the years, I've refined it to be, when people ask me, who are you? So I say, I'm me. Like, I'm me, I'm Manjari and you know, what do you do? Oh, I work here. You know, do you have family? Yes, I have family. So then, everything else becomes a part of the larger global self of you. But I am me first and then all this is attached,
👉🏾 Manjari is opinionated sometimes weak, sometimes strong, depends on what the circumstances - honest, trustworthy, loyal. These are the three core things. And a strong sense of ethics. So my sense of ethics is so strong that it's sometimes, you know, it makes my life difficult. So it's very hard for me if a colleague is not being treated right. Or if a friend is not being treated right, or if a stranger in the bus is not being treated right.
And I think my biggest thing is for anybody is to be happy inside, you live with yourself first.
👉🏾 Yes I completely agree. So I think my first obstacle before motherhood was the marriage. When I didn't get married when I was supposed to get married. And I think at some point my parents just gave up. Okay, you know, I think they just didn't want the battle. Because I had a really strong sister, I'm a middle child, so she was ahead of me. So she had already established a lot of these ground rules in the house. So for me it became slightly easier to say, no, I'm not going to get married now you know. So then my dad once asked me, are you never going to get married I said, I don't know, but I would like to start orphanage someday. So he was like, Okay. So when I finally did get married I married a unique individual who comes from a traditional family background but is not traditional himself. So he had his own battles to break that mould. So for him the question never came from him or, it was never something that for us, was an issue.
👉🏾 It always came from other people at weddings. " Oh, so this year any children, with a smile, any good news, as they say in my part of the world. So that was the start and I wasn't ready at that time because I was establishing myself here in the UK. I was very clear that I wanted to get a career going, I wanted to suss the country out. I wanted to see where I can go. I wanted to see what I want to do next. And sort that out before I, think of getting another life into the world because I think that's a tremendous responsibility. I feel you should be in a happy place to be able to make that journey with your child. So the child benefits from you. And then when I decided I was ready, you know, I was old, older and the journey was not easy. So we tried adoption, the UK adoption laws are very, very stringent, and I always wanted to adopt that was something I always wanted to do, you know, single or married.
👉🏾 So we went to the whole process, but it's very stringent and we felt every part of our life was being scrutinised and I don't think my partner, my husband was ready for that. So he was not at the same place as I, and it has to be a joint effort. I didn't want it to be a thing where I'm ready and, you know, I push him into it, that doesn't work.
👉🏾 I think I've done a lot of reading since I've come here. So I think that's been great. So I read a lot of books about people who've written their stories about adoption, and I spoke to a lot of agencies and I think the good news is that the staff in these adoption agencies are very, very patient and generous in their time.
So they talk to you very nicely they give you a good understanding as to what you're going in for. Because they recognise the journey you're going to take, where you may not be recognising that yourself. I think the adoption journey the way they scrutinise, whether you're ready for adoption is excellent because they scrutinise every part of your life, which is it's intrusive.
👉🏾 But, I think it's a good thing because what they don't want is for people to, in the spur of the moment, say I want to adopt, and then when they have the child, they rethink it because they have not thought the whole journey through. And then the child is put through another trauma of changing home again. But that child may have by the age of two changed, three or four or five or six homes already because of what's happened in his life. So he's already traumatised
The journey would take like about a year and a half. There are many many stages. It's all very well worked out, so it makes you think as well, Am I ready for this? Do I really want this? It also makes you evaluate your pattern, your life. Like, do you have support structures in place? Who's going to help? You don't think of these things when you don't have children, because you don't need to right? What they mean by social structure for the child, I think the way they have defined it here is very good because they are actually evaluating every aspect of your life to see whether you are able to support not only the child, physically development wise, but socially, do you have people who love you are able to love the child who will accept the child. The child will meet and see.
👉🏾 I don't think it was terribly expensive, but then I think we found the right place. I think you need to find the right place. We found a really good clinic down the road from here just 15 minutes. We found a very good obstetrician surgeon and the treatment was very good. He was very reassuring at every point. And what I loved about it here, was the fact that they didn't even question, didn't look at you strangely. So why are you doing it now kind of thing, you know, you should have tried it earlier. They were just like, okay, so this is where you want to go and they laid it bare saying that these are your options.
And we did try something similar in India, because we had other friends who had actually done it in India and they recommended us to this really good hospital. But there we were judged all the time. And it was a lot about money. I'm sure it was about the money for the clinic we went to as well, but it was just done with so much more decency, you felt human.
👉🏾 You just felt, okay, this person is actually listening to me, actually understanding what I'm saying. He understands my trauma. How hard it's been to come here, to get here at this point, sit in this chair, have this conversation. He understands that or she understands that. While in India it was just like pay your money there, go for that treatment there. Go there, get this, get that, get that, pay money again. You're going through this whole journey to raise something good, positive, beautiful in your life. Something to love care, share, bond. And then you're going through this treatment, which is just money, money. I think somewhere the caring is lost. So we just said no to that and then we went in for the option here.
👉🏾 And I think a lot of people suffer, and I met so many couples, a lot of women, either in the waiting rooms or generally, you know, once I was expecting, random women either when I was having tea somewhere in a station, at an airport or even at the hair salon, somebody sitting next to you, people you've never spoken to in your life. And they would ask questions, you know, oh you're expecting and, oh, this is lovely, and then they'd give you that story and then their journey. I felt all these women are actually sharing with me that things they've maybe never shared because I'm a stranger, they're not going to see me again, but it was just cathartic. So a lot of them shared treatment, fertility stories, which were very sad very disappointing. How much they had put themselves through and you know, how they actually tried to develop themselves after that and how it's changed their relationship with their husband. Some of them have got divorced after because it's just not worked out and there's too much pressure on the marriage. I think it's very important to find the right place where you feel it's right.
👉🏾 No, I did actually approach my GP and he basically turned around and said it's because of the age that they would not put me on. He basically said I could do the tests on the NHS. But they would not put me on the, because of the age they had a limit for that. And I get that I mean, I completely understand. I mean like, it's publicly funded. Why would you put your money into something where, you know, it may not succeed, right? You'd rather give somebody who is more likely to succeed, a better chance. And maybe a couple more cycles to make sure that they have everything they need to succeed.
👉🏾 So they came from some expected sources, so I was expecting those. And there were some which was more curiosity than anything. And then I read a beautiful article online about this lady who had her first daughter when she was 50, she's a freelance writer for the independent. And she basically said that when she was asked questions like that, she basically, she said, I have nowhere to be the evenings. I have been everywhere, I have done the partying. I have done the dinners out. I have been to the expensive restaurants. I have been to movies. I have done things with my friends, so I'm fine going to sleep at eight o'clock or seven-thirty if my daughter is asleep at seven-thirty. And I decided I'm going to use that line. Because I think it's a fantastic line, I have nowhere else to be, I have done everything.
👉🏾 So the most random conversation I had was with the GP receptionist, who yelled at me across because we were in COVID times. So she was like two meters apart, yelled across and said, "isn't it too late for you to have your children?" Because she saw my date of birth, obviously, when I was taking my daughter for her six weeks checkup. And I said, yes, but I have nowhere else to be, I've done it all. I'm happy to be here, sitting with my daughter waiting for a six weeks appointment. And I said I have achieved, everything else I had in life so I'm fine being here. I think you should have a child when you're ready to have a child, if that happens to be late in your life, and you're lucky enough to have it, then why not? 👉🏾 You know, why do we pressure ourselves when we are 20 or 25? Because a lot of us are still children, there are women who I have spoken to who've had their children when they were 20 and now they're in their fifties, but they feel they've lost all that 20 years where they, they could've done something else with their life. They were still children when they were raising children. I think they weren't ready. But I think this is what society needs to be accepting of. That it's not when society says that. Oh, okay. So, you know, you need to have a child now because your nearing 30. Or society says so we need to get married at the age of 25, so you can have a child at 30. I don't think it works like that.
👉🏾 That doesn't mean that, there's no stigma there is going to be stigma. I'm sure when my daughter goes to school, there will be a recognition that I am an older mother. And then there'll be a different challenge with that because a lot of her peers will have younger parents and she'll wonder, why my parents are so much older. So that'll be a different challenge, I don't know how I'm going to tackle, but I know it'll come.
👉🏾 I think I enjoyed my pregnancy. The stress was more around me, It's thinking that when is it going to go wrong? Like I was waiting for it to go wrong. So I didn't do any reading after like, I read all the books basically. And then I didn't read anything further because I just didn't know how it's going to go. But forget older women. I think motherhood puts a strain on every woman or pregnancy puts a strain on every woman. And a lot of women are put under pressure to enjoy it because it's so lovely but a lot of them are sick, have headaches or just are uncomfortable with the weight, uncomfortable with change in the body, uncomfortable with how your body doesn't belong to you. You're pushed to go and pee when you don't want to, you're in the bathroom a lot more than you should be.
👉🏾 But there's so much pressure from society, you should be glowing and beautiful. And then somewhere along the line, I realise it's not going to be me. So I'm not going to be glowing and beautiful. That's fine, I just said, okay, that's fine. And I'm not going to be apologetic to myself or anybody else that I'm not that, it's okay I'm not that. Even after my daughter was born like I'm not the cool mum. I'm not going to be the mum who's going to be cool and have a her hair done when out in the sun and the sunshades. I'm going to be the frazzled mom, and I'm going to be continuously running after my daughter. And I'm going to continuously worry about her because that's going to be me and I'm ok with that.
👉🏾 Yes. And my daughter is going to be safe and happy. Safe, happy, protected and well-developed and that's it. I'm not going to be one of those Moms sitting in the park, taking a picture of myself and my daughter looking very pretty because I'm never going to have that time to do all that to myself before I leave the house.
I've got a hundred things to do, you know, like make sure to have her food to have her this, if I'm driving, do I know where I'm going? How do I get the buggy in the car? How do I get it out of the car? How do I make sure that she's okay? Is the timing right? They'll have to move it 15 minutes up and down so that she's safe, she's happy, she has a full stomach, a clean nappy, you know, good clothes, she's in a happy mood when she sits in the car. So that means that my hair doesn't get done and that's okay.
👉🏾 So my daughter is 15 months. I don't know whether I have advice, but I can say from experience that, it's a hard gig. There will be many sleepless nights, we've had hardly any sleepless nights, touch wood. She has been sleeping through the night since she was 13 weeks through the night, like six hours and then longer stretches. I feel for me it was all about understanding her. And now I feel that when we have communication going or she can't speak words. I know what she wants, she tells me, she points. You know, she has a few words here and there, but I know where she's struggling.
So I think it's a hard gig and people who are in the same situation at some point you will find your balance and your medium, but the initial thing of striking the bond with the child and making sure you're not overwhelmed with the feeling of frustration, that it's too much of a challenge right at the start. You know, you need to keep at it, because then the rewards are rich because you bond, she understands you, she trusts you. She or he wants to be with you and I think that's the biggest reward. You know the smile and you leave the room, you come back, you get a big smile. Where do you see that?
I think that's the biggest reward.
👉🏾 Especially when you have, your first baby, a lot of people will tell you how they did it or how it was in their time or how it's wrong, what you are doing. I would say go by what you feel is right. I felt there were a couple of ground rules for me, I felt I was not going to allow my daughter to cry, you know, in the sense that she cries out of, oh where is everybody or loneliness or anger.
