You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of an Older Mother

Veteran journalist Judith Newman wanted to write the book jacket description for You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman. She really did. But every time she sat down to describe her unflinching, ruefully funny look at later-life pregnancy and motherhood, something came up. One day, one of her sons, Gus, coughed up a hairball, the result of enjoying a pacifier that had been stuck for several days to the fur of their golden retriever. The next day she had to calm down her other son, Henry, who was convinced his head would be sucked down the bathtub drain. Spending the day shouting YOU HEAD IS BIGGER THAN THE DRAIN is not what she envisioned several years ago, when after seven years and $70,000 worth of infertility treatments, she was told, at forty, she was expecting twins. For this she spent eight months throwing up

Today the number of women having their first child over thirty-five has increased by a bazillion fold, or some equally scary large number, and Newman is the first to write a book that tells what it's really like when a trip to the drugstore entails the purchase of both diaper cream and wrinkle cream; when "getting your shots" means both immunization and Botox. You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman is not only about having children later in life: it's about what happens to a marriageand to the spirit, when even the most sought-after baby comes. Wry, warm, and brutally honest, this is the book for any womanwhatever her agewho has awakened at 3AM to the insistent shrieks of her darling and thought: Oh man, I'm too old for this.