About

This is me, about 5 7 weeks ago okay April 1, 2009 June 19, 2009. My kids are almost 5 months old. I am still packing a good 30 or so extra pounds (that’s after losing 40, oh yeah) and I’ve chopped my hair.

In case the picture doesn’t make it clear, I am a first time mother to twins. I turned 40 six weeks after they were born.

I’m known online as Myg. It is short for Mygdala, which is derived from amygdala, because I like brain science, what little of it I understand. And because my real name is Amy. All of my online friends call me Myg. None of my in-person friends do. You can call me either.

I’ve decided against giving out my real full name because not long ago I had a thriving practice as a psychotherapist for teens, and teens and their parents like to Google you. If I knew for a fact that I had ex-clients or other professional contacts reading this it would read far differently. Like, I’d probably say fuck, shit, damn and bitches a lot less. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

I do have a job, which I tried to quit, but then FAILED at quitting, which is a very good thing because my husband did not actually get hired for a few things he was trying to get, you know, #economysucks and all. He’s finishing up his MFA in fiction. I work for a university and train people how not to treat kids like shit and about suicide prevention. I do not do therapy any more, and have no intentions of going back to it and that’s a different story which may or may not get told here.

I am also a retired indie-rocker. I sang and played guitar in bands from 1988 through 2001, with my husband, whom I’ve known and loved since 1987. I never should have stopped playing music. It is about the single worst thing I ever did. More on that soon.

And by the way, in case you’re wondering, this is a blog about being a new mom at 40, though it started out being a blog about pregnancy over 35, which I was, both pregnant and over 35, when it started almost a year ago. It’s also a blog about being a new mom to baby twin boys, being married, having a dog, living in NJ, being broke, making decisions, fucking up, and it’s also about whatever else I want. Just warning you. Lately, there’s been a fair amount about sex (SORRY MOM) and a little post (okay, 3700 words is not little) about how to quit smoking.

I have a history of a infertility (blocked fallopian tubes) and got pregnant with IVF. Much of my pregnancy is chronicled here.

My old about page/backstory is right here:

…I might not have been pregnant had it not been for several things, including:

1. I live in NJ, and in NJ, your health insurance is required to pay for infertility treatment, which is somewhere around $12-14k per try.

2. I had three tries at IVF that were covered by my insurance.

3. The third time worked.

If you are over 35 and pregnant for the first time, you’ve probably done a fair number of Google searches for “pregnancy over 35″ and found a bunch of depressing shit about amniocentesis, Down’s Syndrome, pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and blah, blah, blah. At least that’s what I found. Of course, the big commercial sites in pregnancy never fail to mention that there are all of these increased risks to those of us who dare to conceive in our upper thirties and forties. All the world loves bad news, I suppose. But I don’t.

So I made this blog.

There are very few places online that celebrate pregnancy over 35, and I needed to celebrate because I had worked so very hard to make my pregnancy a reality. I wanted to feel good about it – not terrified or somehow guilty that I didn’t or couldn’t do it when I was younger. I know lots and lots of women who had their first babies over 35. Why is there such a dearth of chatter about the positives of this?

I want to change that.

I put off having kids until I was 35, but I had my reasons. I worked with children and mostly teens as a clinical social worker, providing psychotherapy and family therapy. I saw how easy it was, from a side view, to screw up kids. And to be honest, if you were to spend all day every day of the work week around other people’s troubled children, you too may not feel the urgent need to start breeding. I say my job was the most powerful birth control ever.

The problem  was I had no idea I was infertile. I just assumed I’d get pregnant as soon as I wanted to. So when at 35 I started trying and didn’t get pregnant, I chalked the first two years of failure to conceive up to “too much stress.” I am certain that was a real problem as during that time my brother died, a step-sibling was diagnosed with cancer, my father-in-law died of lung cancer AND I was working exclusively with traumatized children. I stopped taking new clients and six months after my father-in-law died, I was miraculously pregnant.

But it was ectopic.

And with that pregnancy went any chance I had at a naturally occurring pregnancy.

Enter IVF.  The poetic, nearly cliche thing is that I had given up. My third try at IVF was going to be my last, at least for a good long while. I couldn’t handle the debilitating depression that overtook me following two failed attempts, and I was sure I was headed for a third. So I came to terms with having a biological-childless future and really re-focused on what I was going to do for the next couple of years when I got that third and final negative pregnancy test.

Of course, that never happened. Because it seems when it comes to this stuff it just never happens the way you’re imagining it will, does it? Instead, I got the call that I was pregnant. And later, I found out I was extremely pregnant. In fact, too pregnant.

I was pregnant with quads. In sum, the quads turned out to be quints, which naturally reduced down to twins, who were born at 35 weeks in January, induced due to pre-eclampsia. We are all fine now,  and since then, nothing has been the same.

Which is what my husband and I were counting on.

That doesn’t mean we don’t miss sleep and uninterrupted meals. But it does mean we’re fully engaged in the parenting thing and, well, holy shit. That’s all my baby-infested brain can muster right now to capture the feeling. But it’s not a bad feeling, mind you.

If you’ve found this blog, I hope you find something here that makes you say, “Being pregnant over 35 is awesome.” And I’ll say it right along with you, because despite my assorted trials with pregnancy and the challenge of being a new mom to twins, I still say it really, truly is.

Awesome, that is.