Then Hudi’s father passed away and it was all too much. She needed a break from this endless cycle of treatments. She took a year off, and got busy with life and work, putting her desire for a child on the back burner. Then she got a bill from a treatment center that was charging her a monthly storage fee. “It felt like my father was tapping me on the shoulder, saying, ‘Okay, it’s time to get back into this now,’” Hudi recalls.

She joined Yesh Tikvah, an organization that helps Jewish couples experiencing infertility, which provided group therapy sessions led by Mrs. Dvora Entin, a frum therapist who specializes in reproductive mental health. Having a therapist was really helpful.

After five miscarriages, and many rounds of unsuccessful treatments, Hudi got a shocking call from her husband. “I was in California at the time, just about to start another round of fertility treatments at a new center, when he called and said, ‘I’m starting to think I might be done.’”

“At this point, I was fifty,” Hudi says.  “My husband was fifty-eight. At our child’s bar or bat mitzvah, he would be seventy-one. He would be in his late seventies at his child’s high school graduation. He said to me, ‘Maybe we should just be satisfied with what we have right now. I’m not sure I want to do this.’ I hung up the phone and sobbed.”

They talked a lot about it, and Hudi brought in friends who had a child in their fifties to speak to Yoni about what life as an older parent was really like. Eventually they agreed to try one more treatment. “I got a positive pregnancy test and then I went in for my first ultrasound,” Hudi remembers. “The sonographer looks at the screen and says, ‘I’m going to talk to the doctor.’ When I looked at the screen, I saw three circles. I said to the technician, ‘Are there three babies in there?’ and she said, ‘Yes, that’s what I had to check.’ ”

In the end, only one survived. “After that, I had an amazingly smooth pregnancy,” Hudi says. “I barely had any morning sickness. I had no health problems. What I did have was a ton of anxiety.” Hudi started meeting one-on-one with the therapist from Yesh Tikvah. “Dvora told me that all the anxiety you feel during the infertility process doesn’t just go away when you are expecting. Without her, I would have been in this whole anxiety spiral.”

After an uncomplicated delivery, Hudi became a mother. The hardest part was over, but now her job as a new mother in her early fifties was just getting started.

With Emunah

“So, I was single for like forever,” Miriam jokes. “I started dating when I was nineteen, and I met my husband at forty-three, so it was a twenty-four-year wait. It was very challenging. My number one priority was always getting married and having children. I went to college and then got a law degree, but getting married was always my top goal, over career, education, anything else, and it just didn’t happen for a long, long time. The year after I graduated from college, I went to eleven friends’ weddings. I danced and celebrated with them, and I was just happy for them. I felt so much simchah for the chassan and kallah. I’m not someone who feels jealous or feels bad about myself. If anything, it gave me hope. I felt like if it could happen for them, it will happen for me one day.”

Miriam has a lot of emunah and an upbeat, bubbly personality that always sees the glass half-full. “Being single, and not meeting the right person was hard,” Miriam admits, “but I never gave up hope. I never got jaded. I would have these intense dialogues with Hashem where I would express gratitude for all the good in my life, not just for me but for all the important people in my life. I knew I was putting in my hishtadlus. I was super open-minded and gave everyone in the ballpark of what I was looking for a chance. I knew I was doing everything right, and in the merit of that, I had hope that Hashem would send me my bashert.”

When Miriam was 43, a shadchan suggested her to Daniel, a recent widow with four children. “Prior to my forties, I wasn’t looking to date someone with a bunch of kids, because it’s just a lot,” Miriam says with a laugh. “But right after turning forty, I was set up with a father of two, and even though that guy wasn’t the right person for me, I got exposure to what that life would look like. I realized I could handle it.”

After a few months of dating, Daniel and Miriam got engaged.

“Time is not on your side,” Miriam’s OB-GYN warned her after the wedding. She began fertility treatments right away. The first round didn’t work. “It was very traumatic for me. I asked the doctor, ‘When can I try again?’ and he said, ‘Whenever you’re ready.’ I told him I was ready to try again right away, and baruch Hashem, the second round was successful.”

In her decades of experience helping women through infertility, Brany Rosen of ATIME has seen amazing miracles. “I know an older single girl who was diagnosed with cancer. She was very distraught that the cancer treatment would destroy her ability to have children. She wanted to take measures to preserve her fertility before she started treatment. She said, ‘I need to do this, in order to have something worth fighting for.’

“But the protocol the doctor gave her was to be on a particular cancer medication for five years that was incompatible with the process. She was heartbroken.

“At forty-one, she invited me to her l’chayim. Her chassan had gotten engaged knowing from the start that she probably couldn’t have children. She finally finished her cancer medications a few months after she got married. She called me and said, ‘Do you think it’s worth trying fertility treatment at this point?’

“I said, ‘Sure. It’s worth a shot.’ When she came to our center for her first appointment, we did bloodwork, and we saw that she was already expecting. Without any treatment! She went on to deliver a healthy baby boy. It was a tremendous neis, and everyone who was part of her journey felt such gratitude to Hakadosh Baruch Hu for bringing her to this point after years of struggle and pain. It was such an amazing, inspiring moment, where we saw that Hashem can do anything. When helping couples through infertility you witness so much heartbreak and pain, but at times like this you have to just stop and say, “Thank you, Hashem.”

Expecting at 40 and Beyond

“I got married at forty-one,” says Naomi, a real estate manager and mother of two. “It took me a long time to find my bashert, but baruch Hashem, I was expecting right away, without needing any treatment. But after my first baby, I had two early miscarriages. After treatment, I was soon expecting again, but I did have gestational diabetes for that pregnancy. I didn’t need insulin, but I had to change my whole diet to include more vegetables and proteins and fewer carbs. I think it was a healthy change for me though, and I lost the pregnancy weight so much faster than with the first one.”

“Being pregnant in your forties does increase your risk of gestational diabetes,” says Dr. Jessica Jacob, an OB-GYN in Long Island, “but that can be managed. Many of the risks associated with having a baby over fort y can be managed, and very few end up being catastrophic.”

Dr. Jacob says she sees women in their early 40s having babies all the time, and most of them are healthy. “There is much more monitoring and there are so many more rules about induction,” Dr. Jacob explains. “But I see very, very little in the way of poor outcomes.” However, Dr. Jacobs warns that there are higher risks if you’re having your first over 40, compared to a woman who’s already had a few. “There’s something about the foreignness of the fetus,” she explains. “Even if a woman has already had children, but divorced and remarried, she’s then at higher risk for hypertension and preeclampsia the way a woman having her first is. It’s like having your first baby as far as your body is concerned.”

Every woman’s pregnancy experience is unique. At 51, Hudi breezed through her pregnancy. At 43, Naomi hit a minor blip with gestational diabetes that was easy to keep under control through dietary changes. But for Miriam, age 45, pregnancy was one hurdle after the other. “I went to the emergency room five times during my pregnancy,” Miriam recounts. “At eight weeks, I went in because I was certain I was having a miscarriage. Once I passed out at the OB-GYN’s office and they took me to the emergency room. A few times I went for low blood pressure, and once I went because I felt extremely lightheaded. At one appointment, the doctor was worried about the baby’s heart rate, but when we got to the ER it was fine.”

Despite all the challenges, at 39 weeks, Miriam gave birth to a healthy nine-pound baby girl.

No Village in Sight

“Hours after my baby was born, Daniel had to leave me to deal with his kids,” Miriam remembers with frustration. “Of course, we’d made arrangements for someone to watch them, but something came up. I was alone in the hospital with the baby. I requested the baby stay in my room so we could bond, but I’d just had surgery, and I wasn’t supposed to be getting up or down, or lifting, or exerting myself at all. I was still just hours post-op. But the baby was crying nonstop. There was a button to summon the nurses, and I must have pressed it twelve times, but they never came — I have no idea why. I was going up and down and up and down to get the baby when I wasn’t supposed to be exerting myself at all. I was in a lot of pain, and it was terrible. Don’t get me wrong — holding my baby was amazing, but I was just in survival mode.”

All of the women I spoke to felt a lack of support once they had their new baby. It’s supposed to take a village to raise a child, but very quickly after giving birth, Hudi, Naomi, and Miriam realized that the village was nowhere in sight.

Miriam doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of coming home with a newborn to a house filled with stepkids. “For any new mom, at any age, it’s a lot, but I was in a fairly new marriage, and it was my husband’s second marriage, and he was being pulled in a ton of different directions by his kids. I knew he was supporting me as well as he could, but he also had so many obligations. Also, he’d done this before, and he just didn’t have the same excitement that I did being a first-time mom. We didn’t have the opportunity to have that little cocoon of just husband, wife, and baby.”

Miriam describes an incident where she thought one of her stepkids was being too rough with her baby. “I asked Daniel to intervene three times, because as the new stepmom, I didn’t feel it was my place to discipline his kids. He didn’t step in and then the baby got hurt. Baruch Hashem, she was fine, but it was very scary.”

Miriam says that being a mom and a stepmom is a constant juggle. “On a typical day, I’ll be watching the baby, helping a stepson study for his high school entrance exams, taking a stepdaughter to Starbucks to cheer her up after a hard day, and preparing for the family Chanukah party.” Miriam pauses to take a breath. “It’s a lot.”

Hudi also had a challenging time after the baby was born. “It was Covid,” she tells me, “so everything was closed. There were no mommy-and-me classes or story times. My mother, who was eighty-three, said, ‘Would you like me to come over and help?’ and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that at eighty-three, in poor health, I’d have to help her more than she could help me.” One huge help — Yoni’s job gave him 20 weeks of paternity leave. “It was wonderful to have him home with me and the baby for so long,” Hudi says with a smile in her voice.

Like the other women, Naomi could have used more familial support. “My parents are older, and so are my husbands,” she explains, “so I do feel that my kids are missing out. My kids are close with my parents, but they can’t do so much with them, or take them places. We can’t leave two wild boys with them for a week. It would just be too hard for them.”

Miriam and Hudi both never felt out of place because of their age. “New York is the career capital of the world,” Hudi tells me with a laugh. “I feel like everyone I meet is an older mom.”

“I look younger than I am, so it’s never been a problem,” Miriam jokes. “I think people assume I’m thirty-five instead of forty-five when they see me with my daughter.”

However, living in a younger community in Florida, Naomi feels deeply uncomfortable with the age gap between her and the other mothers. “That’s been the hardest part for me —  feeling so much older than the other moms,” she confides. “I’ve always been someone who wants to fit in, and I think most of the other moms are in their twenties or thirties. Once I had a playdate over at my house and the mom kept on asking me questions such as, ‘What year did you graduate?’ and it was clear she was just trying to figure out my age. Recently, I went to a cardiologist, and when I told him my kids’ ages, he said, ‘Wow, you started old.’ I definitely feel self-conscious about it.”

Reflections on Motherhood over 40

“I have bad knees and arthritis all over my body,” Hudi says, “but somehow when I’m with my daughter I always have a ton of energy. I get on the floor with her. I run around the playground. I think my love for her gives me extra strength. When I take her to the playground, her favorite words are, ‘Mama, Mama come.’ She always wants me to be right next to her.”

Hudi’s husband also treasures their daughter. “Yoni’s so good with her,” Hudi marvels. “He gets up early to give her breakfast. He carries her on his shoulders. When she was a baby, he’d wake up multiple times a night to get her. We both tried not to answer calls when we were around her. We want to give her our undivided attention.”

Although Hudi is incredibly grateful for her child, she still feels the pain of her long struggle with infertility. “On the one hand I’m full of gratitude for this incredible, beautiful child who has entered my life, but at the same time when I was twenty-four, I wanted a large family. When I was going through all the fertility treatments, I would talk to Hashem and say, ‘Why? Why was this necessary?’”

Hudi found it hard to go to the Kosel, and she struggled with certain tefillos. “I stopped going to shul after a few of my miscarriages,” Hudi says. “After coming every Shabbos for years, I didn’t show up for a month. Nobody said to me, ‘Hudi, we haven’t seen you in shul in a long time, is everything okay?’” She sighs. “I wish someone had reached out.”

“I just feel blessed,” Naomi says simply. “Even with the two miscarriages, it was easy for me, compared to other women with infertility. I know I’m incredibly lucky to have found my bashert and had these two amazing boys, even if the process took me longer than I would have liked, and it had a great ending.”

“Being an older mom is definitely physically harder,” Miriam tells me. “The first year after she was born, I had to go to an orthopedist for wrist pain from carrying her and wear a splint for a few months. I went to physical therapy because my core was so weak after giving birth. It wasn’t easy, but I feel that having her helps me to be the best version of myself. I’m so conscious of all my actions now, because I know I’m her role model. She’s nine-and-a-half months old now, and she’s so cute,” she gushes. “Her personality’s starting to come out. When I pick her up from daycare, she just lights up smiling when she sees me. It’s just the best thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. My baby is an absolute gift from Hashem. My friends, my family, everyone I know, sees her as the best thing ever and a
true miracle.”

Preserving Hope

Women can take steps to preserve their fertility for a later stage of life. Egg freezing is a method of preserving a woman’s fertility by removing eggs from the woman’s body when she’s at a younger or healthier stage of life, and freezing and then storing them for use when her natural fertility levels will be low due to age, illness, or the effects of medical treatment.

“Before this possibility became available, sometimes people would come to me and say, ‘Brany, can you go speak to the girls. They’re not getting married, they’re not settling, and if they found out how much fertility declines with age, maybe they’d settle down,’” says Brany Rosen, founder and director of member services at ATIME. “I would say, ‘I don’t believe it. Girls want to get married if they can find the right person.’”

Brany was at a conference at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine when they announced a successful pregnancy using this technique. “It was so exciting,” Brany enthuses. “Before there had been so much pressure on girls to settle, even if it wasn’t the right person, in order to be able to have children. Egg freezing helps take some of the pressure off. It’s a tremendous insurance policy, and all the rabbanim are okay with it. We do this every day at ATIME, helping with it financially and emotionally.

“Being an older single in the frum world is so difficult,” Brany says with a sigh. “The girls who are married, even if they’re struggling with infertility, at least they’re wearing a sheitel, they feel part of society, they have a husband to cry to. But being an older single. It’s so hard because you don’t have a place. For them to go to simchahs for younger siblings — to look beautiful and smile, while their heart is breaking. You have to do tremendous internal work to get to that place.”

Fertility is up to Hashem, Brany says, but we have to put in our hishtadlus.  “Rav Matisyahu Salomon said at a medical conference at ATIME, ‘If you believe that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is the creator of refuos, the hishtadlus is to do whatever exists in medicine that’s allowed halachically.’ ”

PUAH also encourages these procedures, says Rabbi Segelman of PUAH, and even has a grant program to help with some of the costs of the process. “We also help these women find the best doctors, and doctors that will do the procedure at a discount based on our professional relationship with them,” Rabbi Segelman says.

Puah also helps make sure that the process is done to minimize and prevent halachic issues, providing guidance with halachah and Shabbos-related concerns. “A lot of these appointments are scheduled for Shabbos,” Rabbi Segelman explains, “and we help women navigate that. We’ll be able to help them get appointments Friday or Sunday, or even send a non-Jewish phlebotomist to their house on Shabbos to draw their blood and deliver it to a lab.”

“If a woman takes these steps, it doesn’t mean that she’s given up,” Rabbi Segelman emphasizes. “It does not mean that she’s never going to be a mother and have her children naturally. It’s just like an insurance policy, so that in the event that it does take longer, she has options. We want women to be empowered.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 966)