For women who waited decades, motherhood came late and hard-won

Fifty-three-year-old Hudi was checking out at a supermarket, her almost-two-year-old daughter in her shopping cart. The lady at the checkout counter smiled at the toddler as she rang up the groceries. “Your granddaughter is adorable!” she cooed.

Hudi winced. “Thanks so much, but she’s actually my baby.”

“Enjoy your time with your grandbaby!” the cashier responded with a smile.

This time, Hudi didn’t bother to correct her.

Hudi was 51 when she had her daughter, after going through a divorce, years in the shidduch parshah, and then ten years of infertility. “Listen, nobody chooses to have a baby at fifty-one, when they could have one at twenty-one or thirty-one,” Hudi confides. “I feel like unless you’re in it, you have no understanding of how challenging this is. Especially in the frum world where it feels like every woman in the street is expecting or pushing a baby stroller. You feel grief, rage, despondency, and jealousy. It’s a very lonely road.”

In the secular world, many women choose to push off marriage and starting a family until they’ve achieved certain professional goals. “A high proportion of my patients are in their forties and aiming to become mothers for the first time,” says Dr. Devorah Aharon, a reproductive endocrinologist at RMA of New York. “Over time, the age at first pregnancy around the world, and especially in the US, has increased. Advances in technologies have enabled women to achieve healthy pregnancies at ages when it would be very difficult to conceive without medical assistance.”

An Agonizing Wait

“When I got married at twenty-four, I never expected that it would take almost thirty years until I finally had my first baby,” Hudi says. “But that marriage ended in divorce seven years later, without kids. I was thirty-one and living out of town, working for a nonprofit, and I found it very challenging to date there. I discovered that when a man says he’s willing to relocate, he only means to New Jersey or Monsey,” Hudi says with a laugh. “I was willing to move for the right person, but no relationship got that far. I was single for many years.”

Hudi ended up meeting her husband, Yoni, at a good friend’s wedding. “I was thirty-nine when we got married, and my OB-GYN said if you’re not expecting by forty, you should go to a reproductive endocrinologist. That was the beginning of my ten-year journey of fertility treatments. There are no words to describe how horrible it was,” Hudi says.

Hudi needed support to help her deal with the emotional pain of infertility and joined a support group. “It’s peer-led, so everyone there was also going through it. It was a safe space to share our stories and feel less alone. I co-led the group for eight years, and I’d tell the other ladies this is a place where you can scream or cry.” Her husband, Yoni, also attended a few sessions at a support group; going through the infertility process is also hard on men. “He didn’t talk much about how it affected him,” Hudi says, “but he’d sit in the support group and listen.”