Column 1: My Daughter Arrives
Originally published by reimagine.me
Photography: Shannon Cottrell

MY WORRY ABOUT all this was that when Olivia finally made her way through her mother’s birth canal and saw me greeting her at the exit, her first thought would be, “Grandpa!”

Yes, I’m old. And I’m a dad. The two things happened almost simultaneously. I turned fifty on January 22 and my first child, Olivia, was born April 10.

They say better late than never, but 50 is AARP eligible. I’m not ready to accept aged-based special consideration on the basketball court, let alone at the multiplex box office.

I’m not alone, either. Several of my friends are having kids in mid-to-advanced middle age, some of them first timers. One has gone more than 20 years between kids, long enough to be a first timer all over again.

In some ways, it makes sense. My friends and I have histories of nonconformity. We are writers, artists, musicians, misfits. We have struggled with addiction and depression, and have been working on ourselves and getting our shit together for years, trying therapy, meditation, self-help books, meds; baseball, boxing… whatever it took just to help wrestle with existential questions that needed to be wrestled with. Forever, it seemed.

Often, to me anyway, it appeared that something as monumentally normal as starting a family seemed entirely unattainable. Dogs looked like a better bet.

Or, maybe my friends and I are just stunted man-children afraid to grow up.

Whatever it is, we are part of a growing trend. A December 2012 New Republic article detailing the growing inclination of men and women to have children later in life will be old news by the time my daughter can read, but it was hot off the presses when her mother and I first started down the long road that brought us to her. It reported that the average age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is 25, four years older than it was in 1970. (That’s an average: in Massachusetts, it’s 28; in Mississippi it’s 23.)

The trend is happening elsewhere. In Japan, where adult incontinence pads outsell diapers, the average age of first-time mothers is 29, according to a recent article in The Telegraph. In Britain, it’s 30.

The factors contributing to this are probably as obvious as they are numerous— economic and job insecurity, cultural infantilism, fraying social structures, the recession, more women in the workforce, careerism, self-absorption… and on and on. It boils down to this, though: More and more people are feeling better equipped to have babies at ages when their equipment is less suited for the task.

There are all kinds of medical, developmental and societal implications for this trend. Some of them are alarming—possible links to increased risks of autism, schizophrenia, birth defects and maladjustment. And some of them are reassuring—ostensibly babies with older parents come home to more stable households.

We are possibly at the edge of a yawning evolutionary gap that will take generations to bridge—kind of like how the our species’ narrow birth canals haven’t yet caught up with our newborns’ big heads.

So, on the one hand my wife and I, by having Olivia at this late stage in life, are quotidian examples of a growing global trend (it’s even happening in Africa! the Telegraph article exclaimed). We’re statistics, if you will. But the rising line on the graph tracking the advancing ages of first-time parents is representative of millions of individuals and couples, whose experiences are stories to them, not statistics. Me, too.

My story starts with an abstraction—my life, which until very recently, always felt like it was just about to start for real… soon. Or, soonish. Or, someday, anyway. That’s a funny thing to say at my age, and there’s some evidence that my life really did start a long time ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have often felt like I’ve had little agency in it. That it wasn’t so much mine as one that I was maybe just leasing until I found the one I’d move into long-term.

This detachment, that nattering voice inside telling me I didn’t deserve the things that would seem to make up a normal, healthy life has its roots and they are not unique: chaotic childhood, alcoholic household, periods of acute economic stress.

The net result, though, was that at the age when my college friends were getting on with the careers that would one day afford them fine homes and families, and were meeting their wives and starting to have children, I was hiding out in a ski resort in Colorado making pizzas and chasing powder days, fending off all that real life for just a little while longer. And, then, a little while more.

But then came Olivia and things got real really fast. It became immediately apparent when she was being hurried to the intensive care unit after her birth that despite how long she took to get here and despite how short of a time she’d been around, already there was no such thing as life without her… and that feeling is among the realest I’ve ever known.

So how did this finally happen? How did it get so real?

That’s quite a story, one that involves the recession, concussions, elevated PSA counts, scavenging for scrap metal, wolves, and, of course, friends and family.

But I think I can begin with how I met Olivia’s mother.