From worries about being the strange old lady moms you see in the park to infertile women in their 30s and 40s getting questioned about when they're going to start their families, misreadings by passersby interpret people's life status through out of date concepts of life stage and fertility. 

It's no secret that "modern" women have been entering motherhood later in life than was the norm a few decades ago and this has raised some curious consequences and misguided assumptions. My own mother was just 22 when she had her first child; she delivered her fourth and last child at 27.  It was pretty well accepted in her day -- especially with the onset of birth control -- that by 40ish a woman's likelihood of pregnancy was a long shot, and even cause for embarrassment as was apparently the case when a friend of mine was born to her then 47-year-old mother.

As the story goes, one of her mother's first activities upon returning from the hospital was to dye her hair for the first time. This was one of a few things she did to appear younger than her age to avoid the unwanted perception that she was the grandmother instead of the mother. 

That's apparently still an issue for some today, even for those who elect and succeed with later motherhood as was acknowledged in a recent Huffington Post piece, titled "Not That You Look Old: The Aesthetics of Modern Motherhood." Author Elizabeth Gregory confessed to, among other things, her trepidation at being 65 when her youngest finishes high school. The math and a conversation with a friend led her to do a little research.

She points out: "Where 1 in 12 first babies these days is born to a mom 35 or over, it was 1 in 100 in 1970. Add in the adoptive moms, and you've got a big group."  About those statistics she goes on to note, "Women today walk a very different road from all our ancestors in terms of education, work, and civic status. That's in large part due to the arrival of hormonal birth control, which has enabled many to delay having kids, giving us time to finish our educations, establish ourselves at work, find the right partner, and just see the world a bit."

(Add in the ever growing $3 billion a year fertility industry marketing only its photogenic success stories and, voila, older motherhood gets an added artifical safety net.  Artificial in that there's an assumption that the time horizon in which women are able to achieve successful pregnancy and childbirth has been magically extended.  Ah, if only that were the rule rather than the exception.  More on that later.)

Even with their safety in numbers, there's still reluctance to be "one of those strange old lady moms you see in the park," which was among the reasons Gregory's 44-year-old friend had decided not to move forward with a frozen embryo transfer, "though she'd just said that her four-year-old would love a sib and that she and her husband would both love a second child."

What's implied in this statement is that her friend would have been successful getting a second child -- no sure thing as those of us with fresh and frozen embryo transfers learned the hard way -- prior to turning 40. What Gregory  didn't raise was the even weirder specter facing those of us bona fide infertile 40-something women who live in this era of designer babies and fertility promises who have managed to preserve a certain youthfulness (skin care advances have been much more successful for me than reproductive breakthroughs).

What we face, as I pointed out in a comment, is the all too often ignorant expectation that women like me are still in the realm of pregnancy possibility. What's not understood is that ART procedures have a high failure rate for women regardless of age -- some of us just don't have the necessary functioning parts and/or complications from male factors, and science can't help. Statistics show that as many as 10 percent of all couples who see an infertility specialist come away with the mysterious and unresolved "diagnosis" of unexplained infertility, and 1 in 20 couples will never have a child despite all that medicine can offer. The myth that anyone can get pregnant some how, some way complicates mightily the already difficult process facing those forced to accept that biological parenthood just isn't in the cards.

Still, given the number of how shall we say, mature mothers, filling the playgrounds it's no wonder that society, for the most part, naively assumes biological parenthood in the 40s is easily achieveable. This idea is stoked further by tales of multiple births to late 40-something starlets and even 50- and 60-year-old pregnancies making the headlines. 

This then leads to other kinds of unwanted questions and assumptions.  I concluded my comment to Gregory with this anecdote: A few months ago a new acquaintance at a social gathering casually asked me if I had children (a question I detest as it brings up nearly a decade of failed attempts at trying to conceive -- hardly the memories I want to revisit over a beer with someone who fathered several children the old fashioned way, complete with a late, surprise pregnancy). When I replied simply, "no, we couldn't," his comeback was, "you're not THAT old."

Part of me was flattered to be sure, but I would rather more was understood about the reality of the fickle fertility spectrum. Gregory concurred, responding, "One effect of this combination of changes is all kinds of mis-readings by passersby, who interpret people's life status through out of date concepts of life stage and fertility...It’s a mixed up moment. Best to not assume that everyone’s story is the same, or should be. As ever, actually listening to people turns out to make for a much more interesting day than projecting your own story on them."

Couldn't agree more.

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Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found.