Fashionable at Sixty.

A Fashion house interview Naomi Selig telling us how its so possible to give birth at any age even true the use of one’s own D.N.A. as she spent much of my 30s recovering from a near-fatal car crash. That's when my two sisters and brother and many of my friends were making babies, but I didn't know if I'd ever fully recover from a head injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, compounded in 1996 by the death of my father, to whom I was very close. I tried to make peace with childlessness, yet always hoped that it would somehow pan out. It wasn't so much the eleventh hour as five to midnight. We had two embryos left in the freezer of a fertility clinic and, by March, I'd be too old to receive them. With two miscarriages and four previous attempts at IVF embryo transfers, it felt like a futile mission, but in February, my partner, Pete, and I decided to give the dice one last roll. We met in August 2002 on board a flight to Nice. He was on his way to a skydiving course while I was meeting a friend for a walk in the mountains. When I got back to London two weeks later, I emailed to see if he'd landed safely and before long we were spending every weekend together.

On paper we made an unlikely match. I was then 42 and Pete eight years younger. He'd been a soldier, a fireman and a boxer; he does triathlons for fun. I'm more inclined towards yoga and cafe culture, and I'll never convince him of the inter connected-ness of everything. Pete wondered if he'd stumbled into a parallel universe when he saw a copy of the book “On Being” on my bookshelf. In terms of physiology and favourable maternal and foetal outcomes, the best age for childbearing is 20-35, but in my 20s I ran from any man who might clip my wings. I wasn't then ready to settle down, though I'd probably have sneered at any woman in middle age who was still trying to have children. I assumed that I could travel the world, have a fulfilling career and still find time to create a family, too. Romance, to my mind, was a path to adventure rather than the prelude to marriage and children, yet at the same time I wanted to raise children in a stable relationship.

I was in my mid-40s before I felt ready for motherhood. Pete was at a different stage. I didn't dare risk unilateral action because I was sure it would end in disaster. But as our attachment grew, and as his own friends and then his younger brother began to procreate, Pete caught the baby bug, too. By then, however, my biological clock was on overtime and with each failed attempt, we became more conscious that we were losing direction and purpose, like two ships blown off course.It's not as if trying to make a baby was my only focus – far from it – but I was unsettled. I hadn't repainted my fourth floor studio flat for eight years because it had been at the back of my mind that it wouldn't be suitable as a home if we had a baby. I found it difficult to complete any work and have, from those years, two unpublished books and several half-baked films rotting in my file of "Dead Projects". After the second miscarriage, I was so distraught that I spent a year seeing a bereavement counsellor. The prospect of twins had been very exciting but maybe it was for the best Joy was born by Cesarean section at UCLH at 09.14 on 31 October, weighing 7lb 3oz. As their have been many congratulations. We Ignore the judgmental haters who usually taunt, when they labeling older women as 'selfish' perfect family vision.