The first time someone called my pregnancy "geriatric," I was 43 years old, sitting on exam-room paper, looking at a positive test result I had wanted for most of my adult life. I am a physician. I have used the term "advanced maternal age" in my own charting more times than I can count. And still, hearing it pointed at me landed like a small slap.

If you have recently been told you are of "advanced maternal age," or seen "geriatric pregnancy" typed into your chart, I want to say two things before anything else. First: I know exactly how that word feels, because I felt it. Second: it is one of the most misleading labels in modern obstetrics, and by the end of this article, I want you to understand what it actually means, what it doesn't, and why it opened more doors for me than it closed.

I also want to tell you something I rarely lead with, that my own experience as a 43-year-old mother is a large part of why I do the work I do now, helping my long-time friend Jessica build a line of postpartum care products at Parasol. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start where it started.

What "Geriatric Pregnancy" and "Advanced Maternal Age" Actually Mean

Let's get the language out of the way, because the language is half the problem.

"Geriatric pregnancy" is an older clinical term for pregnancy at age 35 or older. Most clinicians have moved to the gentler "advanced maternal age" (AMA), but the old phrase still surfaces, on intake forms, in older charts, occasionally from the mouth of a well-meaning nurse who has said it ten thousand times and forgotten how it sounds the first time you hear it.

Here is the part worth internalizing: 35 is not a cliff. Nothing dramatic happens to your body at midnight on your 35th birthday. The age-35 threshold is a statistical convention, a line drawn decades ago, when the risk of certain chromosomal conditions began to rise to roughly the same level as the risk of complications from invasive testing. It was a useful line for a specific clinical decision. It was never meant to be a verdict on your fertility, your body, or your readiness to be a mother.

As a physician, the age-35 cutoff has always felt somewhat arbitrary to me. As a 43-year-old patient staring at it, it felt downright personal. Both of those things can be true at once.

I Spent My Twenties and Thirties Building a Career, Not a Family

I never imagined I would become a mother in my forties. I grew up as an immigrant in a family that prized education and stability above almost everything else, and I spent my twenties and thirties building a career rather than building a family. Dating and motherhood always felt like something I would "get to later", even as a quiet part of me wondered whether later might arrive too late.

In my mid-thirties, with that uncertainty sitting in the back of my mind, I made a practical decision: I froze my eggs. It felt like a small insurance policy on a future I wasn't yet sure I wanted. I didn't know, then, how much that one decision would matter.

When I married in my early forties, my husband was in his mid-fifties. The idea of starting a family together felt both surreal and a little rebellious. We were well outside the traditional age bracket, and we knew it. But we were hardly alone. Far more women are having children later today than in the 1970s, and that shift is not a fringe phenomenon. It is one of the defining demographic stories of modern parenthood. If you are reading this in your late thirties or forties, you are not an outlier. You are part of the largest wave of older first-time mothers in history.

IVF and Pregnancy at 43: The Honest Version

I will not pretend the path was simple. At 43, I knew the odds of natural conception were slim, and the risk of chromosomal differences was higher than it would have been a decade earlier. Using the eggs I had frozen years before felt like both a scientific miracle and an emotional leap of faith.

The IVF process was demanding, precise, and emotionally charged. Every appointment, every injection, every two-week wait carried weight. When I finally saw a positive test in February 2022, I felt three things at once: disbelief, gratitude, and the sober awareness that I was now, officially, an "advanced maternal age" patient.

And here is where the label surprised me, because the label helped. AMA status opened doors. It meant expanded prenatal screening was offered without my having to fight for it. It meant insurance covered an elective cesarean, which I ultimately chose. The vigilance that can feel stigmatizing from the outside felt, from the inside, like attentive care. I was monitored closely, screened often, and counseled thoroughly. Younger patients sometimes have to push for that level of attention. I simply received it.

This is the reframe I most want you to take from my story: the AMA label is not a sentence. It is, in many ways, an upgrade in the care you're offered. Statistics describe populations, not individuals. They tell you what's true on average across thousands of women. They do not tell you what is true about you, your body, your pregnancy, or your baby.

Then I Got Home, And Discovered What No One Had Prepared Me For

Emme arrived by scheduled cesarean. I remember the surgical team, the anesthesiologist placing my epidural, my husband watching my face shift from fear to joy. Within minutes, our daughter was in the world.

The recovery suite was a blur of swaddles, vital checks, and rapid-fire instructions. Nurses cycled in and out, teaching me to feed, change, and soothe a newborn while simultaneously preparing me for discharge. Rest felt like a luxury no one had time to schedule.

It was at home that the real gaps revealed themselves, and this is the moment that, years later, changed the course of my career.

I had been sent home with oversized pads but no postpartum underwear to actually hold them in place. My cesarean incision was covered with a dressing I was told to keep dry, yet the abdominal binder I'd been given pressed directly against it. I was a physician with two decades of clinical experience, and I was sitting on my bathroom floor improvising, because the practical, comfort-focused supplies a healing postpartum body actually needs simply weren't part of the discharge package.

I kept thinking: if this is hard for me, with all my training, what is it like for everyone else?

What Postpartum Recovery Actually Demands

Here is something maternity care rarely says plainly: the postpartum body is recovering from one of the most significant physiological events a human body can undergo, and in the case of a cesarean, from major abdominal surgery on top of it. Recovery is not a vague "take it easy for a few weeks." It is a specific, demanding process, and understanding it changes what you reach for.

In those first days and weeks, your body is doing several things at once:

• Clearing the uterus. Postpartum bleeding, called lochia, is heavier and far less predictable than a period, especially in the first ten to fourteen days. It comes in sudden gushes when you stand or shift, and it does not politely follow the rhythm you remember from menstruation.
• Healing tissue. Whether you have a perineal tear, an episiotomy, or a cesarean incision, you have an actual wound that needs to stay clean, dry, and undisturbed to heal well.
• Contracting back to size. The uterus shrinks from the size of a watermelon back toward a pear over several weeks, a process (uterine involution) that produces cramping, particularly during feeding.
• Rebuilding on a metabolic deficit. Tissue repair, blood-volume normalization, and sheer exhaustion place real nutritional demands on a body that is also often not sleeping.

When you understand that list, the discharge bag of mismatched supplies starts to look less like an oversight and more like a system that simply stops paying attention right when the mother needs it most.

The Mission That Inspired Parasol's Postpartum Collection

That bathroom-floor moment is the origin of what I do now.

Jessica and I are long-time friends, and we kept circling back to the same realization: maternity care, for all its sophistication, tends to treat birth as the finish line. Enormous attention goes into the pregnancy and the delivery. Then the baby arrives, and the mother, bleeding, healing, often recovering from major surgery, is handed a bag of leftover supplies and sent home to figure it out.

Jessica believed the postpartum body deserved better than an afterthought, and she asked me to help build for it as the company's Chief Wellness Officer, to be the clinical conscience behind what goes into these products and why. It is, without exaggeration, the most meaningful work of my medical career.

Postpartum underwear was where we started, because it was the gap I had felt most acutely in my own recovery. Not glamorous. But in those first weeks, it is one of the most quietly important things you will wear. Map it against what recovery actually demands, and the design choices stop being features and start being answers:

• Real absorbency for real lochia. Standard pads are frequently no match for early postpartum flow. A high-absorbency layer, held securely in place, changes the entire experience of those first two weeks.

• A secure, stay-put fit. An oversized pad with nothing to anchor it is the exact problem I lived on my bathroom floor. Underwear designed to hold protection in place, through the bending, lifting, and constant motion of newborn care, is the fix.

• Fabric that respects a healing wound. Soft, breathable material that won't irritate tender skin or abrade a cesarean incision. After my own experience with that abdominal binder, this one is personal.

• Coverage built for a C-section, not against it. Nearly a third of U.S. births are cesarean. Recovery wear should account for an incision, not pretend it isn't there.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn't. Postpartum underwear is not a medical treatment. It will not heal an incision or stop a hemorrhage. What it does is remove one source of stress, leaks, shifting, discomfort, the constant low-grade anxiety of am I about to bleed through my clothes, during a stretch of life when you have approximately zero spare capacity for additional stress. In those first weeks, peace of mind is not a small thing.

That same philosophy, solve the real problem the mother (or baby) is actually having, runs through everything we make. It is why, for example, we infuse alpha-bisabolol, a gentle, well-studied skin-soothing compound, into our diapering products for both mom and baby: because skin that is healing or sensitive deserves to be actively cared for, not just covered. If you want the deep dive on that ingredient and why we chose it, we wrote about it here. The principle is always the same: every choice should answer a real need, and we should be able to explain exactly why it's there.

The Postpartum Wisdom I Wasn't Taught in Medical School

By the end of that first week, my husband and I had found a tentative rhythm, but we knew we needed help. With no family nearby and very little newborn experience between us, we hired an experienced live-in postpartum caregiver who arrived on day four and immediately became our guide.

I often joked that Emme was only the second baby I had ever held in my life. It was almost true. This woman taught me how to read Emme's cues, how to structure feedings and naps, and, crucially, how to care for myself while caring for an infant.

She also introduced me to traditional postpartum healing practices I had never been taught in medical school. She made bone broths rich in collagen, herbal soups to ease water retention, and meals built around high-quality protein to support tissue repair. She encouraged complex carbohydrates for fiber and micronutrients, omega fatty acids for hormone balance and inflammation, and B vitamins for the intense metabolic demands of recovery. Vitamin C, she reminded me, is essential for collagen synthesis and wound healing, particularly relevant after a cesarean. I kept taking my prenatal vitamins for the same reason.

But the deeper lesson wasn't any single broth or nutrient. It was the posture of that care, unhurried, deliberate, treating the mother's recovery as seriously as the baby's arrival. Many cultures around the world build a formal period of postpartum rest and nourishment into the expectation of birth. Western maternity care too often skips straight past it. That contrast crystallized something for me: the mother is not a vehicle that has finished its job once the baby arrives. She is a person who has just been through something enormous and deserves to be cared for accordingly.

That belief is, in the end, the entire reason this product line exists. The caregiver in my home treated my recovery as worthy of attention. Most new mothers don't have someone to do that for them. So we try to build some of that attention into the things they actually use.

What I Want You to Take From My Story

If you are pregnant at 35, or 40, or 43, and someone has handed you the word "geriatric," here is what two decades of medicine and one very personal pregnancy taught me:

The label describes a category. It does not describe you. The risks are real and worth understanding, but they are population risks, and the same status that triggers the scary word also unlocks closer monitoring, expanded screening, and more attentive care. I brought to my daughter a steadiness I simply did not have in my twenties: shaped by years of experience, by patience I had to earn, by knowing myself.

There is no single right timeline for becoming a parent. For some of us, later is precisely when we are ready.

And whenever your baby arrives, at 28 or 38 or 43, you will deserve to recover in a body that's cared for, supported, and treated as something more than an afterthought. That belief is why I do this work. It's why I sat on a bathroom floor at 43, improvising with the wrong supplies, and thought: someone should fix this.

So that's what we're trying to do.