When I entered my forties, I was worried sick that I wouldn't be able to have children. And when I had my first, at 41, I was equally anxious that she would be an only child. I wouldn't wish that stress and worry on any other woman.
I realise that I am incredibly lucky to have had two such beautiful, healthy children - Molly Mae, almost two, and 10-month-old Danny - at an age when successful conception and birth are undoubtedly harder to achieve. But still, it makes me sad how little of their adulthood I'm going to see. It is by no means ideal to start a family as late as I have.
Yesterday, Dr Susan Bewley of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital described middle-aged mothers as more of a burden to society than teenage mums. Women who delay having children until they are 35 or over constitute a "major public health issue", she said, citing the added cost to the NHS of IVF attempts, miscarriages and premature births - all more likely in older women than their younger sisters. I know the women, these "selfish" older mothers, that Dr Bewley is talking about. She is talking about my friends and I.
Yet, no matter how much I wish that I had met my husband, Jason McCue, a lawyer and the father of my children, at the age of 30 or 34, the fact of the matter is, I did not.
Short of going to a sperm bank, or ending up having a child with someone with whom I had no long-term future, I therefore had no options.
This, of course, is the case for most modern women. Having a child is the most all-consuming thing you can possibly do, and most women really do want to do it with a partner. Yet most of the men I met in my twenties and thirties - and they were by no means exceptional - simply weren't ready to have a long-term, committed relationship, let alone settle down and have kids.
Are we being told, then, that it is better to have a child earlier, with someone unlikely to stick around? I get so angry about these mixed messages. On the one hand we are told that children need a stable family and two parents, and on the other we are continually harangued by people like Dr Bewley for waiting until we have got to a stage where we are more likely to have just that stability.
Surveys show that 34 per cent of women cite the absence of the right bloke as the prime reason for not having children until they are over 35. When it comes to my immediate circle of friends, you can up that figure to 90 per cent.
What truly irritates me about the people who lecture women on their fertility and age is the fact that they apparently watch the world radically change around them, but still hang on to pre-war sensibilities.
If a woman goes out in her twenties looking, with deadly seriousness, for potential father material, she'll be very much on her own. Society no longer expects women to flee the parental nest and almost immediately feather one of their own, and a good thing, too. The boys aren't thinking about starting families in their twenties and neither, to a large extent, are the girls.
Of course, there's another factor at work here, too. For most women, as soon as you have children, your career comes to a standstill at best, or simply goes into reverse. What astonishes me, mind you, is the instant assumption, and continual assertion, that this country is made up of women who are out there burning with ambition, and who are determined not to let anything thwart that ambition (certainly not the arrival of children).
These are the mythical women who, it seems, set out cynically to take advantage of NHS maternity services once they are into their forties and have forged these amazing careers. So - how many women like that do you know?
The truth is much simpler. In order to support children, or even a mortgage, most families find that both parents need to work. Women have to be concerned with making a living. Again, we have no choice. It's hardly "selfish", having worked damn hard for, say, 10 years, to then want to sustain that career rather than watch it crumble at the first sign of a pregnancy bump.
Yes, we have to live in the real world. Many of my friends who ended up having kids in their late thirties or forties did throw caution to the wind in terms of their careers. They knew that time was running out and they couldn't wait any longer for the right moment to take a break.
I remember thinking something like that myself. If having children was going to have a dramatic and negative impact on my career - as a TV arts presenter and Radio 4 journalist - then, you know what, so be it.
If you're a realist, you know it's going to happen - and to an extent, I found that it did. I had a producer on a programme tell me, for example, that my breastfeeding was " inconvenient".
I couldn't go off and film for 12 hours a day, you see, because I had to go home and feed my daughter at certain intervals. And that's working in television, a fairly flexible environment where you'd hope views might be slightly more enlightened. You can imagine the argument we had.
So, of course, it's not women who have to change their behaviour, but the whole of society. If we could guarantee a career break for babies without penalty, then that would be wonderful. At the moment it just doesn't happen.
In my view, it's opinions like those of Dr Bewley that really highlight the lack of understanding of how modern women live. She has said before that women "defy nature" by delaying conception and then relying upon IVF, yet science is defying nature in every way and for incredibly beneficial purposes. Do we not defy nature when we conquer inherited genetic conditions or disease? Advances in science are there to be taken advantage of.
And when she now says that "middle-aged" motherhood costs the NHS more than do teenage mums, well, what's the NHS for? Surely it, too, has to change with society. There are no statistics to back up her argument, since no one seems to know how much "delaying" motherhood actually does cost the NHS.
I would love to see the figures. I would also like to compare them with the costs incurred by 17-year-old mums who, having had a baby so young, find it hard to get a job or start a career, and are thus reliant on other state agencies. Frankly, it's deeply irresponsible to compare older mums with teenage mums on any level at all.
So, let's stop finger-pointing, blaming, and scaring the wits out of older women. By the time you get to your mid-thirties, and in some cases only then, you have at least some idea of what life requires of you. You have matured, and you have far more to offer a tiny human being who is just taking its first steps.
Dr Bewley needs to ask more, much broader, questions, since, if she's not going to find us all the right men at the "ideal" time, she - and the media outlets who interpret her views with such glee - can lecture women until they are blue in the face.
The fact is, we won't be listening.
