Juliet Le Page: Still fertile in your fabulous forties

Good for them. There might be many who don't like the idea of "older" mothers, but what these statistics can't show are the years of striving, of desperation and of heartbreak that many of the mums making up these numbers will have been through.

The idea that women are deliberately waiting until their forties to start their families is just not true in the vast majority of cases. For my part, I didn't meet my husband Richard until I was 43, and that was the first time I had met someone with whom I actually wanted to have a family.

In fact, when that thought flitted through my head I was stunned that I hadn't had it before. I knew there was something missing in my life, that there had to be something "more", but I had spent the previous years dedicated to my career in physiotherapy, which funded a very nice lifestyle of travelling, eating out and generally having fun.

And it wasn't as though I was single. I did have a long-term partner, but the thought of having babies never entered either of our heads – so when the relationship foundered it wasn't because I had suddenly developed a desire for children and he hadn't, it was just a case of going separate ways. Maybe we both knew something was missing. When I met Richard I finally knew what that was.

It then took a while for us to agree on how we were going to have a baby. I am extremely pragmatic and knew my chances of falling pregnant naturally were much less than they would have been when I was younger, and tests proved it. I didn't want to take the chance of failure through IVF or the natural process, so after much counselling, we opted for egg donation at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary.

We were lucky as the process was successful and I became pregnant. I had spent two years preparing my body, having no alcohol, cutting out caffeine and so had a great pregnancy, only suffering a little heartburn. In fact I think that women in their forties may well have better pregnancies in some ways because they are so careful about what they're doing. In your twenties or thirties, when you can get pregnant more easily, you don't have the same conscious decision-making processes because it's all come easily.

I never thought of myself as being "too old" to have a baby. The only minor concern I had was being the oldest mum at the school gate, but that was never a good enough reason for me not to have children. Mind you, Richard is ten years younger than me, so he wouldn't be an "old" dad like Paul McCartney or Des O'Connor – not that anyone seemed to mind when they fathered children when they were way past their forties.

Rafe – who is now four – was born by emergency Caesarean after I was induced. I can't say being older hindered me in recovery from my Caesarean, I was up and about in five days and driving again after a fortnight.

My daughter Julia, who is 18 months, was also born after egg donation – this time we had to go to Spain because of my age – and by elective Caesarean. Again, all went smoothly. Admittedly with two children I am tired, but who isn't? And to be honest, it's more mental exhaustion than physical. They sure know how to wear you down.

So for me being an "older" mum has been great – but I would never recommend that a woman wait until her forties to start trying. In my job now as a fertility awareness practitioner, there are many women who come to me who started trying for a family long before they hit their forties, only for every attempt to end in failure or to be interrupted because of other life-changing events.

One recent client has tried 17 times to become pregnant through assisted process and is now pregnant in her forties, but that started when she was in her early thirties. So to suggest women are waiting is in most cases untrue.

However, I do have older women who come to me who are in incredibly stressful jobs. They've climbed the career ladder and are afraid to let it go to give their bodies a chance to be relaxed enough to get pregnant. It's a catch-22 for them, because if they don't get pregnant then their career has suffered for no reason.

That problem might not exist in the future. With technology allowing the freezing of eggs, there will be more women consciously making the choice to put off motherhood until later, knowing their eggs will be frozen from a younger age.

Maybe then there will be less shock and outrage about mums in their forties. Perhaps one day we'll be more like India where the birth of a child – no matter the age of the mother – is just looked upon as a blessed gift.

Juliet Le Page is co-founder of the support group My Fertility Support (www.myfertilitysupport.co.uk) which is a free support group for the Edinburgh and Lothian region. She is a specialist fertility consultant, who is an accredited Billings Ovulation Method teacher