What It Really Takes to Get Pregnant at 46

When Tamara Thrasher-Cateni chose to use an egg donor to get pregnant—after years of heartbreak and loss—her doctor said, “If it works, no one will ever have to know.” But she wants people, especially other women and mothers, to hear what it’s like. Her story will change the way you think about motherhood.

I MET MY HUSBAND when I was 26 on a train traveling through the South of France. I was returning from the Cannes Film Festival, which I’d gone to with an actress friend; he was a pilot in the French Navy. As cliché as it sounds, it was absolutely love at first sight. We’ve been together for 23 years, married for 12.

I had never longed for children, but being with Bruno slowly changed that: I realized that there is nothing more incredible, practically supernatural, than the idea that two people can make another person out of their love. By the time I was in my 30s, I wanted to see our DNA blended into a new being.

But that’s not, as it turns out, how my babies were created. Their DNA comes from Bruno and an egg donor I’ve never met and never will. She did a tremendous thing to help our family, but for me, the path was not at all straight or simple.

My twins were born when I was 46, but they were not my first pregnancy, or my first children. Our first son’s name was Enzo. We knew when I was 16 weeks pregnant, at age 36, that he was going to be born with spina bifida. The doctors gave him an excellent prognosis, though he’d have to have surgery immediately and stay in the NICU at first. We lived in Oklahoma, but we made arrangements for him to be born at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, where I grew up and where most of my family still lives, because of the excellent pediatric neurosurgeons there and the Newborn Center’s family-centered philosophy of care. I was worried about him, of course, but I loved being pregnant, that connection I had with him.