Sarah Pascoe has candidly revealed the biggest challenges of having babies in her 40s. The comedian, now aged 44, was 40-years-old when she gave birth to her first child, Theodore, in 2022.
At the age of 42, Sarah welcomed her second son, Albie, in 2023. During an appearance on The Romesh Ranganathan Show, the comedian says, "You don't know how being a parent will affect you, just like you don't know what kind of people your kids will be."
While preparing for parenthood is difficult for all new parents, Sarah reveals the surprises she found challenging as a midlife mum.
"I couldn't hold on to any of myself," she says, adding, "I was 40 and already had a career - I thought I was quite set up and kids would be an add-on to an existing operating system."
She was quite wrong about this notion. While Romesh laughed at her naivety, Sarah continues, "My friends were watching and were like, 'Did you listen to nothing we said?'"
The comedian shares that because what her friends were saying at the time about the challenges of children wasn't relevant to her, she just didn't listen.
"They were talking about how broken they were, and I was like, 'Blah blah blah," she laughs.
It wasn't long before she discovered children weren't an "add-on" to her life at all. Hilariously, she says, "It's not an add-on, it's like when you do an update system and it kills the whole computer. It's ego death."
Throughout performing constant labour for somebody else, Sarah recalls thinking, "Who am I?" She adds, "There was a complete absence of self, I just became this meat robot, wiping up."
Now her children are aged four and two, the comedian is regaining some sense of self. "But I do think nature completely de-programmes you," she says of the time women become mothers.
"You are not important anymore," she explains, continuing, "There's something so un-feminist about it, but that's how we keep kids alive - by being obsessed with them."
Both of Sarah's sons were conceived through IVF after she experienced fertility struggles.
She didn't begin including discussion of infertility and IVF into her stand-up routines until after her eldest son had arrived safely, because "it felt too raw."
"I only really spoke about infertility once I had children and it was reflexing," she tells the BBC, adding, "I also think that's because I couldn't be funny about it until I knew the ending."
Reflecting on this, she says, "It was really like: 'I definitely have a son. He survived. He's alive, he's here. And I then felt I wanted to share things with people who I knew would be at different stages of it."
The comedian concludes, "The other thing with comedy is that people won't laugh unless they know you're OK. You can't tell them the stuff you're not OK about."
