Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.

When Meredith Lynn Kramer was in her late teens, doctors told her she had very little chance of ever having a baby of her own. She had contracted pelvic inflammatory disease, an infection of the reproductive organs that affects more than 1 million American women a year and that leaves one in ten patients infertile. As a result of the illness, Meredith had developed a lot of scar tissue that would make it very difficult to conceive a child.

When she got engaged at 24, she was thrilled that her fiancé already had a daughter from a previous relationship. “I couldn’t have kids, but now I had an instant family with this sweet little girl,” she says.

But much to their surprise, Meredith became pregnant a few months later when she was still in nursing school. They decided to move their wedding date up by six months. The pregnancy went smoothly, until Meredith went into preterm labor nearly a month early. She was grateful that her daughter was a good size for her gestational age and only had to spend a day and a half in the NICU. 

Not long after, Meredith and her husband decided to try for a second child. She even took the fertility drug Clomid for six months to increase her egg production and started using ovulation tests to make sure they were having sex at the ideal time. But they didn’t have any luck. She stopped taking the medication, and the couple stopped actively trying to have a baby. A month or two later, she was surprised once again: a positive pregnancy test. They welcomed their baby boy in 2001. Meredith was 27 years old. “I thought I was done,” she says.

After six years together, though, Meredith and her husband decided to divorce. By her account, he was a very good dad. He moved to Long Island and would come pick up the kids at their home in New Jersey every weekend. Though it was an amicable divorce, Meredith was heartbroken that she never got to say good-bye to her stepdaughter since the girl’s mother had curtailed her regular visits. She missed her terribly. 

Once the kids were in grade school, Meredith started dating someone new and fell in love. But soon after he moved in with Meredith and her kids, he became emotionally abusive. “He was a recovering heroin addict, and since I was a nurse, I thought that I could save him,” she says. “It ended up going terribly wrong.” Because her boyfriend was so controlling, she became isolated from her closest family members, who had all recently moved to Georgia. Her boyfriend held onto all her debit and credit cards. And when she put her kids to bed at night, he would pace in front of the doorway to their bedroom and tell her she was taking too long. He would even start fights if he felt she was giving too much attention to her kids. “It had me doubting who I was and every thought I had,” she remembers. 

She knew she had to get away from him and came up with a plan. She told him that she wanted them all to move to Georgia. He didn’t have a driver’s license, so she said she would go ahead with the kids to set up their place and once everything was settled, he could come down and move in. “That was the only way he would let me leave,” she says. Meredith took her kids to Georgia, and when she got there, she broke up with him and then blocked his phone number, email, and social media. 

In her new home in Georgia, Meredith focused on raising her kids and trying to heal from her bad relationship. Since she was a single mom and her kids’ father lived states away, she knew she couldn’t handle the pressure and hours of working in a hospital. She took a break from nursing and turned to a series of office jobs to give her more flexibility to take care of her kids.

It was a good five years before she decided she was ready to date again. And it turned out that life had one more surprise for her.

Meredith tells her story of how, as a 46-year-old mother of a 23-year-old and a 19-year-old, she accidentally became pregnant — while on birth control and with only one working ovary.

My daughter had just moved out, and my son was busy being a 19-year-old. So I began thinking that I was ready to start dating again. I felt ready emotionally to go out and at least find someone to talk to and have fun with. I joined Match.com, and that’s how I met Jim, who was 48, two years older than me. We started hanging out about one night a weekend over a period of three months. I wanted to keep it real casual. It was early 2020, so pretty much all we could do was hang out at each other’s houses because of COVID.

We weren’t calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend or anything, but we had been intimate. I wasn’t worried about pregnancy. I had been having perimenopause symptoms — anxiety, insomnia, recurrent urinary-tract infections — since I was 43. Aside from that, I had been on the birth-control pill for years to manage pain from an ovarian fibroma, a benign tumor on my left ovary. It wasn’t cancerous, but it had filled my entire ovary to the extent that my doctor said the ovary was no longer capable of releasing an egg follicle.

“Nothing to worry about,” my doctor had said. “You’re past your childbearing years.” I opted not to have surgery to remove it and dealt with the pain with the help of the Pill, which is commonly used to treat pelvic pain associated with cramps and endometriosis. So between my age, perimenopause, birth control, and my one good ovary, I felt covered.

When I didn’t get my period toward the end of February 2020, I knew right away something wasn’t right. When you’re on the Pill, you always get your period on time. Maybe it starts to become a little lighter or shorter, but it always comes. I still waited a week to test. But I knew I felt funny.

Jim was coming over that night, so we decided to do it together. We ran to the dollar store and got a pregnancy test.

I was so sure that it was going to be negative. I felt like something was wrong, but I’m like, It’s got to be menopause.

But the test was positive for pregnancy.

We weren’t exactly rejoicing. But he told me right away that whatever I wanted to do, he was okay with it. Then I went and bought a couple more expensive pregnancy tests because surely that one from the dollar store couldn’t be right. But it was.

For about a week and a half, Jim and I both would flip-flop about what we were going to do because we had only been together about three months before I got pregnant. I think he was still talking to other people. We didn’t know each other that well, so there was a lot to process.

My doctors were unsure how it happened; the odds were insane. The one explanation they offered was that being on a low dose of birth control for over ten years combined with entering perimenopause could have meant that I needed a higher dose of hormones.

We were still trying to make our decision when I started bleeding. He took me to the local ER, and they did an ultrasound. The baby was fine. But at that point, I realized I didn’t want to lose the baby. I wanted to keep the pregnancy.

I realized that I wanted to give Jim a baby, too. He was 48, and he had never had any kids. He’d been in long-term relationships, and he’d always wanted to have kids, but it never happened for him. I just wanted him to have the joy of being a dad. I wasn’t really thinking about how we were going to do it at the time.

We decided to wait to tell everybody until the end of the first trimester to make sure I wasn’t going to miscarry. Also, the doctors wanted to perform a test between 10 and 12 weeks to check if the baby had Down syndrome. Because of my age, the odds were high that something could be wrong. I was worried about how I was going to care for a child with Down for the rest of my life when I was already so old. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but in my heart, I knew I was going to keep the baby no matter what. I was 13 weeks along by the time I got the results back: The baby was healthy.

It was hard to tell people mainly because my friends didn’t even know Jim. It felt like I had made a mistake, like I was fessing up, saying, I screwed up. Even though I did everything right and I had never missed a pill.

I was most scared telling my parents who are religious Christians. They were concerned because they didn’t know Jim and weren’t sure if he was going to be responsible and step up. They knew what I had been through with my last boyfriend and how I had finally gotten on my feet emotionally. Shortly after, my parents met Jim, and I swear they love him more than they love me. They ended up being really supportive.

Next, I told my kids. At this point, I was a little over 13 weeks along and my daughter was 23 and had already moved out of the house and my son was almost 20. I made it a point to bring Jim around more first. My son had seen him briefly a few times, but my daughter had only met him once. I sat both kids down in the living room. I was very, very nervous, mostly because it felt like I had done something wrong. When I told them the news, they actually laughed at first, thinking I was joking. Then they realized how nervous and scared I was. Once it sunk in, they were shocked. But then they hugged me and said, “We’ll be here for you. This is actually a blessing, and it’s going to be all right.”

Everybody’s been supportive. Sure, there’s been a lot of jokes at my job. I’m an office manager at a car dealership, and I work with all guys. And boy, they thought it was just hilarious that I was doing this.

Once we had decided to have the baby, Jim stopped dating other people. We continued to date one another for the whole pregnancy, seeing each other maybe one or two nights a week at each other’s houses. We still couldn’t actually go out on dates because of COVID.

Jim was excited for the baby coming, and he started talking about how we should move in together once the baby was born. I still felt like we had to work on building our relationship. I didn’t know if I was ready to live together. I remember thinking that I should cherish this period before we moved in together — it was as if a clock was ticking down to that day and our lives would change. I wanted to savor the last days with my son with just us in the house together.

It was a hard, stressful time for Jim and me.

I carried small, and only gained about 22 pounds by the end because of all the stress. I knew in my head I was pregnant, but I don’t think it fully hit me that this was happening. I felt weird walking around pregnant and looking older at the same time.

I had so many doctor’s appointments because of my age, but I had zero geriatric pregnancy-related issues, like gestational diabetes or high blood pressure. I had one of those at-home Doppler heart monitors, and I used to check the baby’s heart rate all the time. I just had to make sure he was okay, even though I felt him moving. I may not have accepted 100 percent that this baby was happening to me, but I had this innate need to make sure he was okay.

The doctor told me that I was going to need to be induced at 38 weeks because I had been having contractions, though they weren’t strong. I was uncomfortable and ready to put an end to the contractions and get that baby out.

The weekend before I was supposed to be induced, I was hanging out at Jim’s house. I was ready to go home and have a good couple of days alone before I was induced. And then my water broke. I had made it to 36.5 weeks. We waited until my contractions amped up and then we went to the hospital.

Jim was there with me, giving me support during the contractions and throughout the delivery. When Eli was born, Jim was crying. He was so sweet. At six pounds, four ounces, Eli looked like a shriveled-up old man, complete with no hair on the top of his head, only on the sides. He had Jim’s ears and lips and looked so much like him.

Jim was a natural with Eli from the start. I have the cutest pictures of them together.

Honestly, it was all a blur. I didn’t sleep after I had him for the entire hospital stay. And it’s because I was in shock. It hadn’t set in that I just had a baby. And here’s this guy I don’t really know that well and we’re going home together. It felt like an out-of-body experience.

I hate to say it, but it took me a little bit to fall in love with Eli. At the time, I almost felt like I was giving this baby to Jim because he’d never had a child of his own, and that everything would somehow work out. I don’t know if it was the pregnancy hormones, but I didn’t think about how much work it was going to be until I was all up in it. And then, suddenly, I was like, What did I do? I don’t think I ever would’ve had an abortion, but I just thought, Oh my God, what happened?

In the beginning, we either stayed at Jim’s house or at my house. My older son was still living at home, and I didn’t know if he was ready to be on his own yet. So we would go back and forth between houses, and it gave me a chance to see if he was ready to live on his own.

After six months, we moved to Jim’s house permanently. It became too much to move all the baby stuff back and forth. My son stayed at my house and paid rent.

Jim has always been willing to get up in the middle of the night with Eli. He’s great with that kind of stuff. I mean, he didn’t know anything about babies. I had been a baby nurse and did NICU, mother, baby, labor, and delivery, so I knew what to do. But it was all new to Jim and he was happy to learn.

In terms of deciding to live together, Jim had been pretty insistent about it. I had said to him, “I can do this myself. I’ve done this before. You can just come visit.” But he said, “No, we all need to be under the same roof.”
That first year with a baby was hard for Jim and me because we were so new as a couple. It’s like: Who are you? Which side of the bed are you sleeping on? And we had no memories of doing fun stuff and building on things. There’s no “Remember that time we did this?” Because even when I was pregnant and he would come over, we would just watch TV.

We didn’t really do date nights after Eli was born either. Everyone in my family is too old to watch Eli. My older sister said, “I don’t know how you do it. I can’t even babysit him because it hurts my back.” Jim and I went to Wendy’s once by ourselves, and we sat in the parking lot and ate hamburgers while I was looking at shoes online for Eli. That was our “date.” And then I’m like, “We need to go home. I don’t know what Eli’s doing with your dad right now because he is really old.”

Being a mother is definitely harder this time around. I’m significantly more tired. My joints ache. And I’m dealing with symptoms of perimenopause. It’s also harder because of social media. There seems to be so much more pressure about doing “the right thing” and not messing your kids up. When I raised my other two, it was the late 1990s and early 2000s and it was just so different. But on a positive note, I am more patient these days. I remember being so stressed, dragging the kids out of bed to get them ready for day care so I could get to the hospital on time for work. Now, I have a more flexible job, so I can just say, “Well, we are going to be a little late today.” I don’t get as stressed and upset about it when Eli is dragging in the mornings.

My daughter just turned 26, and my older son is 23. They’re good kids and responsible. They both work, have their own apartments and relationships and they’re doing great.

My kids are wonderful with Eli. They’re so different with him. My son is all play, play, play, and my daughter is just super-sweet. They come over every other Sunday for dinner and hang out with him. With Eli just turned 3, their relationship is getting even better. My kids have watched him a couple times on their own, but they’re busy with their own lives, too. I don’t want to put any pressure on them. They are Eli’s godparents, and if anything happens to Jim and me, they said they would take over Eli’s care.

Before Eli came along, I had a plan to go back into nursing. Then he was born, and that held things off. But now I’m ready. I’m currently in the middle of a virtual nurse refresher course through Rutgers to get my license active again. So between school, working full time, taking care of Eli while Jim works late, and being the one who does the food shopping, the cooking, and the cleaning, I’m out of my mind right now.

In a month, I’ll have to go up to New Jersey to complete my clinical. It’s scheduled for two back-to-back weekends, so I’m going to stay in New Jersey for 13 days. Jim will be taking time off from work to take care of Eli. I haven’t been away from Eli for a night yet. I’ve been trying to show him all the little secrets that he doesn’t know about, like, “You have to give him MiraLax if he hasn’t gone to the bathroom, and this is how much. And don’t give him too much juice.”

Hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll have my license active and be able to transfer it to Georgia. My plan is just to see what’s out there, maybe something nonclinical or in a doctor’s office, something easy, because I’ve been out so long. There’s a nice midwife center near me that I always drive by. I’m like, That’d be perfect.

As for Jim, he’s had a good job as a driver for FedEx for the past 26 years. And we’re hoping that with my return to nursing, he’ll be able to retire in a couple of years. That way, Jim would be able to take Eli to sports, activities, and do more of the daddy-day-care thing.

I thought that I would have accepted it by now, but I still can’t wrap my brain around it. I was looking forward to just focusing on dating and having fun. So, yeah, I’m still in shock.

There’s definitely no more kids in the future. I had my tubes tied the day after I had Eli. I planned it ahead of time to make sure another pregnancy didn’t happen since I can’t trust birth control.

Jim is a good guy. He literally has no vices. We’ve committed to raising this child together for the next 20 years. We will be almost 70 when Eli becomes an adult. We’re trying to do what everybody else does. And in some ways, I feel like we are in the same place as everybody who chose to be together. We just kind of hurried things up.

I feel like I’m still getting to know Jim, and I’m also getting to know myself in a healthy relationship—although with the pressure of having a child to raise alongside of it. But I do love Jim. I love him as a person. I love him as Eli’s dad. And our common ground is that we love our kid.

We’ve talked more about getting married, and I’m open to it. Jim says he wants to and is saving up for a ring and trying to think of a way to ask me that’s romantic. Our relationship was unplanned, and we both weren’t looking to get into anything serious, but we love Eli immeasurably and we love each other as partners. We are a family, and that is good enough for me.