What's the ideal age to become a mom?

One mom's take on what it's like to be both the older and younger mom.

I was a teenage single mom on welfare and, 20 years later, I was a partnered homeowner with a really bad backache. In the post-modern maternal dilemma - to have kids when we're young or to wait? To breed when it "happens," or to plan? - I've had it both ways as a parent.

As mothers, we want everything: an easy conception, pregnancy, and childbirth, the vitality - or coffee - to make it through the first year, money to keep the rent paid and the electricity on, a partner or other family member to do some of the laundry, and time along the way to go to college, find meaningful work, and have adventures.

When I was a teen mom with an infant, people often mistook me for my daughter's nanny. I was settling happily into my new, if unexpected, maternity, applying to colleges, and counting the days until my 20th birthday. Almost two decades later, and a week after my daughter went off to college, I gave birth to another baby. Max was hardly six weeks old when the nurse at his pediatrician's office tickled him, then looked up at me: "He's so cute," she said. "Don't you just love being a grandma?"

Judgment and unwarranted advice, it turns out, are two things that never change. When I was a teen mom, I figured that my weird exchanges with other parents at the park could be explained away by the generation gap. They knew something. They'd waited. Imagine my dismay the first time I took my baby son to the park, thinking I really had it going on this time, that I'd fit in at last, only to realize almost 20 years later that the exact same kind of women seemed to be looking down their noses at me. The only difference was that this time these uber-moms with their fancy strollers and very specific nursing strategies were younger than me.

Maybe other mothers are Zen from the get-go, but it took me a long time to learn that I didn't have control over much. I used to fret endlessly about choosing the wrong school or not being strict enough with the time-outs. I back-talked when people told me I was too young to be a good mom, but I secretly wondered if they were right.

Of course, they were wrong. Over time I saw that my mistakes rarely caused the catastrophes.

Is there a right age to be a mom? Do older moms make better parents?