Tana Ramsay doesn’t shy away from sharing the ups and downs of motherhood.
The cookbook author and her husband Gordon Ramsay share kids Megan, 26, twins Jack and Holly, 24, Matilda “Tilly,” 22, Oscar, 5, and Jesse, 8 months. During an episode of the podcast Postcards from Midlife with Lorraine Candy and Trish Halpin, Tana, 49, opened up about her pregnancies and experience with in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“I think the important thing to say is it’s a bit like breastfeeding. No two is ever the same,” Tana said when asked about welcoming a baby at 48. “I don’t think it’s necessarily always to do with age.”
When she had her first child, Tana said it was a very “straightforward pregnancy,” but welcoming the twins was “complicated.”
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“I had a thrombosis when I was pregnant and started bleeding at about 14 weeks, so that was very scary. Then Tilly came along, and she was my only natural pregnancy where I got pregnant and didn’t realize,” she explained to Candy and Halpin. “In fact, I was nearly four and a half months pregnant before I realized.”
In 2016, before she had Oscar, Tana experienced a miscarriage with her son Rocky at 20 weeks. “Born with a strong heartbeat but too little to survive,” she previously shared.
Now on the podcast she said, “Naturally, as you get older, you worry more. When I got pregnant with Rocky, that was all going swimmingly, and I thought ‘I’m going to exercise throughout,’ and then it all, of course, went terribly wrong.”
“Oscar’s pregnancy was actually – I had one or two scares, but it was very straightforward,” she said. “After you’ve had any kind of scare, it makes you paranoid…I was more careful; energy levels were good.”
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Tana, who has Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, utilized IVF to get pregnant with Oscar. She shared a sweet tidbit about how Oscar and her youngest, Jesse, were linked even years before Jesse was born in November 2023.
“When I had IVF when I got pregnant with Oscar, they sort of check everything then, went through the egg collection — Jesse is actually a frozen embryo from then. He was our little frosty embryo. He and Oscar are almost twins because they were the same collection,” she said.
After the loss their family experienced with Rocky, Tana said she and Gordon, 57, find so much happiness with their youngest baby.
“There’s a bit of Rocky in Jesse and it’s kind of made us all feel whole again,” she said.
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While parenting six kids with such vast age differences may not be the most common, Tana said she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I’ve been the youngest mum at the school gate and I’m obviously now the oldest, but I don’t think it stands out. There’s a lot of older mums and, actually, I think we’re all a bit calmer,” she said.
Learning not to “overparent” has also been key as they welcomed more children in middle age, Tana added. Gordon spoke with PEOPLE in May and echoed his wife’s sentiment.
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“I think I’m a better dad the second time round, if I’m honest,” he said at the time. “Tana’s always been an amazing mom. But I think, if I had to self critique, I know I’m better because I’ve got experience now.”
And the wisdom he’s garnered over the years has definitely not gone unnoticed by Tana.
“I look at the way the children look at him. I couldn’t ask for a better daddy,” Tana said on Postcards from Midlife. “That’s the bad times as well as the good times that have made that happen.”
