Charming though they look together, walking hand in hand to school, Adriana Iliescu — at 72 — looks more like her five-year-old daughter Eliza’s slightly doddery great grandparent than her mother.
Heavily lined and with dyed black hair, even she — who in January 2005 became the world’s then oldest mother — admits she looks every one of her years, if not more.
‘I try not to look in the mirror, because I don’t enjoy it,’ says Adriana, a writer and part-time university lecturer in Romanian literature, who lives with Eliza in a two-bedroom flat in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
‘The mirror is unkind to women, but if we are talking about my energy then I feel like a young woman. I feel like I’m 27 and when I feel a bit more tired, I feel like I’m 37. I am healthier than women more than half my age.
‘People think they are being funny when they call me granny, but I didn’t have Eliza to make me look younger. I never feel my years.’
Could this be why, in what must surely be a triumph of attitude over age, Adriana is now defying all her critics by talking about the possibility of having another child?
‘Medically, it’s possible,’ she says. ‘I understand there are trials going on with a 70-year-old woman in England, so it could be done. I am fine and healthy and I think it would be possible to have another child in the future, but I’m not in a rush at the moment.’
Not in a rush? She’s 72! How much time does she think she has?
But her caution, she insists, has nothing to do with age, exhaustion at caring for a young child or the fear of dying. It is the love she feels for Eliza and their strong bond, that makes Adriana reluctant to test it with the rigours of another baby.
‘I am so close to Eliza, so bonded with her, I’m not sure I’d be able to consider having another child if it actually came to it,’ she says.
‘Eliza is energetic and fun — a very happy child. She is everything to me and nothing else counts or matters. The child is mine and that’s all I care about, but medically it is not impossible for me to have another child.
‘I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. If I live as long as my parents did, Eliza will be 20 by the time I pass away. I think I still have a lot to give her.’
When I first met Adriana, two years ago, she cut a rather lonely and eccentric — if immaculately dressed — figure, mingling with other much younger mothers as she watched Eliza, then aged three, playing on the swings near their ninth-floor flat in a drab, high-rise concrete apartment block.
Back then, she admitted that sometimes she was so busy with Eliza it was ‘hard to have the time to even wash my hair’, before adding defiantly: ‘Motherhood is so much more than I hoped for. It is relaxing looking after a child. It’s everything else that’s tiring.’
Eliza is now in school and Adriana believes the challenges of the past few years will continue to ease a little.
She admits it took some adjusting to having a child for the first time at her age and that she was nervous when Eliza started pre-school, aged three.
I was really tense as I wanted her to do well. I’ve invested a lot of energy into the past two years,’ she says. ‘But, Eliza makes friends and plays with them, which gives me a break.’
The result of Adriana’s complete focus on her daughter is that Eliza can already read and write and is academically advanced for her years.
She has friends and is happy, which is all that matters to Adriana, who gives not two hoots for the opinions of others.
A deeply private woman, she doesn’t like to engage in school gate tittle-tattle and deflects questions from other mothers, curious as to how she copes or what might happen to her daughter if she dies.
Conceived via IVF, courtesy of donated sperm and eggs implanted by a Romanian fertility expert seemingly keen to make medical history, Eliza’s birth continues to divide opinion.
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