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Here is a riddle for you. There are two women. One is running around after a toddler while the other has just packed her child off to university. Which one is older? The one who is still scraping the mac 'n' cheese off the high chair? Or the one wiring spending money to her 18-year-old at college?

More and more, the answer is turning out to be that the two women are exactly the same age - a strange fallout from a variety of social trends, from women settling down and marrying later in life, to advances in fertility medicine. But perhaps the strangest thing is that even though both women are the same age, one of them seems older. And guess which one.

Last week, I was visiting a girlfriend I hadn't seen for ages who now lives in New York. We met in college and have stayed in touch even though our lives took different twists and turns. I met my husband-to-be in graduate school. We got married and had kids way before it was fashionable and certainly before any of our friends. She never planned to marry or have children until she fell for a divorced billionaire and became a mother of three when it was suddenly chic to be a "yummy mummy."

Stepping off the elevator into her plummy apartment in between my two giant offspring, I felt like I was from an entirely different generation. Even though she and I were born in the exact same year, she had a two-year-old clinging to her leg yelling, "Mommy, Mommy," while my two children, both of whom are now taller than their mother, were sitting at the table with us discussing Hillary's chances in the upcoming U.S. election.

When I told this story later to another friend of mine, who is also exactly the same age, but whose eldest has just graduated from university, she agreed that there is a perceived generation gap when it comes to the age of your children.

"It doesn't matter how old you actually are as soon your kids are grown," my friend complained. "You might as well have put on a grey wig and started hobbling around behind a walker once you tell someone your child is in college."

Forget the fact that you wouldn't be caught dead in Mom jeans or a pair of sensible shoes. Regardless of whether you've somehow taken such great care of your skin that you've managed to keep those fine lines and wrinkles at bay, or how rock-hard your Pilates-trained abs might be, apparently the most telltale sign that you've passed your best-before date is whether you're no longer regularly attending Baby & Me class.

Another friend who got a relatively early start on parenting reports that when she is asked in casual conversation at parties how old her kids are and she is forced to answer that she has a 22-year-old, her questioners immediately seem to lose interest.

"It's as if they asked me what I do for a living and I said something deadly dull and conversation-stopping, like I was an undertaker or a chartered accountant," she observes. "As soon as you're not busy swapping notes on the best snuggly or pediatrician, it's like you might as well start looking into nursing homes."

Apparently 45 is the new 35 only when you're still changing diapers. The problem isn't your own grey hair (there's always the salon for that), but that your own heirs, by their very existence outside size 6X, are greying.

Really, it has got so tough out there, we are all going to have to start lying about our kids' age. Either that, or follow Demi Moore, who, once she was past the point of posing in her naked pregnant glory for the cover of Vanity Fair, and found herself accompanied on the red carpet by a posse of full-sized teens rather than the adorable purse-sized versions being carried around by her Hollywood competition, snagged herself a husband roughly the same age as her children.

No wonder then that middle-aged men in the grips of a midlife crisis are so eager to play Second Life for real and spend their Sundays pushing strollers in the park with younger models of their first wives. Or that otherwise sane-looking 60something English psychotherapist and mother of three was so keen to get knocked up again by whatever means necessary. Who needs plastic surgery when you can be as young as you feel, thanks to artificial insemination.

kvonhahn@globeandmail.com