A Grandchild Is Cause For Re-Evaluation
Traditionally the wisdom of the older woman has been concentrated in (or confined to) the role of grandmother. It is one of the prerogatives and pleasures most women can look forward to. But the sudden mutation into grandmother can also be a jolt, challenging a woman’s personal identity and her sense of time and future.
A media executive nearing 60 couldn’t stop talking about it between sets of her highly competitive Saturday morning tennis game.
“I’ve always thought of age as a state of mind, and I guess I saw myself as about 30,” Kay Delaney told me.
Executive vice president of a large media company, she was in charge of all international advertising and supervised a division of 60-some employees.
A few weeks before, her daughter produced the first grandchild. “It took me four times of seeing the baby before I could do anything but cry,” she said. “I was just overwhelmed by so many emotions.”
A rush of immortality overwhelmed her, and she remembered: Matter has neither beginning nor end; it’s neither created nor destroyed. There is a continuum, and now she was an integral part of it, “because when I die, part of me will still be alive. I never felt that with my own children. But with a grandchild I definitely felt it, and it’s an incredible experience.”
The other shock was to be pushed to the front of the generational train. “When I first held the baby and saw my hands next to the baby’s tender skin, I thought, ‘My God! Those are the hands of a middle-aged woman.’ “
The passive transformation into grandparent can jump-start the transition to the Age of Integrity (65 to 85 and older). For women or men who had to learn in First Adulthood (30 to 45), painfully, how to compartmentalize their nurturing selves and their achieving selves, grandparenthood is a particularly welcome second chance to bring all the parts of one’s life into harmony. Kay doesn’t have to suppress her most tender instincts to forge an image of herself as a fearless businesswoman. With her own kids, a working mom longs to be there so THEY don’t miss out. With the grandchild, she wants to be there so SHE doesn’t miss out.
Women who have never married or spawned children have their own anxieties about the future. They may be worried about having no family members alive to look after them in their own old age. In fact, if one probes just beneath the calm, composed surfaces of the most successful and sophisticated middle-aged women - whether they be wedded, widowed, childless or never married by choice - one is likely to find they have Bag Lady Fears: fears of finding themselves old, alone, forgotten or homeless.
They are probably taking greater notice of the older women at the margins of our society who are invisible to almost everyone else, some of them women who had to quit their jobs and give up health insurance and pension coverage to nurse parents or husbands or in-laws through the long twilight of chronic illness. (Or to nurse themselves through a bout with breast cancer.) They may be faced with the desperate choice of spending their dwindling financial resources on their mothers’ old age or saving for themselves for their own third age.
Why? Traditionally, women in the middle years have always been depended upon to do the work of unpaid caregiving to the disabled elderly at home. With women in their 60s and 70s expected to care for people in their 90s, many face a caregiving crisis the second time around. Ninety percent of these caregivers of older Americans are women. But women now fill nearly half the paid positions outside the home.
Twenty-two percent of family caregivers quit paying jobs and give up average earnings of $29,400 per year in order to spend upward of 18 hours a day serving as home nurses for no pay.
When they try to reclaim their professional positions or re-enter the job market, they run into the wall of ageism. Many end up picking from the dregs of low-pay, no-benefits, high-turnover jobs. As the result of traditional policies of hiring, retirement and pension benefits, health care, and marriage norms - all designed around the typical male life cycle - these same caregiving women are set up for impoverishment in their old age. Many outlive their support systems.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate