Re: What's it like, having older parents? -- Talking Circle Alternative

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Date Posted: Sun, 02/ 2/03 10:20am
Author: Bella
Subject: Re: What's it like, having older parents?
In reply to: tash"ana 's message, "Re: What's it like, having older parents?" on Sat, 02/ 1/03 7:34pm

Tash'ana
I am sorry you had such an awful time as a child, it is extraordinary and terrible how many children seem to suffer at the hands of their parents.

I agree with many of the general points you make about having older parents, there are definitely differences - outlook and physical energy being the two most obvious I think. My mother was 37 when she had me, which of course at that time, was "old" for first-time motherhood, whereas now so many women deliberately put off having children it's become more usual for people to have children at that age. My father was the same age, he had been married before, she hadn't. I don't think it was ideal, partly as my mother had quite an "old" outlook, but certainly there was nothing truly adverse. I was lucky in that a close family friend who was only in her twenties when I got to know her, aged 5, was like a second mother really, so I experienced having a young mother as well, in a sense. She had 3 boys, so was quite glad to have a young girl around. (And she is still a great friend). My mother had a kind of old fashioned outlook regarding clothes, but most of the time I was allowed to wear what I wanted. Having much older grandparents was sad, they had all died by the time I was 16. Neither of my parents were particularly happy that I was preoccupied with American Indian issues, and that caused friction with my father (and various other relatives) particularly when I was 11 at the time of the Wounded Knee siege when I was openly admiring of the Indian activists. My parents disapproved, although my mother was slightly more understanding, and my father's comments at the time permanently damaged my relationship with him, not his attitude to me but what he said about the Indians involved. I never saw him in the same way again, and the same happened with other family members because of the way they reacted. I think that was more of a generational thing, had they had been slightly younger, and perhaps a bit more open to seeing the world in a less dogmatic way, they might still not have approved of the militant action but they would have had a better understanding of why it occurred. I think that was the hardest thing I found, their attitudes, which were very set by the era they grew up in. But that was really the only issue that caused huge problems. On the minor side, sometimes I felt a bit embarrassed when my mother collected me from a party and all the other mothers were twenty or thirty-something, and she was in her 40s (she wasn't a youthful dresser either, so that compounded it!). Sometimes I felt sorry for her though, as I think it made her very self-conscious as well. Another aspect was children of my mother's friends, when I was 4 some of them were 15! Actually they tended to be very kind, when they visited us or we visited them, I used to go out and trail around after them, or go riding with them, and they never treated me as if I was a nuisance to have around - at the time I felt substantially shorter than everyone else, but it didn't really occur to me that I was so much younger. They seemed like contemporaries, to me, because our parents were friends. It left me with the permanent effect of tending to make friends with people who were older, not that I think that mattered. The only problem was when I started school, I was so used to the company of much older people it was completely bewildering being in a class with so many young children!

I think it's an individual thing, though, better to have good older parents than bad younger parents, or vice versa.

Bella
(I've got masses of things I'm supposed to be doing this afternoon and am loitering on the computer).

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