Body Blame

The Baby Boomers have rolled through the psyche of the nation for nearly seventy years, overwhelming first its hospitals, baby clinics, Kindergartens, primary schools, high schools, workplaces and universities, then insatiably consuming housing and green spaces around its cities. As the tsunami of the wealthiest and healthiest generation in the nation’s history continues through to retirement, the superannuation industry, the economists, the misnomer “health” industry, all predict dire consequences for aged care, hospitals, and the economy from the expected impact of diabetes, obesity and dementia. As I write this, in The Canberra Times, a 73-year-old male victim of a bashing is described as elderly. If I were that victim the journalist would gleefully describe me as a great grandmother. Consider what you now are imagining about me. What do I look like? What is my value? Would the journalist have so described me (and I am a great grandmother) to evoke more sympathy for me as a very defenceless, extremely old weak woman, to encourage you to believe he or she showed great empathy for the lead in the story or to whip up some anger against the perpetrator, or all three and much more? Even worse, on the news some months after I wrote the previous paragraphs, I heard about an elderly couple who were the victims of a home invasion in Sydney: he was sixty-three and she fifty-eight! I know I have always looked younger than expected. When I was in my mid forties no one believed I looked old enough to have a twenty-year-old son. I took to joking my five children were from my husband’s first marriage. Twenty years later I think I will tell the same joke. I have seen young women in their mid thirties look older than I ever have. Smoking, drinking, drugs, anorexia, cancer do that. So I doubt that I look at all like the image you have of a great grandmother. I question why adjectives like elderly, and nouns describing a relationship for which no permission was given or sought, should determine something much more important, my value? By describing me as a great grandmother, my value is not enhanced, but reduced to that of an ancestor, as something valued by the potential importance of the life of someone much younger. My three-year-old great grandson holds my value. As years pass, given the majority of people do actually beget some offspring, it is likely that those children will also do some of their own begetting. It happens no matter whether we are alive or dead. Yet a strange thing has occurred. Becoming a grandparent has become a milestone, a marker in our aging process. Whenever people “graduate” to grandparenthood, they meet and greet each other with, “And how many grandchildren do you have?” Always volunteering their score. Producing grandchildren has become a competition. Yet it is a strange competition: copulation and birthing decades earlier with no further input required. To legitimise it, the competition then revolves around the question of the grandparent’s involvement with the grandchildren. This ranges from total estrangement to enmeshment so intense that the grandparent is raising the grandchildren. Grandparents reveal a great deal of pain when they then explain they did not know they were grandparents for a long time, have never seen or no longer see their grandchild, or only see their grandchild occasionally. Others revel in frequent visits, the privilege of child minding or taking the grandchild on holidays. However, for as many as take delight in these activities, there are those who find this a burden. Some opt out of this, to varying degrees, beginning by refusing to be called anything vaguely like nana or grandma, pop, pa, or grandad. Here in Australia, some choose gros papa, or oma, dedo, bubba from other cultures, not necessarily because of a real connection, or like the fabulous grandmother of my childhood neighbour they may be called by a variation of their given names. How I longed to have an Amanda Francis who swept up the driveway next-door in a full cloak, bearing armfuls of gifts bought in exotic places. I didn’t realise for many years that she was a grandmother. My paternal one had died when I was seven and the maternal one long ago when my mother herself was only seven. With my turn to choose a name, my first names didn’t seem at all exciting in the way hers had. Some go for variations like my daughter-in-law, who can cutely have derivations of their names, Gargar and Susu, but Peepee and Carcar are just gross and thankfully did not occur to me or anyone else! So our children reproduce and they along with society expect us to fulfil a very traditional role. It is not an accident that every shopping mall around the country is full of strollers being pushed by grandparents, or that every school visited by us as we pick up our grandchildren to take them home has a myriad of other grandparents do likewise. We have to be very clear with our children about how we love their children but do not want to raise them, yet from the look of the parks and playgrounds, a lot of us haven’t been able to do this, or have gracefully acceded to it. Some embrace it wholeheartedly, perhaps even believing they are better than their children at raising children. No paradox there, I trust. Then others wish they had had some such help and having not received it, perhaps giving it to vicariously satisfy their own need. When I saw my first grandchild, but hours old, I realised with a pang in my heart, that I could only love her with the permission of her mother, but she has always been generous in this. Unlike many to whom I speak, she never has placed restrictions on how I love her children. It is with regret, I realise how jealous I was of my children and how in reality, I probably did grow barriers between my children and their grandparents as a result. Fortunately, I surrendered these feelings, and they have had the blessing of some long-lived grandparents and have been able to nurture their relationships with them. As my children rush with greater speed into childrearing, five nearly grown and now six under three years of age by the end of the year, I feel the pressure for the relegation of my aspirations to the shelf: peer pressure to retire, to enjoy my grandchildren, to travel. After all, if there is no financial need to work, the question is why would you. The grandchildren are only little for such a short time and if you want to travel overseas, do it while you are well and don’t forget the tremendous increase in the price of travel insurance once you are over 70! I now am expected to sit on the edge of my life. Kate Winslet’s character in the film The Holiday is told by Eli Wallach’s character Arthur, a long forgotten famous film scriptwriter, that there are two roles, the leading lady and the best friend. Kate immediately recognises that she should definitely be the leading lady in her own life. Yet every woman knows when she becomes one of the aunts at a wedding, when the bright young things are served before her at the shop counter, when she doesn’t quite count anymore, that somehow she has been relegated to a supporting role.