I promise that not
every edition of this blog henceforth will be about the election and its residue, although I imagine that life (mine and others’) will be pretty intensely shaped
by those things for a long time. Like the heightened awareness of oppression in
all its manifestations that DT and his ilk have stirred. So, the other day, I
had an experience that called my attention to one such manifestation: ageism. Not the sort directed by others at those of
us who are old, but the internalized type, the (often unrecognized) ways in
which ageism lives under the skin of all of us, including those of us who are
its target, those of us who are old.
So here’s the story:
I was walking along the bike path, near a pond where some daring (fool-hearty?) person and
their dog had recently played on the very thin ice ...
(here’s a picture to spruce
up the page) ...
... when I saw two women walking together toward me. An older woman, maybe my age, had a dog on a leash and was
walking slightly behind a younger, middle-aged woman. The older woman had a
slight smile on her face, a smile that I saw as resigned, maybe even sad. The
younger woman was saying something, but the words weren’t clear to me.
As I passed them, I
almost instantly made up a story about them.
They are mother and daughter, and the mother is
visiting from out of town. Their conversation is congenial, but a bit tense.
Maybe the mom has said something that the daughter sees as mistaken—even ill
informed or out of touch. They have such conversations pretty frequently, where
the daughter is slightly dismissive, while the mom is eager to engage, eager to
find a moment of positive connection. She tries hard to say and do things that
will please her daughter so they can have a close relationship. She always hopes
for that, though it keeps eluding her. She wants to go back to the warm intimacy
of her relationship with her 8-year-old daughter, even her early-teenage
daughter, before her child reached the age when she needed to push away, to
find herself and her own life. Mom so looks forward to these visits, always
imagining that something might light that spark again.
Now, the daughter is off into her own life, her own relationships,
her own priorities. Leaving her mom behind … figuratively as well as literally.
The daughter thinks mom is a bit of a pain. She still loves her mom—after all,
it’s her mom! But their interests are just so different, and her mom seems so far
outside this world, always wanting to talk about issues that don’t matter much and
memories that don’t mean much to the daughter. She’s happy with her life, which
is very full without squeezing mom into her schedule. She doesn’t long for the
earlier days at all … in fact, she doesn’t remember much about her early years
as a kid. Her first clear recollections of her mom are from adolescence, when
her mother just didn’t “get it.” They didn’t fight really, but she chafed at how much her mom wanted to be in the middle of her life. She was glad to go away
to college, and pretty much never looked back.
Mom, for her part, had looked forward to this trip
with eager anticipation. She planned carefully what clothes she’d bring, imagined
how happy she’d be to see her daughter and grandkids. She’d been counting the
days. Now here she is, with this awkward little tension between them, displacing
the shared joy she’d imagined.
OK, I elaborated my
on-the-spot story a little. Not all of that went through my mind in the minutes
right after I saw them. Some of it did. And then, as I reflected on this
encounter and the instant story I’d spun about it, some was added based on previous
experiences. Like seeing a woman (presumably a mom) greeted, or left to wait
alone, at the airport, a half-hug her only connection with others. Or a mom at
dinner with her adult offspring’s family, sitting silently, wearing her nicest
outfit while her kid’s family stare at their cell phones, wearing jeans and
sweatshirts. Some of the story comes from imagining my own mom’s experience and
wondering whether my actions made her feel as I imagine these women might be
feeling. So, in truth, virtually all of my story about that day is a snapshot of my own feeling about moms, especially my mom. And about what my life as an
old woman will become over the years.
But the part of
this encounter I want to focus on is this: There I was, walking along, crafting
this sad tale in my mind, when I suddenly caught myself.
Wait a minute, Janis (I said). Why are you assuming
that this woman is so passive, so at the mercy of her kids? Why aren’t you
granting her some agency in her own life? Give her a break! Maybe her smile isn’t
sad or resigned at all, but quietly contented. Maybe she loves these times with
her daughter, enjoying watching this younger woman build a vibrant life—just what
she would have wished for her child. Maybe her smile betrays her calm recognition
that they’re different people, with different ideas … and the hope that soon,
her daughter will be able to accept that, too. Heck, maybe she came simply because
these visits are important to them both, even though she’ll be happy to get
back home so she can get on with organizing teach-ins with her activist
friends. Why am I so quick to make her powerless, abandoned, tragic?
I knew the answer
at the same time I asked myself these questions. I was imagining her this way
because I believe (if only non-consciously) that this is what old age means: abandonment, loneliness,
emptiness, powerlessness—even though I may (consciously) insist that my friends and I are exceptions to this general rule.
Ah, internalized ageism, that recurrent bugaboo.
I’ve written about
this here before (and experienced it far more than I’ve written).
It’s hard to shake this sense that aging is inevitably miserable when that’s
how it’s so persistently portrayed, how we learned, throughout the many decades
of our own lives, to see it. Why else would we feel offended if someone refers to us as "old"? I apparently learned that lesson well. My assumptions about
these women, after all, are totally made up—I know nothing about them. Instead,
they reveal my fears about myself and, increasingly, my own life: that I will
be pitiful, pitiable. That I’ll be dependent on others' generosity, my happiness totally
bound up in their attentiveness to me.
Like other forms of
oppression—overt and internalized—this stuff requires constant, or at least
repeated, attention. In a strange twist, I’m glad I had this internal
story-writing experience, if only to catch myself doing it … again. To remind myself,
again, how deeply rooted these ageist attitudes become over a long
lifetime.
I often think that
ageism is so very difficult to overcome—in our attitudes toward others and our
feelings about our own worth—because each of us has such a short time to deal
with it. We believe the lies until we’re at this stage in our own lives. Then,
by the time we get here and find out that they’re lies, we’re already declared by
others to be irrelevant because we’re old (and even worse, old women). We aren’t important enough for
our insights to matter. Bad timing: we just barely “get it,” when we lose our
credibility. And then we die, taking our newfound wisdom with us. Bummer.
Unless, that is, we
refuse to let ageism (along with all the other “-isms” that have grown in our psychic gardens over the
years) go unrecognized and unchallenged. And that requires, first of all, that
we extract it, root and shoot, from our own psyches.
Now there’s a
mental gardening task!
©
Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a
link to the post.
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