The festive season has just about exhausted itself and I am obsessing, as always, over how much of my life has been used up looking for the end of the sticky tape.
Christmas can be a pain in the neck, but a New Year, when one is old, is the scariest thing. Our long experience tells us that the first disaster of the year is going to happen just about now. Then there are those doleful words of John Donne: “…never send to know for whom the bell tolls…” Let’s leave it right there, shall we?
I have an edgy feeling that the new government that has mugged us with silence on some important things so far, might spring into action this year by tackling the “aged problem”. So much easier than climate change.
Stopping old people from doing things is a lot easier than stopping the young from doing things. I don’t want to put ideas into its head, so I won’t mention my fears out loud. I expect the continuation of research that shockingly reveals that old people are really quite like young people in many ways. A heading that stopped me in my tracks was on the ABC News website: “Silver Surfers fighting loneliness with technology”.
The study it refers to found that teaching old people to use Facebook helps reduce their feelings of isolation and loneliness. Fancy that. Why do they think young and middle-aged people use social media if not to feel less isolated and lonely? Even a cat called Henri shares his existential angst on YouTube. I found being classed as a silver surfer so depressing that I needed time on Facebook to recover.
Nice things happen too. Mother duck brought her 10 ducklings to meet me. The ducklings grouped and re-grouped behind her like shuffling beginner recruits. Mother duck looked nervous. But was she their mother or their granny nanny? Is the granny nanny unique to the human species?
I have been mildly surprised to learn that working families in Australia are still as dependent on grandparents for childcare as they were 30 years ago, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Granny nannies are a preference. I wonder how often grandparents are the ones who express the preference. It must be a bit strange to be shovelled out of your job because you are too old and then take on the exhausting care of toddlers. Or maybe people retire just to look after the grandkids. This certainly takes the pressure off the formal childcare system we have. No wonder the government is being mean about increasing the pay of childcare workers when, it seems, grandparents are gagging for the job and probably doing it for nothing. Increasing the pension age to 70 (about which many politicians are speaking behind their hands) would mean another childcare crisis. Without having had the experience myself, I would still not recommend 70 as the starting age for caring for infant grandchildren.
You don’t have to be heartless to find childcare tough going in your senior years. The spirit may be willing but the flesh… and all that. I wonder how much tension there is in families over the expectation that grandparents, especially the younger sort, will look after the kids. It is a problem that has been around for a long time.
The great Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who died in November, nailed it. She wrote in the 1980s a parable of a put-upon grandmother, Dorothy, within a very spooky novel, The Fifth Child. The novel is many other things besides Dorothy’s story. It is about changes in society. Lessing was divining at the time and, no surprise, it ends up as a sci-fi horror story.
Dorothy’s daughter Harriet and husband David could well have been Generation Something before their time. They fall in love and start living a dream beyond their means, which entails having “a lot” of children. The in-laws demur, aware that they will be called on to keep the young couple afloat. Poor Dorothy cops the hardest jobs when four babies in six years delight the happy pair. David’s father signs the cheques and keeps out of the way, but Dorothy is always there, her duty to perform. Then the fifth child changes everything.
Doris Lessing was in her 60s when she wrote the book that gave even her the creeps. She seems to have liked the young couple more than I did. I found them self-obsessed exploiters. Dorothy leaps out of the pages as spirited, noble, long suffering but powerless. And I dare say that’s how the New Year will find many granny nannies. But happy, I hope.
Image: Doris Lessing
