The Grandmother Hypothesis: Creating and saving civilization as we know it

What are you supposed to do you do when you’re not raising kids anymore, anyway? The easy answers to that question aren't always very satisfying, as I was reminded today listening to a Wisconsin Public Radio call in show.

The topic was having children late in life. Author Elizabeth George had only positive things to say about the experience. The women she interviewed for her book, Why Women are Embracing the New Motherhood, didn't seem to be encountering any downsides, either.

One gentleman asked about children becoming caregivers at a younger age. Not a problem, George replied. People are healthier now. And they have better financial plans.

Well. Maybe. Let's hope.

Then caller Molly from Baraboo threw both George and host Joy Cardin off balance with a question about the developmental tasks of aging. The conversation, which I’m recreating loosely from memory, went something like this:

“I had my child at age 39 and then had an early menopause. We thought about having another child but by that time, I found I wasn’t really all that interested in children. I’d heard that you change after menopause, that you are ready start to begin a new life, and I felt like that was happening to me. I was ready to do that, but I couldn’t because I had a three year old. Do other people have that experience?”

You could hear the author frowning. “What do you mean about differences after menopause and being older? Do you mean retirement?”

Host Cardin jumped in and offered some other suggestions for what women do in that “next stage” of life: traveling around the world and self-improving. Lots and lots of self-improving. (Apparently she's not old enough yet to discover that sometimes that's an exercise in futility, not to mention boredom.)

“But with only one child, you can travel around the world easily enough anyway,” said George. The awkward conversation ended with an uneasy dismissal suggesting that Molly’s case might be interesting but didn’t really apply to others: “Early menopause is an anomaly,” George concluded.

Actually, it’s not. But besides that, I was stunned by the lack of vision of what it might mean to be in the world after menopause, after children.

As an older mom, I knew exactly what Molly was talking about. My friend Kathleen, also an older mom, used to say, “I’d be standing at the refrigerator, my mind drifting off on lofty and spiritual thoughts, thinking about God and peace and ways to save the world, and when that little hand tugged my shirt and asked where the juice was, it took me a few seconds to come back to earth.”

There’s a lot more out there than recreation and holding the line against a widening waistline. Apparently George and Cardin have never heard of the Grandmother Hypothesis. This intriguing idea says that postmenopausal grandmothers (and older men, too) created culture, if not the human race, by helping younger people nurture their children. This not only meant more calories in the family pot, which meant more children surviving, but it meant that everyone had more time to do interesting things like carve spoon handles, compose songs, and create political intrigue.

Time spent lingering in the sun at a table in Turino sounds lovely. But now that my babies are heading for college, I need to add calories in the form of money to both their pot and my own retirement one.

I’m also looking forward to writing books, getting a promotion, and saving some little corner of the world

There’s so much to do, and almost all of it interesting. Even necessary. . .

What are your thoughts about life between kids and the grave? How do you see changes in reproductive norms affecting aging and aging populations?

When things work right: housing and supportive services

My mother died April 1. She was 86, in increasingly poor health, and had long been ready to go.

We encountered some troubling problems with the medical care system at the end. But I'm going to leave those behind and talk about what went right.

When Mom started having more trouble managing in the independent apartment in Oshkosh, Carmel Residence, where she'd lived since 2000, we moved her into the community's assisted living facility, Gabriel's Villa. There was an interlude of illness, skilled nursing, and rehab in between, but that's not really germane to this part of the story.

The apartment was lovely, and Mom quickly made friends with the residents and the aides. The food was superb, and she actually started eating three squares a day. She began walking around her apartment using only her cane, and generally was managing better than she'd been for the past two years.

But things got worse again. She developed pneumonia and digoxin toxicity, the congestive heart failure worsened, the implanted defibrillator started going off frequently despite an increase in potent drugs for arrhythmia. Her mental state became altered.

Gabriel's Villa operates under a residential care apartment complex (RCAC) license. As a result, the staff were able to be very flexible, providing more care as needed for an additional fee. They began administering her medications and checking her every two hours, later every hour.

After we decided to turn off Mom's defibrillator and let nature take its course, her plan all along, Gabriel's Villa agreed to let us bring home hospice into the apartment. No one wanted her to move her again.

Mom died a few hours after we'd returned there, before hospice care could begin. I stayed with her, with much loving attention and help from the aides who were with us, getting her ready for bed, when her big heart went into ventricular fibrillation. A few minutes later, she died, held by my sister and me.

It was as she wanted it-- a good death, I think. For that, we owe much to the dry sounding notion of "elder housing with supportive services."