Illustration by Homestead
Longreads
May 2019
16 minutes
(4,090 words)
My daughter was 10 days old the first time I was asked if I were her grandmother.
It was the second week of an unseasonably early Baltimore heat wave
and I had managed to maneuver her stroller across my neighborhood’s
bumpy, narrow sidewalks to my favorite coffee shop. Almost nine years
later, I still remember the one spot on our street where the
juxtaposition of a tree planter and a set of rowhouse steps made it
physically impossible to push a stroller through at any angle. One
either had to lift the stroller a foot in the air or bump it over the
curb into the street, a solution I figured out only after much grunting
and angling. By the time I arrived at the coffee shop, I was sweaty and
unkempt.
A young man peered into the stroller, then glanced at my face: “Oh,
are you her grandmother?” Only three days earlier, a woman had seen me
boarding a plane with my newborn, eyed me approvingly and whispered:
“You look amazing!” An unearned compliment — my daughter didn’t come out
of my body and my body’s not that great, anyway — but I had been happy
to take it. I’m not dumb. I knew the grandmother question would be asked
again and again, and that compliments would be rare.
I tried out a simple, direct reply, the one I use to this day: “No,
I’m her mother, but I am old enough to be her grandmother, so it’s
understandable that you would ask.”
I thought my answer generous. But in the years since my daughter was
born, I have discovered that people who ask rude questions feel terribly
affronted if you say anything that implies they have just asked a rude
question.
“But I’ve seen that baby with a young couple,” the man said. “Out and about in the neighborhood.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, I absolutely have,” he insisted. “She’s been going around with a young couple.”
I let it go. I live in a city that, year in and year out, has a
startlingly high teenage pregnancy rate, and consequently a high number
of young grandmothers, some of whom end up raising their grandchildren.
I’d be proud to be one of those women. But I am not. I’m just an old mom
and I’m cool with that. Say a word or a phrase often enough, and it
loses its power. I’m an old mom. I’m 60. I’m a 60-year-old woman with a
third-grader. I am old. I am 60. I am old. I am old. I am old.
“You don’t look old to me,” my daughter has said on more than one
occasion. “You could be in your 40s, your 30s, you could be in college,
you could be in high school.”
Uber drivers say something similar, but at least I know why they’re
blowing smoke up my ass. I’m not sure what my daughter wants, but she’s
been eyeing the American Girl Doll spaceship, which lists at $449.99 on
eBay. Good luck with that, honey. Mama’s got money, but she’s not crazy.
[2]
The case against late motherhood is obvious: the later you become a
mother, the more likely you are to die while your child is young. Energy
levels drop, or so they tell me; the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory, which I was forced to take by my former employer, labeled me
abnormally energetic. But old age also brings a dip in oxytocin, the
“nurturing” hormone. There must be a reason that nature cuts women off
from reproducing, even as it allows men to keep going.
In the years since my daughter was born, I have discovered that people who ask rude questions feel terribly affronted if you say anything that implies they have just asked a rude question.
But nature has reasons for lots of thing that we cheerfully
circumvent. (The global market for erectile dysfunction drugs is
forecast to top $7 billion by 2024.) And while it wasn’t exactly my idea
to become a mom at 51 — more on that in a moment — I think old
motherhood has advantages if you’re a) relatively healthy and b)
relatively wealthy. I am lucky enough to be both of those things. Even
without my husband’s income, I could afford to raise a kid, although,
like most Americans, I would be wiped out by a serious illness and
college tuition would require most of my retirement fund. I was raised
by Southerners who believe it’s tacky to talk about money, but to not
talk about money in this situation is disingenuous. To become a mother
at age 51 is the entitlement cherry on the privilege sundae. It’s greedy.
I’m not greedy. I didn’t want to have it all. To me, life was like a
Skee Ball game at a boardwalk arcade: You banked your shots, collected
your tickets, and redeemed them for the best prizes in your point range.
I wanted a career (novelist) and a rowhouse (I’m a Baltimorean). And,
assuming I had any tickets left over, an interesting, stimulating life
partner. By 2002, I had all of those things.
Less than a decade later, motherhood came for me..
[3]
I chose the passive voice above, but motherhood at age 51 is anything
but passive. If you become a mom after the age of 50, chances are you
worked pretty hard. You and a whole army of people — an adoption agency,
lawyers, a fertility clinic. Whatever path you choose, the baby is a
commodity, something you buy. That sounds cold, but I appreciated the
transparency — the delineated costs, the fees paid upfront. If you want
to have a kid, you might as well get used to opening your wallet. I’m
going to keep hammering at this topic, I’m afraid. Money made motherhood
possible for me.
Here’s how motherhood happened to me. I was in my 40s, living with a
man who had a delightful son, one of the best people I know. But my
partner, now my husband, wanted another child. I feel obligated to
mention this because people who don’t assume I’m a grandmother often
assume I wanted my “own” baby. They said as much to my face, so lord
knows what they said behind my back.
But the man who would become my second husband desired a child, so I
made a child happen. That’s our dynamic. He writes checks; I make things
happen. As noted, I have money of my own, but he out-earns me by a
factor of 10-to-1 and he talks a good socialist game on Twitter, so our
arrangement seems only fair.
It took me a while, though, to make a baby happen. It took six years,
which I found daunting. With each passing year, the refrain in my head
changed: I was going to be 59 at the bat mitzvah, then 60 at the bat
mitzvah, then 61 at the bat mitzvah . . .
Now, God willing and with the help of a good Hebrew tutor, the bat
mitzvah will be in four years, when I’m 64, and I find it hilarious that
I ever cared. Will she still need me, will she still feed me? She
insists the former will apply. She wants me to go to college with her.
That idea has merit, although I assume it will be off the table when
she’s actually 18.
Besides, I want to continue writing novels as long as I can. My
father retired at 66 and it didn’t suit him. He died at age 85, but he
hadn’t been his real self for at least five years. My mother, now 88 and
terrifyingly healthy, says women are better suited to retirement. I
don’t plan to find out, but then my entire life has been spent testing
the old maxim, Man plans, God laughs.
I have to think God, in whom I don’t really believe, bust a gut when
my daughter arrived. Lord knows, quite a few other people were laughing
at me, filled with barely disguised glee at the belief that I had
destroyed my career.
[4]
It was Mother’s Day, 2010, and I was going to be a mom in less than
three weeks, although I didn’t know that at the time. But I knew it was
imminent — after all, I had orchestrated everything. I had almost
finished preparing my daughter’s room, making essential purchases. At a
family gathering, I ventured an opinion about something I hoped to do as
a parent and a sort-of relative grinned maliciously. “Oh we can’t wait
to hear all your views on motherhood,” she said.
The woman who said this to me was one of the people who had accused
me of wanting my “own” baby, who had, unsolicited, urged me not to
become an older mother. (She considered herself one and had regrets.)
Over lunch several months earlier, she had said: “I can tell you this
much about having a kid: You won’t write a book a year anymore.”
At that moment, I became determined to keep writing a book a year, no matter what.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
Before I agreed to add a baby to our household, I had conducted a
small inquiry in my field, crime fiction. It’s a profession that skews
old or did, then. And, at the time, there were almost no working mothers
among the writers I knew. I approached friends, women, who didn’t have
children, but no one I asked had ruled kids out because they were
career-enders. However the small coterie of crime writers with small
children did end up slowing down their output if they were women. A brilliant young writer I knew had stopped publishing when her daughter was 3. “It was worth it,” she told me via email.
I wasn’t so sure. But then — I was almost a decade into my career and
I was, am, crazy ambitious. I was 38 when my first book was published,
an age some would have considered late for motherhood, and way too late
for any literary wunderkind cred. By the time I agreed to have a child, I
had published 10 books. In 2007, a year out from the year we expected
to become parents — we hit a snag and we had to start over — I published
my first New York Times bestseller. There was no way I was getting off that merry-go-round.
As we have seen, there’s a lot of math in older motherhood. Here’s
some more: I used to be able to write a 90,000-word novel in 11 months.
Since my daughter was born, I have written some novels at that pace, but
I also have allowed myself up to 16 months to complete others. In her
first eight years on the planet, I wrote seven novels and I should
finish an eighth before she turns 10, knock wood. (I also wrote a
children’s book, but it literally took 40 minutes.) So, no, I no longer
write a book a year, but it’s fucking close. Besides, it’s not my kid
who’s slowing me down, it’s my own ambition, my determination to try to
write a different, better book every time.
And, yes, this schedule requires money and help: a fulltime
babysitter for the first four years of my daughter’s life, then
Montessori School and a part-time babysitter, now an aftercare program
and an assistant who is my childcare fallback. I also depend on the
give-and-take of other moms in my neighborhood, who come to each other’s
aid all the time. On a February snow day, a friend asked if I wanted
her to take my daughter to a drop-in art camp. I had already made
arrangements, but the mere fact that another person was thinking of me
made me want to break down in happy tear
This was a tough winter, with constant interruptions to my writing
schedule, almost all of them child-centric. School closings, school
delays, school holidays, illness. And, every regular day, there’s the
sheer mental space given over to one’s child — meals, laundry, moods,
homework. (You may wonder where my husband is during all of this. My
husband’s work as a television producer means he is out of town, Monday
through Friday, February to mid-September, a schedule he has maintained,
more or less, since 2014. I hope you enjoy your premium cable content.)
But, somehow, my work gets done. And I think that, too, is a function
of being older, of knowing that I’ve done this 23 times before, so why
shouldn’t I be able to do it again? I wrote when I had a full-time job, I
wrote when I was going through a divorce, I wrote when I was enduring
such a terrible time at my day job that I ground my teeth until my back
molars cracked and I spat them into my hand. I wrote when my dog died. I
wrote on vacations. I wrote when my household was bouncing back and
forth between two cities because of my husband’s job. I was back at my
writing desk five days after my father died.
In 1999, I was on a panel with Mary Higgins Clark, the writer who
basically invented domestic suspense, the subgenre that encompasses all
the Girl/Woman/Wife/Sister/Daughter books of today. I was a reporter at
the Baltimore Sun and I was writing books by getting up at 6 and
putting in two hours before heading to my job. I credited my then
husband for his support, although he was far from the house husband I
claimed he was. (That was the public face I put on our incomprehensible
relationship.) In fact, our marriage was already pretty shaky.
A woman in the audience, her voice heavy with sarcasm, commented:
“Well that’s very nice for you, but what do we do if we don’t have house
husbands, if we have jobs and children?”
Clark, who had started writing as a young widow with five children,
pounded the table cheerfully and said: “You get the work done when you
can do it. You write at night, you get up at 4 a.m., but you get the job done.”
Clark is now 91 and still writing. And, in case it’s not clear, I fucking love her.
[5]
The year my daughter was born, I started buying robots fashioned from
cast-off kitchen objects. I now have what I call my robot army, an
assembly of soldiers made from old coffee cans and thermoses and
flatware, many of them arrayed on a windowsill in my office. I identify
with robots. When I was a child, my mother told me I was a Venusian
robot who would be summoned back to my home planet when I turned 13.
That made more sense to me than anything I heard in the Presbyterian
church growing up. A good friend, who didn’t even know this story,
teases me about my desire to be good, do right, make no mistakes.
“You’re such a good little robot.”
Yet motherhood has made me less robotic, more inclined toward
improvisation and spontaneity. We are told that people become rigid with
age, fixed in their routines. Even in my 30s, I was so famously
monotonous that I compared myself to a hamster. “I would be very happy,”
I told my newspaper colleagues, “going around and around in my little
wheel.” My husband gave me a battery-powered one that sits on my desk.
The man who would become my second husband desired a child, so I made a child happen. That’s our dynamic. He writes checks; I make things happen.
But when one has a young child, routine is a necessity and yet also a
luxury. Life, God, whatever you want to call it, kicks my calendar in
the shins on a regular basis. My favorite recent “emergency” was
Valentine’s Day. Yes, I knew it was coming. I didn’t know my daughter
was expected to bring 24 cards to class until I saw a post on the
school’s Facebook page late on Feb. 12. That took three hours out of my
workday on Feb. 13.
Still, somehow, the work gets done. And not just the work. I’m
reading more for pleasure because my daughter and I read side-by-side at
bedtime. I have taken up newish interests — tennis and Italian. I cook
more, delighting in my newfound ability to improvise with whatever food
is on hand. Old motherhood is clearly good for me.
I have no idea if it’s good for anyone else, including my daughter. Motherhood is a story where I don’t control the ending.
Earlier this year, I impulsively picked up three Nerf-like dart guns
at the local crafts store. My family spent part of the afternoon chasing
each other in circles, stockpiling ammunition, launching sneak attacks.
THIS IS THE MOST FUN I’VE EVER HAD, my daughter said. I worry this is
true, that there’s not enough aimless silliness in our lives. At the age
of 8, she has been to Italy, France, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Australia
and New Zealand. Last summer, because of my job, she was on a week-long
cruise to Alaska. This summer, because of my job, she will return to
Tuscany, her fourth visit. She has stayed in luxury hotels, flown in
business class, eaten at five-star restaurants, sat in premium seats at
Broadway musicals.
But she says the most fun she ever had was the result of three off-brand dart guns that retailed for $9.99 each. I believe her.
[6]
On top of everything else this winter, the winter in which my writing
schedule had been the universe’s favorite punching bag — one more “snow
day” and Baltimore City schools would have started chipping away at
spring break — I had been having an ongoing battle with the Department
of Public Works, which neglected to pick up my trash three weeks
running.
The first time, I yelled at my city councilman and he sent a lovely
man from DPW, who seemed so nervous that I couldn’t bear doing that
again. Shit rolls downhill and no one is more aware of this than the
moms who stand sentry at the bottom of their households’ hills.
The third time, I stood on my steps in my bathrobe and screamed at
the collectors to take my garbage. They insisted that only the block to
the south of me was on their route, but I was relentless and they
capitulated. I have now figured out that the sidewalk in front of my
house falls into a dead zone outside both routes, so I drag my can to
the corner.
But the story I want to tell is the one about the second time, when I
threw my trash in the back of the car and started to drive to one of
the city’s sanitation lots.
En route, I saw a crossing guard arrive at her post and remembered — Oh, yeah, early dismissal today.
Not a problem for me because I pay $200 a month for a school-based
aftercare program. But I had forgotten to pack an extra snack. Again,
not a problem. I could grab something from the convenience store
opposite the school, drop it off, continue on my way.
Then I thought — heck, I got my pages done today. Why not pick up my
kid and take her to a matinee? We made it just in time for the 12:50
showing of The Kid Who Would be King; I was disappointed that I
didn’t qualify for the senior fare, but it turns out that everyone pays
$8 on Wednesdays. Although my daughter had gobbled a fast cafeteria
lunch at school, I treated her to a personal pizza and a box of Sour
Patch Kids, most of which ended up on the bottom of my purse, shedding
sugar. We were the only two people in the theater, which gave us license
to show our noisy appreciation for this updated version of the
Arthurian legend. We laughed, we yelled, we high-fived.
In asserting for the unexpected pleasures of older motherhood, I am not arguing against motherhood at any other age. I’m not suggesting anyone else live my life.
At one point, the modern-day Arthur, Alex in this version, sits on a
hillside, trying to absorb shattering news about his father, a less
heroic figure than the boy had been led to believe. The abyss opened for
me, as it does for us all from time to time. I’m going to die. I’m
going to cease to exist and while I want to be wrong about this, I don’t
think there is an afterlife. My afterlife will be in others’ memories,
mainly my daughter’s, if I’m lucky. Who will I be in that story?
Again: No matter how many novels I write, I won’t get to write the end of this one.
Our favorite suburban multiplex has a small arcade with two crane
machines, one impossible, one a sure bet. I gave my daughter many
quarters — I had just stared into the abyss, after all — and she scored
two rubber ducks from the easy machine with one grab. A triumphant day,
but I still needed to get rid of the trash.
We headed to the sanitation yard, my original destination. It was
cold; a light drizzle was starting. A young man, huddled next to a space
heater in the makeshift office, showed me where to put my garbage and
asked if I needed help.
No, I said, staring up at the receptacle, which had to be at least eight or nine feet high. No, I do not.
And mindful of my daughter’s eyes on me, I hoisted my bag of garbage —
a week’s worth of trash — and swung it high and hard, giving it all the
oomph that my 60-year-old biceps can pack. Which is, by the way, quite a
bit. (I belong to a gym, I work out with a trainer, I’ve been taking
tennis lessons — again, all reminders that health and wealth are amazing
privileges.)
“What did that man say to you?” she asked when I got back in the car.
“He asked if I needed help.”
“Did you?”
“Nope.”
“Did you want help?”
“Nope.”
“What did he think?”
“I always tell you, it’s a waste of time to try to guess what people are thinking.”
“What do you think he was thinking?”
“I think he was glad that he didn’t have to leave the warmth of his
office. And that maybe I needed help because I’m old. But I didn’t.”
I hope this day lives in her memory — the impromptu movie, the rubber
ducks, the rubbery movie theater pizza. But most of all, I hope she
remembers her defiantly old mother with that garbage bag. I hope the
memory expands and exaggerates, so that in her mind’s eye, I whipped
that trash around and around in a circle over my head, shouting like a
warrior before I let it fly. I hope it’s a story she tells her daughter
one day and I don’t care how old she is when that happens. Because in
asserting for the unexpected pleasures of older motherhood, I am not
arguing against motherhood at any other age. I’m not suggesting anyone
else live my life. I’m not saying I don’t sometimes seethe with
resentment over the fact that I am a de facto single mother, but that
situation has nothing to do with my age. I won’t deny that I have put my
head in my hands and wept over another day of work lost. I’m not saying
you should have children and I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Do what you
wanna, as the song goes.
I have said throughout and will continue to say: Money helps. But
maybe it’s not the big money. Maybe it’s the quarters that go into the
crane machine, the $8 matinee ticket, the $9.99 off-brand dart gun, the
coins stacked on my dining room table as my daughter tries to figure out
how much money she needs to buy a faux American Girl school room with
76 pieces. (At only $139.99, it’s a relative bargain compared to the
rocket ship, but I’m still not paying for it.) Maybe it’s also the money
I don’t earn, the things I don’t write because I decide to play
hooky for an afternoon. Heck, writing this piece was a loss leader; my
per word rate for fiction is much higher than my rate for nonfiction.
And maybe the next time — there’s always a next time, trust me — someone says, “Are you her grandmother?” I’ll say: “No I’m her great-grandmother, I’m eighty-fucking-seven, but I look amazing for my age.”
I am old. I am 60. I am a 60-year-old woman with a third-grader. I am
old. I am old. I am old. I am 60, my daughter is 8, and I will let her
write the end of the story. What other choice do I have?
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