Another problem with being an old mother is that your kid sees the result but not the process. I can show my child a fully realized life but not how I got there. I can show the professional success, the financial comfort, the inner peace, the secure sense of self, the feeling of authority, and a wealth of knowledge. But I can’t demonstrate how to acquire them because I did all that before she was born. She looks at me and thinks that this is how I was from the start, that it just comes naturally and easily to people. And if it doesn’t just happen to her, it’s because she’s not as good.
How do I know all this? She told me. This is a very smart, insightful child.
Don’t wait until you are “ready” to have children. Your readiness is not a gift.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m really enjoying these insights.
Amanda
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God, I feel this pretty hard. My youngest (whom I had at 38) told me a few months ago, while we were having a family brunch on vacation, “You don’t wear glasses, you don’t have allergies, you’re tall, and you’re really smart. You’re, like, the perfect human.” It stopped me dead in my tracks. He is a preteen (not short but obvs not grownup height) and is very (VERY!) smart, but he wears glasses (like his dad and brothers) and has some food allergies, but I never realized that he considered these to be his own deficiencies. I wanted to start tallying things that I suck at, because there are many, but then stopped because I didn’t want to make it about myself. I told him I’m not perfect by a long shot, and that he’s unbelievably smart and that he will be tall, etc.
But I’ve seen this to some extent with my older two boys because I’ve always been the one who helps with homework. By virtue of my profession, I can easily help with all math and science through high school, and generally other subjects like English and social sciences, where there’s writing, as well as visual arts. I can’t help with music (my husband can) or languages that I don’t speak, but anything else I can and pretty much do. I did see, in my older two boys, that my facility with math made them feel bad about their own. They see me look at the problem for 2 seconds and knowing right away how to solve it. I have told them countless times that they’re doing great (which they are/were) but that they’re learning and that they shouldn’t compare themselves to me who’s been doing this stuff for work for literal decades; that it’s fortunate that they’ve got someone in-house who’s able to answer all their questions. And they are (the older two) excellent students both, but I feel like having an expert in the house makes them feel like they aren’t as awesome as they are. My eldest went into the bio sciences, and I’m going to posit that part of the draw was that field not overlapping with my general area of expertise.
With my middle son, who’s currently in Calculus AB (high-school junior), I have to keep telling him that he’s doing great, that he’s doing just as well as my students in my undergrad classes, that it’s not supposed to he easy, that everyone takes time and practice to master this stuff. But he compares it to all his other classes that come super easily and don’t take a lot of time for him. With math, he can totally do it and do it very well, it’s just not trivially easy for him. Then he sees me and I make it seem easy, so it just wrongly exacerbates his feeling that something is wrong with him. It’s not!
I never would’ve guessed that being competent and successful might be bad for your kids, but there you have it. Not bad, but definitely challenging in nonobvious ways.
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They are lucky we have our own professional lives and our own interests. When such a larger-than-life parent dedicates her or himself to formatting the child 24/7, that’s brutal. We often feel guilty that we aren’t glued to them (especially at an earlier stage) but they need space to figure out who they are outside of our large personas.
It sounds horrible but I only fully became myself after my father died. He was so wonderful, so supportive, so present that it was sometimes hard to figure out where he ended and I began. It would have been so much better for us both if he gave me some space.
Obviously, this is a lot better than an absent, uninvolved father. Obviously. I feel stupid complaining. But when a parent is somebody you really admire, figuring out who you are isn’t necessarily very easy.
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Honestly I agree completely with you and Xykademiqs.
My mom had me at 32, she is a jurist and had a stellar career in government while I grew up and even went back to school to get a masters degree in public management.
I tried to emulate her (and my dad, another jurist), by going to law school and had these high hopes and expectations for myself. I ended up flunking out and drifting aimlessly around for a couple of years.
I eventually got a trade degree and I’m happily employed now, still not sure what I want to spend my life doing, but at least employable and capable of living my own life. I still feel the pressure to do something more, go back to school and get an academic degree, but I feel it is much easier to make a decision about that now, since I know myself so much better now than I did at 20. Also my parents retired last year, so they’ve eased up on the pressure a bit. They love me and want only the best for me, but I think choosing to go in a completely different direction was for the best.
Whenever I read or hear about children of parents with impressive academic or artistic careers choosing the same areas of study or the same artistic avenue, I end up feeling sorry for them. They aren’t just competing with themselves or their peers, they are competing against their idealized parent figure.
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That’s why I went into Hispanic studies. I was doing great in machine translation and English but the only reason was that my father taught me English and linguistics since birth. I wanted to know whether I’d amount to anything in a field where I would start from zero. I didn’t want to reflect his light. I wanted to have something completely my own.
So good for you that you went your own way. I know people in academia who followed in the footsteps of impressive parents, and it’s brutal.
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My husband was in that camp. His dad was some kind of govt. numbers guy, grandfather a pioneering biophysicist. When I met him and convinced him it was OK to just go get a regular job (I’m not sure his parents will ever forgive me)… he’d been completely paralyzed by the expectations loaded onto him. No interest in science or statistics. He’s happier now working in a totally normal career that’ll never win a nobel prize, and writing novels in his spare time.
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My last child was born when I was 40, which meant that I went through menopause at the same time she was going through puberty. Not a good situation.
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I feel very understood in this thread. Which I didn’t expect because people keep saying that I’m inventing this. But how am I inventing anything if my own 8-year-old child told me this?
So thank you, everybody who contributed to the thread. It helps.
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That happened with my mom and my next-older sister (early menopause). It was ugly.
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I had late menopause. Didn’t happen until I was 54.
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