Doing The Internal Work: Examining Our Aging Bias
An integral part of supporting our parents as they age is to get curious about our own fears, biases, and preconceived notions about what it means to grow old.
Thoughts about our unspoken biases towards aging and what it means to be “old” have been knocking around in my head ever since I interviewed Hope about her experience in the sandwich generation, supporting both her parents and her husbands’ parents as she raises her kids. Hope speaks so clearly about her views on aging, and honestly, it says a lot about our culture that I found her mindset to be so refreshing and thoughtful. If you haven’t read her interview, run-don’t-walk to go do so now. Find it here.
If you don’t have time to read it right now, you can get the gist of it from this quote from Hope:
“There’s so many messages of, stay young, get the anti-aging cream. I don’t want to fear old age, and I don’t want my kids to fear old age. It’s still a treasure that people get to live so long to see their grandkids, and be at the sporting events and the band concerts. It’s not something to avoid, but also it’s not easy. Trying to hold the beauty of it, and the terribleness.”
The ideas I’m letting swirl around in my brain, and the subsequent questions I want to pose to you are:
When we fear “old age” it impacts how we look at this stage of life, and how we care for our parents as they age. The beauty industrial complex and the messaging we receive (thanks capitalism) drives us to want to “fix” something that is not inherently broken, in an effort to assuage that fear.
What do we create space for within our own internal processing of aging, if visible signs of aging do not immediate trigger a response to “fix”?
We are always, always teaching our kids. Even when we wish we weren’t, we are sending them messages that they subconsciously adopt, judgments that they then feel comfortable making on others, and internalized fear of their own mortality.
What can we be teaching our children about aging instead of this fear and judgment?
Hope considers how she would want her kids to care for her, when she is making decisions about how to care for her parents. This “walk a mile in their shoes” mentality bumps against one of our biggest defenses against accepting the reality of aging, which is: if I don’t acknowledge that it will happen to me, then maybe it just…won’t. We know this logic is false, and yet it happens all the time (the same defense mechanism pops up with how we view our unhoused population. Don’t get me started on this one).
If we instead approached aging with acceptance, how would it impact our caregiving choices? How we talk about aging with our kids? Society in general?
Hope says “It’s not something to avoid, but also it’s not easy. Trying to hold the beauty of it, and the terribleness.” Aging is not good or bad, easy or hard, positive or negative, beautiful or terrible. It is both, and everything in between. Embracing a dialectic mindset allows us to be present in the moment for the full range of what caregiving, aging, and parenting can be. It encourages acceptance of what is, and less judgment of what it “should” be. Everything it is, it is.
What might happen if we embraced the complexity of this phase of life?
Can you try to stew on just one of these questions, and see what comes up for you? Doing the internal work supports our well-being, our relationships with our aging parents, and the messaging we send to our children every day.
Feel free to leave a comment with what resonated, what feels sticky, or any questions that are rising to the surface.
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