Jody Day
World Childless Week Ambassador
One of the most anxiety-provoking aspects of ageing without children can be worrying about who will be there for us when we’re old, and potentially vulnerable. Whenever I bring this up with childless people, it seems this anxiety is never far from the surface.
As part of my work with AWOC (Ageing Without Children UK) over a decade ago, I was at the launch of its Our Voices report. I recall being buttonholed by a helmet-haired Baroness from the House of Lords who said, rather pointedly, ‘Well, I didn’t have my children so that they could take care of me when I’m old!’ I smiled warmly in response, used to being treated as some kind of idiot for being childless. ‘Absolutely,’ I responded. ‘It wasn’t something that occurred to me when I was trying to conceive.’ Continuing with my air of innocence, I said, ‘It’s great that you aren’t expecting your children to take care of you. If you don’t mind, I’m curious, what sort of plans have you made instead?’ Her response was a deer-in-the-headlights look, followed by an overwhelming urge to speak to someone she’d just seen over my shoulder.
I’ve had variations of this conversation many times now, and I understand that it reveals a painful unconscious truth—most parents are relying on their adult children to be there for them should they need them to be; they just don’t like to be reminded of it. This denial can also mean that a lot of important discussions and considerations about later and end-of-life arrangements remain unsaid within families, which can cause a great deal of difficulty later down the line too.
Childless caregiving
We hear a lot about the ‘Sandwich Generation’, those caring for ageing parents alongside teenage children and work commitments. However, we hear very little about what Kirsty Woodard named the tightrope generation:non-parents who find themselves in caregiving roles, without anyone in line who might do the same for them one day. And with the childless female sibling the most likely to take on this role (especially if she is also unpartnered), and with 65% of adults in the UK predicted to be carers at some point in their lifetime (usually midlife), it really does feel like a tightrope, and an unacknowledged one at that.
I had the privilege of sharing a home with my mother-in-law for the last eight years of her life until her death two years ago, aged ninety-three. She was an independent, well-travelled, intelligent and forthright woman, and her son and I quietly took care of any tasks that she could no longer manage herself. Most of these were not what comes to mind when you think of the word ‘care’. She did her own laundry, but it was we who purchased the detergents and fixed the washing machine. She had an iPad and was very active on Facebook, but it was her son who installed and maintained the wifi connection, purchased the iPad, kept up to date with software, and helped her sort things out when she got scammed. By our actions in the background, she was able to continue living as independently as possible. Without us, she would have found living alone extremely difficult, if not impossible.
However, it was only in the last six weeks of her life, after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, that we took care of her physical body, helping her with feeding, bathing and using the bathroom. And actually, those times with her were some of the tenderest, most intimate in our relationship. As I sat at her feet, massaging cream into her dry shins, we had some of our most candid and hilarious conversations. Caring for her brought us closer than we’d ever been and, when she died, in her own bed, as the dawn came up over the sea, surrounded by her son, her daughter-in-law, the wonderful palliative care nurse provided by the Irish Cancer Trust, the cat and the dog, it felt like a life well lived brought to a luminous conclusion. It was a moment I will never forget. However, neither can I forget that this is not a deathbed scene I can ever hope for.
But here’s the thing: in my own experience, and from talking to hundreds of other childless women over the years, it’s actually not the death that most of us worry about; it’s what comes before that⸺the potential vulnerablities of ageing without a support system, without advocates, without even knowing who to list as your ‘next of kin’ when you have a medical proceedure, or to ask to be the executor of your will. (Sadly, the way around that emotional and practical conundrum is that many childless people avoid writing their will entirely, and that leaves a hell of a mess for others to sort out).
Creating an Alterkin Circle
When I lived in the UK and was still part of AWOC, I coined the word ‘Alterkin’ to describe the kinds of close, alternative ‘kinship networks’ people without children long for. Over the last few years, since moving to a very rural location in Ireland, I’ve been researching how to start an ‘Alterkin Circle’ and, a year ago, I put all that research into practice.
It’s not rocket science, what we are doing: we are a small group (6-8) adults aged 50-80, women and men, solo and partnered, each ageing without biological children for a variety of reasons, living within a 20-minute drive of each other, or closer. We meet each month for our ‘Alterkin Circle’ sessions, which have a semi-formal and confidential structure that we’ve worked out together, varying whose home we meet in each month. And we also have an ‘Alterkin Social’ session each month too, when we do fun or life admin stuff together. We ask and grant favours of each other, give each other lifts to the airport, check in with each other around health matters, and are generally getting to know each other. We’re each having to develop our asking/receiving muscle (we’re all a pretty independent bunch!), and so one guideline is that if it’s something we would have asked adult children to support us with, or accompany us to, we can ask that of each other. It doesn’t just have to be ‘care’ - it can be fun stuff too, like going to a concert, or shopping. We’re learning as we go, but we do have a set of principles to guide us that we’ve formulated together over our first six months, and we read those out at the beginning of each Alterkin Circle. And the first of our principles, and the most important, is this: ‘we move at the speed of trust’, a phrase taken from Adrienne Maree Brown’s writing.
Moving at the speed of trust
Having spoken about Alterkin publicly in interviews, some common feedback I’m hearing is that trust issues can be a stumbling block for many childless women even thinking about starting their own Alterkin Circle; I’ve heard so many variations around fears of being taken advantage of, of their needs being considered less ‘valid’ than others, and generally of having to deal with difficult and intrusive people.
And so this why I think it’s also really important to acknowledge that with so much weight being placed on ‘community’ being the answer to ageing without children (and just about everything else in our unravelling society), we need to acknowledge that community can be hard work. Many childless people have chosen to become as independent, resourceful and self-sufficient as possible, not because we’re natural loners, but because we’ve had too many bad experiences with ‘other people’, whether that be our very first group (the family we grew up with), at school, with neighbours and friends, in intimate relationships, with colleagues, etc. I empathise with this, carrying my own deep relational wounds, but having spent the last twenty years of my life as both part of, and leading various groups, I’ve come to learn that conflict is a part of community, and that it is possible to learn how to deal with it productively. And indeed, just because someone is childless, that doesn’t mean you’ll instantly get on with them; I don’t think everyone expects all parents to automatically get on, do they?
So, in our Alterkin Circle, we’re feeling our way slowly and with great delicacy. Unlike an online community, where you can just log off, or even an urban-based group where you might leave and never bump into anyone again, we live locally to each other in a rural area. We cannot blunder into each other’s lives without consequence. That feels both incredibly scary and beautifully precious.
And that’s why ‘moving at the speed of trust’ is so important to our Alterkin Circle. It’s the absolute opposite of the techbro motto of ‘move fast and break things’!
How to start your own Alterkin ‘community of care’.
Step one: find your people. For me, finding those willing to take part in this Alterkin project involved a slow, deliberate process over about 18 months of keeping my eye out for anyone in my local rural area who didn’t seem to have children, and then getting to know them as acquaintainces, before approaching them, one-on-one, to see if they’d be ‘open to discussing the idea of creating a local support group for people ageing witout children’. Often, requesting a more in-depth conversation was done by a text or WhatsApp message. I found the answer was usually a very clear yes, or a slightly more reserved maybe (or a very Irish polite non-response by changing the topic!) This then led to several in-depth, one-on-one chats over coffee, in the pub, on a dog walk, etc. Some people at the younger end of the age range, who were initially interested, later pulled back, but have said they’d like to get more involved later. It was (and still is) a delicate process and can’t be rushed: ‘moving at the speed of trust’ means not forcing it.
In the online childless community (like the Childless Elderwomen group I co-host as part of the Childless Collective), many childless women have told me that they’d like to start a local group, but as they’re not yet living in their ideal location, wouldn’t it be a waste of time? And although it might sound sensible to wait, I often feel that this question might be masking the real vulnerability of asking for help by delaying it. Because it is tough; I found it tough! By raising the topic of ageing without children with others, we are essentially asking for support (even though we are offering it too), which places us in a position of potential rejection. But as I wrote above, no one was horrible to me about it, and apart from a local parent who ‘didn’t see the point of it’ (which is exactly why it’s necessary!), I was only ever met with polite curiosity. So, if you are living somewhere you think you might want to move on from later, it’s still a great place to ‘practice’ asking those questions and developing your skills in forming a group and managing the process. Who knows, maybe someone in your group will know a childless person in the place you want to move to, and you’ll have an intro into an established ‘community of care’ when you move? Besides, brushing up on your social and community skills is never wasted.
The future of Alterkin
On my Gateway Elderwomen newsletter, I’ve been writing about childless caregiving and our Alterkin project (amongst other topics), and I hope soon to publish anonymous interviews with each of the members of our Alterkin Circle as we celebrate our first year together. It’s early days, we haven’t had any huge conflicts yet, and we are still getting to know each other. All of us hope that in our second year, we can very gradually invite some new potential members to join us at our Alterkin Social events, and that some of those might be a good fit to become new ‘Circle’ members. In time, we’d like our Circle to be the size of an extended family, whereas at the moment it’s more the size of a nuclear one. And, as many of us know from experience, nuclear families can often be too small to have the time and energy for everyone’s needs, and it’s often those of us without children who get put to the bottom of the pile.
Alterkin is not a perfect solution to ageing without children, but it’s free, it’s kind, and it’s connecting me to others and to my wider local community in ways that are enlarging my personal and social life. And I’ll take that over the alternative, which was worrying about all the factors about ageing without children that are out of my control!
Resources:
● World Childless Week 2020 included ‘Ageing Without Children’ as one of its themes. Explore the expert webinars and community submissions at: https://worldchildlessweek.net/ageing-without-children-2020
● Gateway Elderwomen: Jody Day’s newsletter about the joys and challenges of ‘elderhood without motherhood’ https://jodyday.substack.com
● Caring for the Caregiver - recording & transcript of a Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen webinar hosted by Jody. It was recorded the day before my mother-in-law died, and so one year before our Alterkin Circle began. https://bit.ly/gwe-fwc & view all the ‘Fireside Wisdom’ webinars from the last 5 years here: https://gateway-women.com/gateway-elderwomen/
● USA: Navigating Solo is an organisation set up by Healthcare Advocate Ailene Gerhardt for ‘older adults who are without the reliable support of adult children or close family members’ https://navigatingsolo.com/
● UK: Ageing Without Children (AWOC) is a UK Charity with around 10 AWOC Groups across the country, led by members. It also has a very active Facebook group with almost 4,000 members. https://awoc.org.uk/
● Global: Childless Elderwomen Group - Along with member volunteers, Jody hosts the ‘Childless Elderwomen’ subgroup in the Childless Collective online community. With 200+ childless women aged 50 and over, there are weekly, live, member-only Elderzooms suitable for all time zones, as well as a thriving chat section. https://childlesscollective.com/community
