Working Mother

This post was written by Darren Manley (pictured here), who is a blogger and author of the forthcoming book, Growing Up Old.

My father retired in 1990 from the Southern California Edison Company after thirty-nine years of service. He was 63. I was five and had just gone into kindergarten. I tugged at his bathrobe when he didn’t put on a shirt and tie that first Monday morning.

“Aren’t you going to work, daddy?”

“I’m not going to work anymore.”

“Were you fired?” I had just learned this word.

A laugh. “No, not fired. Retired…”

You might think it ironic that a 25-year-old who grew up with a retired father would be contributing to a blog called “Working Parents.” Because of his age, my dad couldn’t do many of the things other dads did; he rarely fulfilled the traditional role of the breadwinner who comes home from a long day to play a game of catch with his boy.

Yet, in their Golden Years, he and my mother still managed to give me a sound, beautiful understanding of what it takes to succeed in life – monetarily and otherwise. They sacrificed their retirement to take on the most difficult and rewarding of jobs – parenting – and crystallized for me some hard truths that our nation as a whole is just coming to grips with.

Growing up with a mother and father who had survived the Great Depression and World War II meant that we did things differently in our house, especially when it came to money. We never used a dishwasher. In the backyard, the clothes hung from the line, drying in the lazy afternoon sun. Instead of buying new clothes, mom sewed up the holes in my old ones on her ancient Singer.

And when the Tooth Fairy came around, I was always told that she had run out of money to stuff under pillows, but had tucked some away for me in “a faraway land I could not yet reach” (the bank). Not to mention the “ration stamps” I was given in second grade to teach me the art of deferred gratification. (I could never quite amass enough of them to earn a Coke every night of the week.)

Their old-world philosophy led to a pronounced and difficult rebellion as I searched for my identity during the vibrant 80s and 90s – a search very similar to the one boomers endured decades before. But as I matured and my parents’ voices became weaker, I came to see that so many of their simple truths rang true. The frugality they learned during their tough childhoods became a way of life; one that can still be lived to an extent in our modern world.

With the economy postponing so many retirements and older parenting a rising trend, I figured the time was right to use my own voice and honor my parents and all older parents who work to give their children everything they never had.

In a May 2007 post here, Lauren Young posed the question: “How old is too old” when it comes to parenting? It’s a tough issue that brings so many factors into play, but I would argue that from one angle, it’s never too late. The wisdom older parents have – far removed from the heady days of youth – is vast. The very decision to become a parent later in life illustrates the sagacity of age, because we are all called to pass down our knowledge to those who come after us.

Like the ebb and flow of an economy, older parents have long ago made their mistakes in life and finance and risen above them. They can teach their children in unique ways, and their timeless messages have the power to change society, parenting, and future generations for the better.

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