I Don’t Mind Being Childless, It’s Coping With Old Age That Worries Me

My fear of getting old without children

I’m in a meeting. I can hear my phone ringing in my bag but I can’t answer it. It rings again fifteen minutes later. As soon as I can, I look to see who has called. It’s my mother. She’s eighty. I get that ominous feeling in my gut.

That morning, out of nowhere, her arthritis has flared up so violently in her right wrist that she is crying with pain and her arm is virtually useless. She struggled to lift a spoon to her mouth at breakfast, she couldn’t dry herself properly, and getting dressed was a challenge.

At lunchtime, I made the ten-mile drive to her house, sorted us both out with lunch, made sure she had something easy to microwave for her dinner, and provided moral support over a cup of tea.

For the next few days, my brother and I help her out with the basics of living. Eventually, the swelling and pain in her wrist subside and she can cope better on her own.

For the last eight years, my parents have needed a lot of assistance.

They both had an array of chronic health problems and failing mobility. My Dad suffered from dementia. It changed him from a capable person who was the pillar of his community to a little old man sitting confused in an armchair, barely able to stand up unaided.

He died in 2020.

Although my Mum is lonely without my Dad, she does have a lot of support. My nephew and brother live on the same street and I’m not that far away. Even though it can be exhausting when matters go wrong, between us we can get through, figure things out and life chugs on.

But Who Will Do That For My Husband And Me?

We don’t have kids and we don’t have the community links that my mother has. My nephew is an only child and he will need to support his parents.

Everything that my mother has help with, from personal care in a crisis situation, to cutting the grass, to having someone to do the heavy lifting on the domestic front, my husband and I will have to pay for.

It wasn’t an intentional decision not to have children. I was single throughout my thirties, met my husband just before I turned forty and we didn’t get married until I was forty-six.

Despite once having a biological clock that ticked as loud as Big Ben, when I hit my forties, I was content that it would just be the two of us.

I’m still happy with that decision. It’s so wonderful to be happy with my lot and not spend years hankering for something that just didn’t happen.

The only thing that worries me is what happens when we get old.

Can We Stay Healthy?

We’re now in our mid-fifties and my husband already has some health issues. It feels like it will fall to me to stay healthy, both physically and mentally, to keep our show on the road.

Ten years ago, when I moved out of London to set up home with my husband, I started doing Pilates. The instructor was a year younger than my Mum and had amazing health. Some of the women in that class were in their sixties and seventies.

I looked at their strength, their flexibility, and, most importantly, their absence of severe aches and pains, and decided that I would do Pilates until the day I die!

Witnessing the decline of my parents is a fantastic motivator to stay healthy.

I make an effort to maintain a good weight and not let middle-aged spread take over, as this seems to be where people start going downhill.

I have noticed that people who are physically well and capable in their seventies and eighties have always been fit and active. I’m not a gym bunny but I’m aware that the exercise we do now will have a bearing on how we are in twenty-plus years’ time.

There are no guarantees on the health front. Anything from cancer to serious injury to just getting tired with life could happen.

Will my sheer bloody-minded determination allow us to cope in our dotage? I’ve practised Buddhism since I was twenty-one so maybe fifty-odd years of ramped-up life-force will put us in a good rhythm to attract the support that we need.

And I’m hoping that, by then, there will be an affordable retirement village on our doorstep!

Cali Bird loves to give gentle, encouraging advice about getting going on your writing project. Check out her Substack newsletter. She is also an award-nominated author of Tales of the Countess, a chick-lit novel with handbags that talk!