Yikes Questions: "But Who Will Take Care of You When You're Old?"
I was in my late 20s, recently married, and out at a bar with a group of old friends, most of whom I'd known since we were kids. I was sitting and chatting with a girlfriend's husband, and he asked me when my partner and I were going to have kids.
"We're not," I replied.
An answer that blunt, I knew well by then, was always followed up with one of about a dozen Yikes Questions, and his was a classic: "But who will take care of you when you're old?"
He had two daughters, one of whom was still a baby, and he'd already decided her future as his caretaker.
I said, "Presumably people I pay to do it. Who will take care of you when you're old?"
He looked confused. "My daughters," he told me, as if I were the stupidest person on the planet.
"What if they can't take care of you?" I asked, and his expression turned stricken. "Or what if they don't want to? I'm certainly not taking care of my parents when they're old."
He was shocked. There was a lot crossing his face in that moment. He'd thought I was a nice person, but now here I was saying not only that I didn't want children but that I didn't want to take care of my parents, either. But he hardly had time to dwell on the realization that I am a monster, because he needed to deal with the entirely new possibility that his daughters might not agree that it was their destiny and duty to look after him in his dotage. It was possibly the first time he'd contemplated their agency at all.
"You don't mean that," he said, without conviction. "You'll take care of your parents if they need you." He searched my face hopefully.
"I won't," I reasserted. "And I've made that clear to them. Your daughters might do the same someday, because they're individual people. Which is why you had kids, right? To love them as unique little humans with their own fascinating and wonderful lives. Not just so you'd have someone to take care of you when you're old?"
He blinked. He downed his beer. Lost in his own thoughts, he didn't answer my question. He wandered up to the bar to get another drink.
More than 20 years later, that conversation stays with me.
I don't even know if I'll need someone to take care of me when I'm old(er). If I have the good fortune to live to a ripe old age, I don't know how I'll die or whether it will happen quickly or slowly. I don't know if I or my partner will go first, or whether they'll be able to provide the care I need if I need it.
All I know for sure is that having children is no guarantee of a future caretaker, nor should it be. That is not a reason to have children. It's not guaranteed that, if you need care, your children will be able to provide it, or want to. Not doing eldercare is a valid choice, just as choosing not to parent is.
A child's life is theirs to do with as they will, as much as they are able. And it's our responsibility to figure out what to do with our final years, independent from our decisions about whether to parent.
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