That ‘times change’ is a truism. It’s one that has been occupying my mind now for several months. And some of these thoughts came back to me this morning, after reading a short article about “late-forming families” in Anthropology News (May 2012, by Nancy Anne Konvalinka and Elena Hernandez Corrochano). This research was conducted in Spain, where the authors studied the lives of families formed after the age of 35 or 40. One of the authors’ points was the squeeze felt by such new—yet older—parents, as they strove to care for their own young offspring while often caring also for their aging parents. The articles notes the strong pride within Mediterranean cultures in the important roles families play when their caregiving help is needed, and people’s commitment to fulfilling such roles, despite growing difficulties.
Although my own ethnic background is varied, coming from all over Europe—and a bit of native American as well—I feel and see the same emphasis among my family members: we want and expect to help each other with caregiving. But in the US, I noted three dimensions not noted by Konvalinka and Corrochano: extended age, greater mobility, and working grandparents.
These authors write of three generations (children, parents, grandparents), from the perspective of the parents. Yet in the US now four generations have become commonplace. Konvalinka and Corrochano focus on the parental generation; I am fixated on the grandparental generation, where I sit, also looking up and down. Here there are two ‘sandwich generations’.
Our mobility means that many of us live far from our children and from our parents. We struggle to maintain these links, to provide the care that our values (and sentiments) require of us. This year, in my own extended family, we’ve had example after example of elderly family members needing growing amounts of help, requiring balancing with the needs of our children and grandchildren….In some cases, the pressure on the squeezed generation becomes nearly unbearable. I am lucky in that my eldest daughter, the mother of my three grandchildren, who lives all the way across the United States, has a vibrant local support network. She is also a full time mother who loves her caretaking role and manages wonderfully with minimal help from me.
But another close relative (nearing 70) works outside the home, lives near—and routinely helps—her children and grandchildren (whose mothers also work), has a husband with a heart condition, and until recently regularly flew back and forth across the country to attend to her own aged and failing mother. Her schedule and the demands upon her have been, by any objective criterion, overwhelming. Although she has yet to be truly overwhelmed, I worry for her.
Another close relative has a responsible and demanding job. Until recently, she also had major responsibility for a much older husband and her own mother (who also lived across the country from her). As the condition of her elderly relatives deteriorated, the strains under which she suffered—and still managed—became palpable. It was a pace I knew she couldn’t keep up for long. Even their eventual deaths did not bring immediate cessation of responsibility; she had to deal with complex, associated paperwork and financial arrangements.
Over the past few days I’ve been reading Wendell Berry’s book, Hannah Coulter—yet another of the residents of Port William about whom Berry has written so much (e.g., Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett). I have found all these books touching, but this one portrayed these caretaking roles in a different light from what I’ve experienced in my own family, though still poignant, heart-rending. The heroine, Hannah, is a rural woman from a poor family (like many of my paternal ancestors from Oklahoma). In the book, Hannah looks back on her long life. She has suffered losses—her first husband died in World War II not long after their love marriage, her children—externally defined as ‘successful’—moved away from Port William and from her, she saw the life she’d loved dwindling, disappearing as ‘times changed’. The grief and pain of these losses comes through loud and clear, softened somewhat by her own gratitude for the meaningful life she’s lived—full of hard work and connection to others who loved her and whom she loved. Where I see my own family suffering from the needs we want and struggle to fulfill but are often unable to, she suffers from the loss of those meaningful connections, to family members and to the land, to the way of life she’s loved.
The book also brought to mind my experience in Borneo. Part of the community of Long Ampung had moved from the very remote Apo Kayan down to Long Segar, a less remote community where I lived for a year and to which I have returned from time to time. In 1980, I visited Long Ampung, seeking to understand why some community members had opted to move, some to stay. There were of course many reasons to leave (for schools, medical care, land, access to commerce, participation in the ‘modern world’), but for those who stayed, part of the reason seemed to be the kind of attachment to the land and to the environment that Hannah felt for her farm in rural Kentucky. I wasn’t in Long Ampung long enough to be sure of all this, but my conversations there led me to suspect that the people who remained watched the changes underway in the world with some of the same dismay and loss portrayed for Hannah:
- the switch from routine day-to-day interdependence among friends and kin to dependence on cash and employment (and a resulting loss of freedom, autonomy, security);
- the loss of daily, lifelong, intergenerational connectedness with one’s family;
- the improbability that one’s children and grandchildren would, or even could, maintain and honor one’s values and traditions;
- the growing alienation from the land and the forests themselves.
Many of the great grandchildren of Long Ampung—now living in Samarinda or elsewhere in East Kalimantan—now send me notes on Facebook; we can discuss the educational needs of their children, in turn, by phone. My son visits and makes development plans with his relatives living in yet another daughter village, which split off from Long Segar—Lung Anai (still closer to Samarinda, still more involved in a cash economy, in the modern world). Times change, the ties that bind now reach round the globe. I wonder where it all leads…and how we can all adapt to these changes that seem to come at an ever-faster clip.
But perhaps it just seems that way….time flies ever faster as we age.