Trading Places: When Did My Kids Start Worrying About Me?
By: Andrea Kott
Tags: Aging Parents, Coronavirus, Parenthood, Children, Motherhood

“How are you feeling? Are you sleeping? Do you still have your sense of taste and smell?” Our children try sounding casual. They know their dad and I are social distancing. Nevertheless, I feel their worry.

I am 62 years old, healthy, and fit. I walk, bike, and swim. My doctor says I have the heart of a 20-year old. Still, I’m 62, which inches up my risk of dying-from-Covid-19. Our kids know I’m vital. They also know that people my age and older are succumbing to this illness, which must be forcing them if only subconsciously, to grapple with my mortality.

It’s not unthinkable. My appearance, not to mention my regular, sometimes crippling, bouts of arthritis, could easily suggest that I’m older and more susceptible to illness than I am. My curly hair is snowy white, and my face is prematurely lined from years of sun worship. Despite my athleticism, or maybe because of it, I have two titanium hips and a fused lower spine. Most days — at least before working out — I ache and creak like a rusty machine.

Perhaps I was naïve to think that our kids would take my aging in stride. They always knew that I was older than their friends’ moms. They even applauded my rejection of the cultural pressure to look younger by camouflaging my age: yet, the powerful feminist example I thought I was setting by not coloring my hair, wearing makeup, or squeezing into clothes designed for younger, skinnier bodies may have instead emphasized the age gap between other moms and me, implanting in our kids the tiniest, most subliminal fear of losing me sooner than later.

When our son was eight, his teacher asked if I was his mother or his grandmother. And, our daughter, at age 12, said a friend who’d spotted me at her softball game asked, “Is that your mom? Isn’t she too old to be your mother?” These stories made me cry, but they didn’t attune me to the anxiety about my longevity that our kids may have had.

Only recently have I begun wondering if they see me as elderly. My last orthopedic surgery scared them, and they seem more than a little alarmed whenever I mention needing a routine medical procedure. Although they good-naturedly tease me for speaking too loudly or forgetting things that they’ve said minutes earlier, I sense them digesting the deficits that they’re beginning to notice, like my hearing and memory loss. When I took a spill during a family stroll, our son dove to help me stand as if I were drowning, while our daughter tenderly brushed dirt from my sleeves. Both looked frightened and sad. During a family conversation about the pandemic, I thought it timely to mention the location of my husband’s and my living wills. Our son changed the subject.

Twenty-five years ago, right after my husband and I learned I was pregnant, a friend of ours, a father of two, remarked: “From this moment on, you will never not worry.” He was right. His comment, although foreboding, prepared me for the worrying that I would do from then on. What it didn’t prepare me for was the day our kids would start worrying about me.

Andrea Kott, MPH, a freelance public health writer, is the author of the memoir “Salt on a Robin’s Tail: An Unlikely Jewish Journey Through Childhood, Forgiveness and Hope,” due this month from Blydyn Square Books.