2023-11-01 17:00:07
In front of the school gate, Lila’s parents (some witnesses wished to remain anonymous) were recognizable by their gray hair. “When they came to pick me up, my classmates thought they were my grandparents”, recalls the 18-year-old girl. His mother is 62 years old. Her father 67. For a long time, she lied regarding their age. “Now I don’t do it anymore”, assures the student in her first year of language school. Lila chose a different path than her parents: her father was a police officer and her mother worked as a nurse. Jobs that she talks regarding in the past tense because they are both retired. Her father was 49 years old when she was born. “However, he was the one who took care of us the most”, she says, referring to her siblings, without mentioning her mother, with whom she has tense relationships.
Lila repeats it: having older parents than the average “has no advantages”. The youngest of the family, the teenager grew up with the feeling of having arrived too late. The reason, according to her, is the ten years that separate her from her two older brothers. and his sister: “They traveled a lot with my parents when they were little. I was a little sad when they told their anecdotes. I didn’t have any. » Between their first and last child, his parents no longer have the same budget. And their energy fades. Lila will travel less and learn to escape in other ways: basketball, reading or playing the piano. “I have long resented them for not being as young as the others”she admits.
What is a parent like any other? Medicine places the cursor at 35 years of age, the limit from which a pregnant woman is in “geriatric pregnancy”. “An extremely violent term”, supports Anaïs Le Brun-Berry, psychoanalyst and parenting consultant. In his office at 9e district of Paris, she receives mothers who feel guilty regarding having had a child following 40. “There is this idea that an older parent will be less “able to”. And that the child will be able to feel it and feel ashamed if he compares his parents to those of his friends”she believes.
Outdated, incompetent… Elderly parents are not popular. As evidenced by the film Old Dads, by American stand-up comedian Bill Burr (2023, on Netflix), where three boomers close to fifty discover fatherhood late in life. In a testosterone-heavy environment, they come up once morest a generational gap with other parents. The main character, Jack Kelly, instills macho principles in his little boy. Is the child hurt? His father advises him to put earth on his wound. “I’m trying to make him a guy, not a jerk”he would later say to a neighbor who cautiously recommended that he disinfect the wound.
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