The Gero-Punk Project

I just realized this yesterday when I was thinking through the choreography of the surprise birthday adventure Isobel and I were planning to take my mommy on today. The way I keep track of the passage of time as each year unfolds – my own personal calendar — is by following the turning of the final digit in the ages of some of the people who are closest to my heart. It goes like this: It begins with Isobel’s father Jean-David in January (this year he turned 57), followed by my mommy’s birthday on Ground Hog’s Day (this year she turned 67), followed by Isobel’s birthday on Saint Valentine’s Day (this year she’ll turn 17), followed by Simeon’s birthday around the winter solstice (later this year he’ll turn 57), followed by me. I will turn 47 two days before Christmas. Ten years difference between me and Jean-David, me and Simeon. Twenty years difference between me and my mommy. Thirty years difference between me and my daughter Isobel. Forty years different between Isobel and her father. Fifty years difference between Isobel and my mommy, her Gramma. Odd. Interesting. Perhaps meaningful only to me. But meaningful in a way that I can’t really explain in words.

This is really a story about my mommy (and my mommy and me), a tribute to her on her birthday, but every story begins with a preamble, at least the stories I like to tell. So, here’s the story.

My mommy and I were little girls together.

She was twenty-years-old when I was born in 1966. The Vietnam War was in full-swing and my father, also twenty-years-old, was an Air Force Private. When he went overseas to serve as an electrical engineer during his tour of duty my mommy and I lived with her parents, my Gramma Jewell and Grandpa Preston Hotz. During that time it was just little me and my little mommy living and playing together under the watchful eyes of my grandparents (I believe this is the time when my Gramma Jewell and I began to form our deep connection, as well.). There is a photo of me as a toddler playing naked in an inflatable kiddy pool in my grandparents’ Menlo Park, California backyard, my tan, skinny young mommy’s face glowing with happiness as she watched me splash.

My mommy and I have grown up together.

We’ve helped each other through uncertain, frightening, and dark times: The end of relationships; serious health emergencies (this February 19^th will be seven years since her ruptured cerebral aneurysm); multiple household moves; economic insecurity; professional struggles and disappointments; spiritual and identity crises. We’ve also supported each other in our shared deep desire for safety, purpose, growth, wellness, and happiness in whatever life-times-and-circumstances we happen to experience.

There have been periods over the decades during which we’ve both been adults when we haven’t understood each another, didn’t know how to talk to or hear one another.  There have been periods when we didn’t spend very much time together or talk to each other very often, times when the quality of our relationship wasn’t what either of us desired but was all either of us could muster. But we’ve always in this lifetime been there for each other when it really mattered. We’ve always loved each other, admired each other for all the ways we are so similar and so unalike.  And in recent years, we’ve grown closer together as we’ve grown deeper and wider as individuals, as we’ve grown up.

The day I write this essay is my mommy’s sixty-seventh birthday. I can’t believe it! She’s all ages and no age and the age she is now, all at the same time. I remember her during my early childhood, long thick hair down her back, bell bottom jeans on her girl-body, taking care of me and my little brother. I remember taking naps with her. Sweet memories!

Later, in my early and full-on teenage years I remember her working so goddamn hard all the time to keep life going for all of us (and this has not changed); thinking back to those dark times, I feel even now her almost totalizing sadness and disappointment about how things seemed to be turning out for her life, and for our lives.

But I speak of memories, I tell stories about the past. Let me tell a story about now.

Susan Enslow Hotz, my mommy, is a complex, dynamic, amazing human being. She is vibrant, adorable, enthusiastic, fundamentally smart, and open to the world (Even though sometimes still uncertain and not quite sure about who she is and what she should be doing in this world, what this weird human experience is all about. But aren’t we all uncertain sometimes?). My mommy is one of the most sensitive and generous people I know. She was a gifted nurse for many years, and now she’s a gifted caregiver of elders—an elder taking care of even older elders.

I’ve watched her over recent weeks respond to and manage challenges – an unexpected change in her work-life, her brother’s serious illness — that in the past would have knocked the wind out of her so completely that she’d have entered a paralyzing confusion leading to a narrowness of her perceptions about reality, a reduction of her personal agency. But not this time, and not the past few times Big Challenges have come her way.

I’m not engaging in hyperbole or fawning on the occasion of her birthday when I say that my mommy is a major teacher in my life – What an unexpected gift it has been to get to witness how she navigates the current storms with which she’s been faced.  Her capacity to be present to what is happening, let herself feel what she’s feeling, but also do what she needs to do to handle difficult stuff gives me great hope about my own growing capacities. And the dreams she dreams about her future self, the adventures she wants to have alone and with me and with me and Isobel, speak to the fundamental optimism she has about her life.

I surely wish I could help make all of her dreams come true. But today I did what I can do right now. Isobel and I took her on a surprise birthday adventure to the coast. We had a decadent lunch (fish and chips, glasses of Vouvray for me and mom).  I gave her roses and bought her a book of short stories. We had cardamom honey lattes at one of my favorite cafes. We ganged up on Isobel, teasing her about not wanting to go on a long walk with us and correcting her driving (Izzy drove us to and from the coast…Yikes!).  We also shared a heart-breaking moment at lunch when Isobel began to cry–we were talking about some difficult family history as well as our travels through the life course (specifically, our growing older, her father growing older).

In other words, we had a perfect, complex day as three human beings inexorably intertwined with each other, for better and for worse, in good times and in bad. In other words, we lived life as this life is meant to be lived.

What an honor it has been and is now to be my mother’s daughter. Happy Birthday and many returns, mommy!

What do gerontologists think they are doing when they do gerontology?  What makes gerontology different from other academic disciplines and fields of study and practice?  (That is, how is gerontology distinct from other related disciplines and fields, such as geriatrics, psychology, sociology, social work, etc.?) How do we know that gerontology is being done when we see it? 

What are the questions, issues, and problems around which gerontology organizes and institutionalizes itself?   How are these question, issues, and problems specifically Gerontological, rather than something else? What is the “lens” through which we look when we are doing Gerontological theorizing, inquiry, and practice?  How do you know a gerontologist when you see one?

How does gerontology cohere as an academic discipline and field of practice when increasingly other disciplines and fields are taking on issues of aging, old age, and later life?  What constitutes gerontology’s purview or territory when aging is everywhere and nowhere at the same time? And guess what? Not only are academic disciplines and fields outside of gerontology taking on the questions, issues and  problems that have traditionally been under the aegis of gerontology (Do a literature search, as I had my students do last week, and you’ll see the proliferation of research and theory work being done around aging, old age and later life outside of gerontology proper.), but there’s been a proliferation of niche services,  products, business and marketing  strategies targeted at boomer and older populations (but with little or no grounding in Gerontological knowledge).

What can we say about the state of “Gerontological knowledge” any way? And should gerontologists (Perhaps at some point we should have a conversation about who gets to call themselves a “gerontologist.”) be the arbiters of what counts as legitimate knowledge about aging, old age and later life, and the praxis that follows from this knowledge? Should those of us trained as gerontologists determine the criteria for services, products and businesses targeted at the issues of aging, old age, and later life?

I’ll admit it–I have such strong mixed feelings about all of this! I’m at heart a gero-anarchist. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m committed to freedom and creativity as we travel through the life course more than I am committed to codification, standardization, and institutionalization of ideas and practices around the human aging journey. And. I am a gerontologist. I am. I have been for more than half of my life this time around. But.  I am a gerontologist of a certain style– a critical, contemplative, and anti/de-disciplinary style. And as we’ve been exploring so far in my Gerontology course this term  (Theorizing and Researching in Gerontology), the field of gerontology is so complex, so diverse, there are many styles of being a gerontologist, and, thus, many versions of gerontology. So maybe there is room for me.

Though quite possibly — actually, I know this with certitude — some of my gerontology colleagues would disagree with my assertions and would willingly and with confidence offer a definitive and straightforward definition of gerontology and description of the work to which we gerontologists commit ourselves.

Alas, I know for a fact that my version of gerontology, my life as a gero-punk, is far from normative. 

So be it. 

But the deal is — and this is undeniable, it really is – that aging is an emergent phenomenon. And human beings are living longer than ever before in the history of this planet. And human aging is a complex, multi-faceted process that unfolds over a long period of time (e.g., over the entire human life course) and thus invites, even demands, a multi-faceted approach predicated on a nuanced relationship to time/place/space. As such, how on earth could the academic discipline and field of study devoted to this wild, emergent, and complex phenomenon be anything but wild, emergent, and complex?