La Voz de Galicia – January 17, 2025 →
Despite being nearly four decades older than me, I sometimes catch myself talking to her as if she were a child who knows nothing about life. And then I get angry with myself: what right do I have to talk to an eighty-year-old woman, my mother, in that way? We all don’t know something at some point, and we all have to ask for help or explanations to learn what we don’t know. But what happens when someone explains things to us assuming we lack the capacity to understand what they’re saying? That’s where the fine line lies, so difficult to navigate, and crossing that line can mean many things, including offending or humiliating the other person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
I suppose it’s because most of the women in my life are getting older (my mother and my best friends live in that space between sixty and eighty), or because the person I share my life with is a few years older than me. But every day, I find myself asking more and more questions about how I would like my old age to be and how I would like to be treated. And in those questions, that part of me reappears, the one that also speaks to herself like a child who knows nothing about life: “Come on, Cris, when you’re old, you’ll be alone, like all old women.” And then a wry smile slips out as I think about how hard it already is not to be alone and about what happens when we let ourselves be defined by what others think we are: old, young, millennials…
When I’m old, I’ll be old. And I’ll build my own definition of old, just as I build my definition of what I am now. And I’ll try to keep learning, if they let me, and if they don’t let me, I’ll surround myself with those who teach me things without making me feel small.