Look at the image here and what do you see? Now turn away, turn back, and look again. Do you see anything different? Many of you have probably seen this before in your psychology 101 class, or in a popular magazine. Dontcha think it's pretty fitting for this Blog?

Here is an article that discusses the pros and cons of older parent adoption from the perspective of adult adoptees who were, themselves, raised by older parents. Whew! That's a mouthful.

Get a group of people together and ask their opinions on something and you will get as many different opinions as there are people. That is pretty much how the discussion in the article shakes out. For some, having older parents was a positive experience, for others, it was not.

A couple of years ago, a colleague of mine, who is 10 years younger than me, made a crack that I was too old to be raising children the same age as hers. She (not so) jokingly said that she felt sorry for my kids having such an old mother. I asked this woman if she was under the illusion that her children thought she was young. She responded that she was sure that her kids knew that she was young and hip and that I, ahem, was not. I asked her how could she be so certain and she just told me that it was obvious. I wasn't invested in the discussion so I dropped it at that.

A week or so later my co-worker came to me looking like someone had died. Concerned, I asked her what was wrong. "You were right," she said painfully. Completely having forgotten our earlier conversation I asked her, "About what?" Then she told me that a situation came up where her children were teasing her about being old and in correcting them she (not so)jokingly used me as a reference point: "Dr. Gray, she's old." That's when she found out that her kids thought she and I were the exact same age, 37. In other words, old. I thought this was hillarious. She did not.

My good friend, Shirley, is thirteen years younger than I am and she had a similar experience with her son. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but, she was surprised one day to find out that her son thought that she and I were the same age. She grilled him because she could not understand how he could think that. Developmentally kids just seem to think that grownups are old (parents), older (grandparents), and really old (anyone obviously older than grandparents).

How ironic. We older mothers work ourselves into a knot trying to convince everyone--including ourselves--that we are, indeed, young enough to parent our children. Yet, our children seem to think that regardless of our chronological ages, we are all pretty much the same--old.