Birthday Meditations on a Beatles Song
May. 12th, 2022 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrj[Apologies to those who also subscribe to the alpennia blog rss feed and will see this twice.]
* * *
For those of us of a Certain Age, who grew up in a Certain Cultural Context, there is a birthday that comes with a default soundtrack.
When I get older losing my hair, many years from now
Some sentiments in the song mark the point of view as strongly gendered—and gendered within certain specific cultural expectations.
Will you still need me?
The speaker assumes that the value they provide will eventually decline—
Will you still feed me?
--while the listener is not granted the respite of age. Nuturing and service are expected to continue.
If I’d been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door?
And only the speaker is framed as socializing freely outside the home, with the expectation that this will be tolerated. The queries and images assume a highly specific life script.
Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear; we shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee
Knowing the authors, this image of respectable working-class conventionality carries an inescapable edge of satire, but a kindly satire. And today—both in the British society that spawned it, and in my own American society—the image of an idyllic, relaxing retirement in which only a little scrimping and saving is necessary to enjoy a few pleasures is out of reach for too many. Retirement age creeps upward and the equivalent of a summer cottage on the Isle of Wight may be only a fantasy. Even for those of us with traditional retirement plans, nothing is certain.
You'll be older too, and if you say the word, I could stay with you
How many people still assume that they will find a relationship in which you can expect to grow old together? My parents, and both sets of my grandparents all celebrated 50th wedding anniversaries. As a lesbian, I always knew that the legal system would deny me even the theoretical possibility of achieving the same feat. But that paradigm was always what I measured my life against and found it wanting.
I can be handy, mending a fuse...I can knit a sweater by the fireside...Sunday [usually Saturday] mornings go for a ride...Doing the garden, digging the weeds
It’s a good life. Truly it is.
Who could ask for more?
Yes. Yes, sometimes I could.
Will you still need me?
I do, you know, want to be needed—or if not “needed”, at least valued. One of my persistent psychological failure modes is the belief that I must provide value to people in order to find social acceptance. It doesn’t matter how often people assure me it’s not the case, this is a fixed part of my personality and unlikely to change.
Will you still feed me?
Feeding takes a lot of different forms. Nutrition is far from the most important way we feed each other.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view
I’m bad at the whole spontaneous casual communication thing. I remember, when I was much younger, coming near to having panic attacks at the thought of contacting someone out of the blue without a specific purpose “just to chat”. How did people do that? Social media makes it easier today (and I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if the internet had existed when I was young), but throughout my life I’ve tended to drift away from people if there wasn’t a structural context that brought us together. It’s on me; it’s not other people’s job to telepathically determine that I’d like to keep in contact. And social media still defaults to passive consumption, rather than interaction, much of the time. I’ve always hoped that being a “content creator” would fulfill my part of the reaching process and inspire people to drop me a line (see previous comment about being valuable).
Yours sincerely, wasting away
But all in all, it’s a good life. And I’m not sure it would have been possible for me to take any road but the one I’m walking.
Mine for evermore
Birthdays can be a time for taking stock—for looking backward and forward. For asking those eternal questions.
Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
(With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
* * *
For those of us of a Certain Age, who grew up in a Certain Cultural Context, there is a birthday that comes with a default soundtrack.
When I get older losing my hair, many years from now
Some sentiments in the song mark the point of view as strongly gendered—and gendered within certain specific cultural expectations.
Will you still need me?
The speaker assumes that the value they provide will eventually decline—
Will you still feed me?
--while the listener is not granted the respite of age. Nuturing and service are expected to continue.
If I’d been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door?
And only the speaker is framed as socializing freely outside the home, with the expectation that this will be tolerated. The queries and images assume a highly specific life script.
Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear; we shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee
Knowing the authors, this image of respectable working-class conventionality carries an inescapable edge of satire, but a kindly satire. And today—both in the British society that spawned it, and in my own American society—the image of an idyllic, relaxing retirement in which only a little scrimping and saving is necessary to enjoy a few pleasures is out of reach for too many. Retirement age creeps upward and the equivalent of a summer cottage on the Isle of Wight may be only a fantasy. Even for those of us with traditional retirement plans, nothing is certain.
You'll be older too, and if you say the word, I could stay with you
How many people still assume that they will find a relationship in which you can expect to grow old together? My parents, and both sets of my grandparents all celebrated 50th wedding anniversaries. As a lesbian, I always knew that the legal system would deny me even the theoretical possibility of achieving the same feat. But that paradigm was always what I measured my life against and found it wanting.
I can be handy, mending a fuse...I can knit a sweater by the fireside...Sunday [usually Saturday] mornings go for a ride...Doing the garden, digging the weeds
It’s a good life. Truly it is.
Who could ask for more?
Yes. Yes, sometimes I could.
Will you still need me?
I do, you know, want to be needed—or if not “needed”, at least valued. One of my persistent psychological failure modes is the belief that I must provide value to people in order to find social acceptance. It doesn’t matter how often people assure me it’s not the case, this is a fixed part of my personality and unlikely to change.
Will you still feed me?
Feeding takes a lot of different forms. Nutrition is far from the most important way we feed each other.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view
I’m bad at the whole spontaneous casual communication thing. I remember, when I was much younger, coming near to having panic attacks at the thought of contacting someone out of the blue without a specific purpose “just to chat”. How did people do that? Social media makes it easier today (and I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if the internet had existed when I was young), but throughout my life I’ve tended to drift away from people if there wasn’t a structural context that brought us together. It’s on me; it’s not other people’s job to telepathically determine that I’d like to keep in contact. And social media still defaults to passive consumption, rather than interaction, much of the time. I’ve always hoped that being a “content creator” would fulfill my part of the reaching process and inspire people to drop me a line (see previous comment about being valuable).
Yours sincerely, wasting away
But all in all, it’s a good life. And I’m not sure it would have been possible for me to take any road but the one I’m walking.
Mine for evermore
Birthdays can be a time for taking stock—for looking backward and forward. For asking those eternal questions.
Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
(With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
no subject
Date: 2022-05-13 02:00 am (UTC)My parents are coming up on 60 years and still happy. Both sets of grandparental marriages were ended by death, not separation, and I fully believe they would have passed 50 but for that. I married late enough that 50 is unlikely, but still something we can aspire to. It feels pretty weird for those of us coming from that kind of context to see how disposable marriages seem to be in broader society, can't it? Of course there are good reasons to end a relationship -- no one should ever tolerate abuse, for instance -- but maintaining marriages requires work and are worth working for.
I say all that, and yet, I am a lousy correspondent and also bad at the "just chatting" thing.
I'm not trying to make your post about me (good old transference). This is my bumbling way of saying "I hear you and I value you".
no subject
Date: 2022-05-14 02:57 pm (UTC)One of the biggest changes I see around marriage is the freedom on women's parts to consider it unnecessary -- whether in terms of entering marriage in the first place, or leaving when it no longer gives you joy. And when I listen to younger people talking about marriage these days, there's not only the sense of it being unnecessary when establishing relationships, but that life is uncertain enough that such formalities can be more of a hindrance than a help. Although a long-term marriage was the formal marker of my imaginings, my disappointment has been much more centered around never finding that sort of relationship in any form. But then, it turned out I was looking for something rather different than what other people were looking for (an aspect I only figured out when I sorted out my asexuality), which helps explain things.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-13 05:53 am (UTC)♥
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