19.
“Maybe this is specific to my family, but my parents are older because my older sibling died around age four. They were old enough to be a walking, talking human and the death was not a freak accident — they had been sick, but they were expected to recover and didn’t.”
“It took my parents a while, and apparently more than one miscarriage, before they had my sibling and me. People comment on how great their lives must have been putting off having kids, like they were just having a super fun time and postponing something inevitable or shirking some duty to procreate.
No one HAS to have kids. Implying that kids are a life-ruining burden that somehow ‘tamed them’ is doubly insulting because my parents were ‘young’ or of average age at the time to start a family, but they worked really hard and sacrificed a lot to prepare and make sure they were secure and stable enough. It ended in tragedy despite all the ‘fun young things’ they passed on to build a life they were comfortable with bringing children into.
It shatters my heart when people comment that my parents are ‘older’ in random light-hearted conversation. It’s not like they didn’t try, it’s not like they didn’t succeed, it’s not like they didn’t suffer terrible loss to put them behind the ‘typical’ curve. I hear people they’ve known for years say things about how nice it must have been having more time to themselves before ‘settling down to start a family”’ and I don’t know how they can stand it.”
—crookedflowers
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/fabianabuontempo/older-parents-differences
