"We've got an older mother on our hands." (2009)

Undergraduate: Alexander Trowbridge

Faculty Advisor: Jane Danielewicz
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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I am a student in Jane Danielewicz's Life Writing class. We have explored various Memoir genres in the class, including autoethnography: Using one's own experience as a member of a social group to capture the collective experience of that group.

I am the son of an older mother. She was forty-five when she had me. My piece is an attempt to give my audience a glimpse of what that is like.

That being said, I don't actually expect everyone who had an older mother to have had one quite like mine. Here is an excerpt:

I called her the other day to ask her what it was like to be older than other moms. The problem, of course, was phrasing.

“Hey mom, I’m writing about...Well, umm, a girl in my class is writing about being the daughter of teen-age parents,” I said. “So I thought --”

“—Upupupup” she said. “Alexander, your mother is 39.”

She’s 67.

In elementary school, people would mistake her for my grandmother and I would get upset. In middle school, when Keith Dixon called me a fag, and I called him fat, he went for her age. “Your mom is so old.”

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized what I had that other kids didn’t: Your parent is your first teacher, and mine had four decades of adventures under her belt before she settled down to teach me.

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