The 3am bag lady blues

Scaring yourself about ageing alone without children.

Self-portrait of myself as a ghost. February 2024.

‘But who’s going to be there for me when I’m old?’ is a thought that keeps many women without children awake at 3am. And in that hour of the wolf, as they call it in Russia, that’s when the bag lady shuffles into your dreams.

Her worn-out trainers are stuffed with newspapers and wrapped in supermarket bags and, peeking out from the geologic layers of hand-me-down coats, only her bony hands reveal how thin she is. The whites of her eyes are startling against her grime-dark face and, should you see her smile, it’s a portal into an abandoned graveyard. She keeps her bedding and possessions in a shopping trolley, and she leans heavily on as she pushes it around all day, moving from the soup kitchen to the library and then back to base, a coveted dry spot under a canal bridge. She shares the space with a few young girls new to the streets; she can’t help but mother them a little as she teaches them what, where and who to avoid if they don’t want to disappear even deeper into the world of the unseen. If they don’t want to become her.

I didn’t have to dig deep to write this passage. My bag lady lives alongside me, whispering her hoarse song of precarity into my ears. Ever since that day in my mid-forties when I realised that motherhood by any route would never be possible, she has shadowed me.

This archetypal image of vulnerability in old age lives near the surface in almost every woman I know, perhaps especially for those of us who don’t have children and can’t kid ourselves that future support will be available. And it doesn’t seem to matter how vulnerable we are systemically— those with supportive partners, savings and a roof over their heads know her well too. Connie Zweig, in her excellent 2021 book The Inner Work of Age¹ quotes research Allianz Insurers did with a group of women that revealed that ‘almost half of all respondents said they often or sometimes fear losing their money and becoming homeless, regardless of income level.’ It also stated that, ‘after losing a spouse, running out of money in retirement is what 57% of women say keeps them up at night'.²

Our fears are not without substance—the reality is that single older women without children have been shown by a 2020 University of Sydney study to be the group most likely to face financial and housing precarity in later life.³ This pushes back against the stereotype that women without children have plenty of money because they haven’t had the expense of raising children, and whilst that’s true, what’s not taken into account is that many of them may have taken significant career breaks to be carers for elderly parents, without a partner to keep the financial show on the road, and without the potential safety net of children to support them in later life. They are also less likely to be sitting on a property nest egg as, without a partner, they haven’t had someone to share life-long expenses with, including qualifying for a mortgage. And that’s even without not being able to access the many unfair tax breaks and benefits that accrue to couples. As Sarah Fay writes, Singlism⁴ is real, and over a lifetime, it can add up to a crippling penalty against single older women; indeed, the American academic who coined the term ‘singlism’, Dr Bella DePaulo, worked out over a decade ago that ‘it may be a million dollars.’⁵

Life without children can be wonderful (and awful, that’s just life) whether you chose it or it chose you. And getting old has its delights, but it’s rarely without compromises, especially as the body starts to creak at the seams after a lifetime of normal wear and tear. Turning sixty recently myself, not only am I coming to terms with yet more menopause-related indignities and limitations (I almost levitated during a routine cervical smear last week) but I still manage a chronic pain condition from a workplace injury in my late twenties along with genetic insomnia. And don’t even get me started on my fitness levels which are worse than ever having injured my back at the gym over a year ago whilst working to get ‘stronger bones’ through weight-lifting.

I’m learning that the privilege of living in an ageing body requires a deep bow of gratitude, uncomfortable doses of humility and an ever darker and more absurd sense of humour.

Yet in the books that I read about women’s ageing (and I have a groaning shelf full of them for research purposes), very few of them don’t make the presumption that the reader is white, middle-class, heterosexual, partnered, property-owning, retired, pensioned and has children and possibly even grandchildren. (Connie Zweig’s is amongst a very short list of books I can recommend; she’s a childfree-by-choice step-grandmother.)

The idea that millions of women worldwide are facing old age alone, and possibly without any or all of the potential buffers listed above, seems to exist in some scary no-go land for many. It’s as if such a reality is unimaginable, unthinkable even. Deviant. Probably their fault.

In our ageist, sexist, culture, we don’t want to face the vulnerabilities women disproportionally might experience in old age, and so we deny them. But our unconscious can’t be fooled that easily, and thus the spectre of the bag lady haunts us, and shunts the whole topic into the shadowlands of the mainstream psyche.

But do you know what? Having written that paragraph describing my inner bag lady, I feel better for having met her.

She sounds like a survivor; she sounds like me.

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I’m so close to becoming a Substack ‘bestseller’ (just 11 paid subscribers more!) and I would be so grateful if you could bump me over that threshold. I’m running a special 50% off in December if that would help. Thank you for being one of my readers, free or paid—I appreciate you deeply. Jody x

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Join us around the Zoom Fireside on Sunday 15 December for a free, live & recorded webinar on ‘Solo Elderhood’.

Register free here

I really hope you’ll join me, and my solo elderwomen guests on Sunday 15 December at 8pm GMT for a free, live and recorded session of my ‘Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen’ webinar series on ‘Solo Elderhood’.

We’ve got some amazing truth-telling and myth-busting guests who, if it’s anything like the last 16 sessions, will make us laugh and cry with their candour, insight, wisdom, insight and rebelliousness.

The recording will be sent out the following day to all who register, whether you can attend live or not. Click here to register.

My guests will be:

• Vicki Robin (US) is almost 80 and a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. As well as a best-selling author, she is co-founder of Conversation Cafes and the 10-Day Local Food Challenge, and hosts the podcast/YouTube series, What Could Possibly Go Right? Currently, she’s exploring ‘the unmapped territory from older to elder’ on her Substack Coming of Aging. Vicki serves on the Board of the Post Carbon Institute and lives by herself on Whidbey Island in Washington State, USA.

• Donna Ward (AUS) is 70 and is a writer, editor, publisher and former psychotherapist from Western Australia who now lives in Melbourne. She is the author of a 2020 memoir She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life, published by Allen & Unwin Australia and a campaigner on the issues facing older, single, childless women in Australia.

• Sue Fagalde Lick (US) is in her early 70s and is the author of numerous books, including most recently her memoir No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s about her marriage to Fred, his decline, her life whilst being his sole carer and his death. A musician and singer, she lives alone in rural Oregon and writes a Substack about her experience of ‘solo ageing’ called Can I Do It Alone?

• Julie Greenan (UK) is 70 and has a just started sharing her writing on Substack. She’s single having been married and had several long-term relationships in the past and has no children, but prefers to avoid categorising herself as either childless or childfree. Julie’s been a regular panellist on stages and podcasts discussing her experience of being single and childless and is an active member of the Childless Collective (formerly Gateway Women) online community.

• Carol Scott (UK) is in her mid 60s and is a therapist with extensive experience working with those who are childless-not-by-choice. She is currently writing a book about becoming single after the end of a long relationship, with the working title of ‘Beyond Break Up’ which includes a chapter on being single and childless not by choice.

• Susan Dowrie (AUS) is in her early 60s and a long-time member of the Childless Collective (formerly Gateway Women) Online Community, as well as having hosted the Brisbane Gathering for members for several years. Susan describes herself as an ‘unapologetic Spinster’ and is single and childless due to not meeting the right man. She has recently sold her home of many years and is exploring solo van life on the road in Australia.

• Ruth Berkowitz (US) is in her mid-fifties and is a Holistic Well-being Coach for childless-not-by-choice people and an Insight Meditation Teacher. Within the Childless Collective (formerly Gateway Women) online community, Ruth hosts its Mispacha group for childless Jewish women.

1. Zweig, C. (2021). The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul. USA: Park Street Press, Vermont.

2. Allianz Insurance, (2016). ‘The Allianz Women Money and Power Study: Empowered and Underserved’

3. University of Sydney, (2020). ‘Why Single Older Women Without Children Face Economic Insecurity’.

4. Fay, S. (2022). ‘Is Singlism a Thing?’ Beyond Pathological [online publication]. May 28, 2022.

5. DePaulo, B. (2013). ‘This Is What It Costs to Be Single.’ Psychology Today. [online publication] January 14, 2013.