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.