Opinion: Why ‘Old Dads’ made me so mad

Editor’s Note: Amy Klein is the author of “The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment Without Losing Your Mind,” and is working on a book about older motherhood. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

When I first saw the trailer for comedian Bill Burr’s new feature film, “Old Dads,”  which premieres this week on Netflix, I got mad.

Great, another pop culture piece focusing on men, I thought, when it’s the women doing all the hard work.

I wasn’t excited to watch a film focusing on three older dads — played by Burr, Bobby Cannavale and Bokeem Woodbine — who clash with the younger parents in an overly politically correct West Coast private school.

The film was a Burr “get off my lawn” type of comedy purportedly about a Gen-Xer’s take on the absurdities of the progressive younger generation in their parenting and the workplace; instead it felt more like a boomer screed. And it also felt like a lost opportunity. Couldn’t a film about old dads also have included some older moms?

Look, being an older dad is not a new story: Men have been doing it since the dawn of time. The biblical Abraham was 100 years old when he had Isaac. More recently, Robert De Niro was 79 when he announced the birth of his seventh child. Al Pacino was 83 when he had his fourth. Talk about “The Godfather”….

Our culture is long overdue for some real-talk storytelling about older moms, because we’re the true heroes of any story about older parenting. We older moms are the only demographic increasing fertility: From 1990 to 2019, the number of women ages 40 to 44 giving birth more than doubled, and women 35 to 39 saw a 67% increase, according to the United States Census Bureau. (Women in age groups under 30 also showed a startling decrease in that time period.)

Like many older moms, it wasn’t exactly my first choice to become a parent later in life: I only met my future husband at 39, and we didn’t get married until I was 41. I got pregnant right away — and if I hadn’t kept miscarrying for the next three years, I still would have been an older mom, just not quite as old as I was when I birthed our daughter at age 44.

Living in New York City, I didn’t feel old being a first-time mom in my 40s — but that’s because my sister and best friends also had babies at the same time (fine, they were approaching 40 and I was well past it, but still.) It’s true that some people called me “Grandma” — an unfortunate rite of passage for all us over-40 moms, especially those not living in big, coastal cities. But I just laughed it off.

What I can’t laugh at is that we older mothers get so much aggravation for having children later in life. “Should we be sympathetic to a 42-year-old’s fertility struggles?” That’s how a writer came at me on a parenting website when I started to share my IVF journey in a weekly column ten years ago. Commenters weren’t kind either, writing things like, “Your [sic] old and dried up,” one woman wrote. “Amy’s journey seems to be all about herself and her needs,” another opined about my wanting to be a mother.

That’s because the narrative about older moms is that we’re selfish.  Not that we haven’t found a partner, or we’re trying to get out of debt to afford a child or we are having trouble getting pregnant. (Forget the fact that, according to some studies, sperm counts are declining.)

But older dads — no matter if they’re octogenarians — are rarely called selfish or “dried up.” In “Old Dads,” Burr’s character Jack doesn’t get grief for being old. “I always wanted to be a dad,” he narrates at the beginning of the film, noting that it took him 46 years to get there. (In real life, Burr was 49 and 52 when he had his daughter and son.) If anyone asks Jack why it took him so long, he says, “I tell them to F@#$ off.”

Rarely can a woman tell the world to go jump in the proverbial lake. As the “Barbie” movie has shown us, women usually have to apologize for our very existence (and in America Ferrera’s memorable monologue about the challenges and misogynist traps women face, she did not even begin to discuss older moms.) When people call us selfish, or career-oriented (as if we shouldn’t be working?) or blame us for our own infertility (!), we women just have to shoulder it.

We don’t have the luxury like the men in “Old Dads,” such as Jack, who says he married late because, “I just hadn’t met the right woman yet.” That’s because it’s okay for men to be picky in finding a partner or to focus on their careers or in fact be selfish (it’s called “ambition” for men). His wife in the film (played by Katie Aselton) believes he married late because “he had an unhappy childhood.”

Hey, I had an unhappy childhood! Raised in a home with traditional gender norms before my parents ultimately divorced, I wasn’t eager to take on the labor of motherhood — birthing, raising and loving kids, not to mention cooking, cleaning and planning for them, too. Like Jack, I also was a late bloomer, but as he says, “I’m not going to whine about it.”

Truthfully, I don’t have much reason to whine about being an older mother. I love it.

I’m grateful I had my 30s to make the mistakes in dating to not have to settle; I kissed enough frogs before I met my love, an equal partner who does his share of the childcare, work and housework. (Like Burr, my husband was 49 when we had our daughter, but he looks half his age, and acts like it, too.)

I’m lucky that I had time to work out my issues so I don’t have to burden my kids with unresolved psychological scars. And unlike many women who have children in their 20s and early 30s, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything: We older moms have had more time for travel, for climbing the corporate ladder (or whatever ladder we’re on). We have invested in ourselves, and

are now more than ready to devote ourselves to our children and families.

The main problem with being an older mom — or older parent — is that we’ll have less time to be with our children. But nothing is ever guaranteed; my best friend, a mom of two, died at 42, so you never know. The topics of aging and death aren’t addressed in “Old Dads,” which ends with the old guys being forced to change with the changing times.

This one movie doesn’t bear the responsibility for addressing all the shortcomings of how we talk about older parenting, but I wish it addressed the lessons we older moms (and dads, my husband wanted me to add) can teach the younger generation: most importantly, to not take parenting (or ourselves) too seriously, that our children will probably be okay (look at how little parenting we Gen Xers got!) and that life and parenting are precious, no matter how old you are.

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