AARP - Segunda Juventud - Hispanic Women and Worry

What, Me Worry?
Julia Alvarez: The author of In the Time of the Butterflies is a worrier. Why? Alvarez, who at 56 is launching her newest book, Saving the World, shares some ideas below.

By Julia Alvarez
April/May 2006

An expert talks about why women worry

what worries you

“Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo,” Mami used to say to her teen daughters when we wanted to do something the American way.

Mami’s advice might have worked back in the Dominican Republic, but we girls had to make our way in a new world she knew nothing about. So, we would defy her. And she’d march out her diablo, offering further proof—her Catholicism, her belief in a devil!—that she could no longer be a model for us.

My three sisters and I were the generation who crossed over—not just from a physical birth country to the United States of America, but from earlier, traditional gender roles to a new self-reliance and freedom. The crossing was stormy. (We did not call it the United Mistakes of America for nothing!)

I look longingly over my shoulder at the old-country way of taking care of its viejitos, entre familia, con respeto y mucho cariño

We had to reinvent ourselves to survive here, place limits on family demands, divorce when marriages didn’t work out, and pursue careers to take care of ourselves, which meant having fewer children or none at all. Freedom from old restraints let us realize the American Dream our parents both wanted and warned us about.

Now the choices we sisters made that freed us in our middle years are coming home to roost. The strides we made toward independence and autonomy, the years will take back. We will grow old and fragile and dependent, and the old-world network will not be available to us. As my prima used to say when my sisters and I would boast of some advantage in our freed-up American lives, “Tick-tock.”

I look longingly over my shoulder at the old-country way of taking care of its viejitos, entre familia, con respeto y mucho cariño. My own parents, after 42 years in this country, went back “home” in their old age. Home, where relatives and friends drop by daily. Where they can live comfortably on their American savings. Where the doctor—undoubtedly a nephew or a friend of a friend—will drop by to see them sin ningún inconveniente. Where they have the solace of religion and the context of a surrounding family narrative to take the sting out of death.

That will not be my old age. I know it, and I worry—more than my Anglo friends, who don’t have this kinder, more empowered way of aging to compare to our American way.

I suspect my generation will again be creative in solving challenges in years to come

What, specifically, am I worried about? Not that I’m losing my looks. I worry that I will be alone. The statistics say we still outlast our husbands. I have no children, but if I did, they, like my nieces and nephews, would be living far away, busy with careers, focused on their nuclear families. If my resources run out, I will lose the only way to wield respect and care in a society that operates on money. I’ll spend my last days among strangers, missing ese calor familiar, relations who love me, whose stories are part of my story just as their chins and noses and eyes are fresher recastings of my own faded features. And through all this I won’t have mi fe en Papá Dios—who’s older than el diablo—to comfort me.

And so again, we women of my crossing-over generation must reinvent ourselves in this new life stage. What will it mean to be an “American senior citizen” whose roots are in an older world but who will grow old and die in this new one?

I suspect my generation will again be creative in solving challenges in years to come. At a gathering of all my sisters last Thanksgiving, one of them looked out at our 10 Vermont acres and asked about building three little guest houses for our old age. My husband’s jaw dropped; my own heart quickened with interest.

And so, I feel a measure of excitement about this new adventure of growing older. But yes, I admit, also a lot of worry. As my parents and tías and tíos die, the old world I always thought I could go back to is gone forever.

Now, con los años que no perdonan a nadie (as Mami used to say), I know what that old devil knew: that with the years, my sisters and I would arrive in the U.S.A. in a permanent way.

Tick-tock. That day is here.

Read our expert's exclusive thoughts on why women worry.

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