I was recently at a dinner where someone asked who we each had our first crush on. I have to go way back to 1960 when I saw the Disney movie Pollyanna, which starred Haley Mills and earned her an honorary juvenile Oscar. Pollyanna was Disney’s adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel, directed by David Swift. Hayley Mills plays Pollyanna Whittier, an orphaned missionary’s daughter sent to live with her wealthy, rigid Aunt Polly (Jane Wyman) in the Vermont town of Harrington, around 1912. Aunt Polly effectively runs the place, and the town is gloomy under her thumb. Pollyanna brings the “Glad Game” her father taught her, which is about whatever happens, find something to be glad about. She charms the town’s sour cases, including the hypochondriac Mrs. Snow (Agnes Moorehead), the reclusive Mr. Pendergast (Adolphe Menjou), and the fire-and-brimstone Reverend Ford (Karl Malden). She points out to Ford that the Bible has hundreds of “happy texts,” and he softens his sermons. The town gradually comes alive, which leads to a rift with Aunt Polly over a charity bazaar. The emotional turn comes when Pollyanna falls from a tree sneaking home from the bazaar. She’s left unable to walk and loses her optimism. The townspeople she helped show up to return the favor, and Aunt Polly finally thaws. The film ends with Pollyanna headed for surgery and hope. The film helped make “Pollyanna” shorthand for relentless optimism. I am an eternal optimist, so obviously, the theme of the movie must have resonated with something deep inside of me, but I cannot deny that even at the young age of six or seven, there was something about Haley and her blonde hair and impish grin that appealed to me.
Haley’s next movie in 1961 was the original The Parent Trap. Like Pollyanna, David Swift wrote and directed it, and it’s based on Erich Kästner’s novel Lisa and Lottie. Mills plays both twins. Susan Evers was raised on a California ranch by her father Mitch (Brian Keith). Sharon McKendrick grew up in proper Boston society with her mother Maggie (Maureen O’Hara). The girls meet at a summer camp in Maine and start as bitter rivals, with escalating pranks that include a sabotaged dance and a dress cut to ribbons. The camp punishes them by isolating them together in a remote cabin. There they discover they share a birthday and each has half of the same torn photograph. They swap places so each can meet the parent she never knew. Sharon goes west as Susan and finds Mitch engaged to Vicky (Joanna Barnes), a gold-digger. To stop the wedding, the girls confess, which forces both parents back together in California. The twins then recreate their parents’ first date. On a family camping trip they torment Vicky with bugs, a bear cub, and a dunk in the lake, and she quits. Mitch and Maggie rediscover each other, and the family reunites. When I mentioned my first crush on Haley Mills, the group immediately referenced The Parent Trap and seemed largely unaware of Pollyanna.
Parenting is very much an underlying theme in my life for unsurprising reasons. My parents were divorced when I was about four and I was raised entirely by my professional working mother. Despite falling into the pattern of stumbling through several marriages before finding and ending up with my beloved Kim, I fathered three children and took my parenting responsibilities very seriously. I was determined NOT to be my father and wanted very much to be there for my kids (and believed I mostly was, though the truth probably lies somewhere between them and their therapists). One of the parenting lessons I learned from my mother was the importance of letting go and embodying a sense of independence in my children. That conflicts a bit with being a present parent, but not really if you think in terms of what’s best for the kids. It’s the parental obligation of every species to prepare their offspring for life and that means making them capable of independence. I am dogged about insisting that each of my three kids form their own nuclear families and not lean too heavily on ours as time marches on. That is distinctly different than the approach I see other parents taking at times, but I believe that is what serves the kids the best and I feel that I still get my share of time with them all as needed.
While we all know that parenting never really ends, it does take up less and less time with the passage of years. When we moved out here we were doing the exact opposite of what many people our age do. We were moving further away from the kids rather than closer to them. That had nothing to do with our choice, but it was the reality and I rationalized it as not so different than moving to Florida, which many others do in retirement. A discussed reason (certainly not the only one) for the move was that Kim and I are the youngest of our respective siblings and we felt that the older ones might need our help in the coming years. And here we are now, seven years later, and that reality is coming home to roost. Last year, Kim’s older brother, Jeff, died after a prolonged series of illnesses. That leaves three other siblings who range in age from 74 to 80 and who range from perfectly healthy to loosing a step. We are occasionally called on to assist in one form or another, but its clear that the real burdens of aging are falling on the kids.
Caring for aging parents has always been expected in the West, but its form has changed a lot. It moved from sacred duty, to contractual exchange, to legal obligation, to a mix of family care and state support. In antiquity, filial duty (the obligation children owe their parents) was both religious and legal. Athenian law allowed prosecution of children who failed to support their parents, and candidates for public office were examined on how they treated theirs. Rome built the duty into pietas, and Roman law recognized mutual support obligations between parents and children. The Hebrew commandment to honor father and mother, carried into Christianity, gave the duty moral weight for the next two millennia. In medieval and early modern Europe, care was often explicitly negotiated. English manor court records show aging peasants handing land to an heir or even a non-relative in exchange for written “maintenance agreements” specifying food, fuel, clothing and a room. Northwestern Europe also had an unusual family pattern: late marriage and separate households for young couples. So elderly parents often lived nearby rather than with their children, and leaned on community and church charity. England’s Poor Law of 1601 made adult children legally liable for supporting indigent parents. That “filial responsibility” principle crossed to the American colonies, and versions remain on the books in many U.S. states today. Through the 19th century, most American and European elderly lived with or near a grown child, usually as a household head rather than a dependent. The big break came in the 20th century. Pensions, Social Security (1935) and Medicare (1965) let older people live independently, and co-residence fell sharply. Sociologists called the new norm “intimacy at a distance.” Northern Europe shifted more care to the state, while Southern Europe stayed more family-centered. Today, family members, mostly daughters and daughters-in-law, still provide the bulk of eldercare, largely unpaid. Longer lifespans have created the “sandwich generation” caring for parents and children at once, and multigenerational households have been rising again since the 1980s, driven partly by housing costs.
I watch our nieces and nephews fretting over their parents (justifiably or not) and think to myself that I want none of that for my kids, whether they would be willing to assist or not. Kim and I talk about it regularly. Preparation, having a grip on reality, avoiding denial and choosing to stay independent is a priority in this household and will remain so. Am I being too Pollyannaish?