Aside from the discordance of following up a post about childfree people with the comparator of "the most bitter, unlikeable, miserably lonely person in the world," I want to note that this is also an issue for adults who are childless.
Collectively, childfree and childless people are a huge and growing cohort, and yes, the way things are going, we're looking at trouble down the track. But as with many other messages society doesn't want to hear, disabled people have been making this point for years, because the problems most people only imagine happening to them at an advanced age are with us already.
I say that as a single, childless, middle-aged and multiply disabled person with no siblings, and few relatives I'm either personally or geographically close to - indeed, increasingly few relatives, period. People think, "my partner and I will look after each other," but as someone whose long-term relationship has ended in middle age because of abuse, I have to break the news that you cannot rely on that. I wasn't supposed to die alone (given my health issues, I assumed I'd likely predecease my ex by a significant margin), yet I have to take the possibility seriously when planning for my future.
This is a conversation that is gaining traction lately, not least because plenty of people in their 30s are already doing elder-care (as I was just beginning to at the close of my 30s), since a good many millennials (and in the 40-something cohort, not a few Xennials and younger Gen Xers) have older parents. As a kid I felt unusual among my peers; now I don't. And I'm watching much of that care, as expected, fall to women and AFAB people who are themselves disabled, and who are either single or not living with their partners.
We're a generation straining not between the needs of parents and children, but between parents and our own disabilities. Often, there just is not enough time and energy to accommodate even one of those properly, and often, we haven't been able to work enough, or lucratively enough, to build up financial security for ourselves.
I am luckier than some of my friends in that respect, but I'm still worried by questions like, "If I accept financial support from a parent, am I diminishing a reserve they will need to buy in care when it gets to the point that I can't care for them? And when my needs equal theirs, but I'm on my own, who's going to help me with all the stuff I help my parent with now?"
It's one of the many reasons that supporting a disabled elderly parent (or, as often happens, two of them) in your 30s/40s and beyond for a single disabled person can be unsettling. You're not just constantly worried about this person you love, about if they have everything they need, about how much you can be there for them, and about losing them one day; you're seeing a preview of your own later years, but whether you chose to be childless or not, there is no child in the picture supporting you.
As a disabled person, you've often tangled with the benefits system and the health and social care system and its cruelties multiple times over: on your own behalf, when supporting newly disabled friends, and now for your parent, who (hopefully, but sometimes not at all) once supported you through that process.
And yes, all of this is going through the minds of a lot of your disabled friends who don't have partners or children, but do have ageing parents.
So please, cut us some slack if you're finding our emotions about these topics hard to understand. It doesn't mean we don't love our elderly parents. We're just living with a daily background terror as we watch the social safety net get cut from under all of us by right-wing politicians and the public who keep voting them in, against their own interests.
