Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40

by Vicki Breitbart (Editor), Nan Bauer-Maglin (Editor)

Overview

**AS SEEN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, BITCH MAGAZINE, THE LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, LIT HUB, AND MORE**

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, poems, and creative nonfiction, more than twenty-nine writers offer witty and incisive insight into the unique experience of being or having an older parent in today's world.

By turns raw, funny, tender, and wise, these stories reshape our understanding of the social factors that impact later parenthood, honor the strength and resilience required to overcome countless challenges posed in healthcare and adoption settings, and relish in the many joys of a parent-child relationship, no matter what age. Writers, child development experts, and older parents themselves Vicki Breitbart and Nan Bauer-Maglin have curated a collection that truly affirms and destigmatizes the act of becoming a parent over 40, whether by choice or by chance.

Contributors include New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo; award-winning author Adam Berlin; writer and editor Laura Broadwell; author and editor Salma Abdelnour Gilman; professor and institute director Elizabeth Gregory; podcast producer and host Barbara Herel; author and research scholar Elline Lipkin; retired journalist Linda Wright Moore; founder and executive director of The Democracy Center Jim Shultz; and more.

Tick Tock is a document, a community, a manual, a help line, a chorus of voices expressing the gamut of complicated emotions that accompany a person of a certain age contemplating the leap into parenthood. I wish this important book existed when I was at that crossroads, and am grateful for it today. —Michelle Tea, Against Memoir

Tick Tock reads like a wide-ranging chat with friends who ask 'What’s your story?' These are human, lived tales that describe life-changing and interconnected issues—political, social, and personal. What a gift. —Judy Norsigian and Jane Pincus, Our Bodies, Ourselves

Tick Tock is an exquisite, understanding, and inclusive examination of the unique challenges and joys faced by older parents. An unforgettable book—undeniably important and a pleasure to read. —Beverly Gologorsky, Can You See the Wind?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948340458
Publisher:	DOTTIR PR
Publication date:	10/19/2021
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Vicki Breitbart holds an MSW from NYU, an MS from Bank Street, and an EdD from Teachers College, and has been a writer and educator for more than forty years. Throughout her career, she has worked extensively with young children, parents, and other educators. She is the author of The Day Care Book and Open for Children, as well as numerous academic articles on women's issues, and the producer of documentaries Sugar and Spice and Open for Children. She is the parent to a 43-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter, who she adopted when she was 53.

Nan Bauer-Maglin worked at City Universityof New York for almost forty years as a professor and administrator. She is the editor of Widows' Words: Women Write on the Experience of Grief, the First Year, the Long Haul, and Everything in Between. She is the editor of Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women Talk about the End of (Mostly) Long-term Relationships and the coeditor of Women and Stepfamilies: Voices of Anger and Love; “Bad Girls/Good Girls”: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties; Women Confronting Retirement: A Nontraditional Guide; and Final Acts: Death, Dying and the Choices We Make. In 1977, she adopted a baby when she was 35 (which was considered old then).

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I. Why Did It Take So Long?

• We Can Wait, But Are We Paying Too High a Price? by Salma Abdelnour Gilman
• Out of the Closet and Out of Time by Laura Davis
• OTM (Old, Tired Mommy): Not What I Planned by Linda Wright Moore

PART II. Pregnancy and Birth After 40

• My Road Trip to Fertility by Martine Guay
• Old Mom by Sarah Dougher
• The Terrible Math by Elline Lipkin
• Mourning the Loss of Fertility by Linda Corman
• A Phantasmagoria of Pregnancy and Birth beyond Forty by Julia Henderson
• Giving Birth after Fifty by Phyllis Cox

PART III. Does Age Matter If I Adopt?

• Growing Roots by Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser
• “La Llapa”: A Father Again at Forty-Five by Jim Shultz
• States of Mind by Judith Ugelow Blak
• 25% Pure Gold by Barbara Herel
• Too Old for Cartwheels: Reflections from an At-Risk Family by Julie Buckner Armstrong
• From Grief to Joy by Vicki Breitbart
• Twins? Are You Crazy? by Pamela Pitman Brown
• Life in Balance by Laura Broadwell

PART IV. Parenting After Forty

• Never Too Old to Be a Father—Again by Robert Bence
• “Who Is That?” Becoming a Bonus Mom at Age 45 by Paige Averett
• Old Life, New Life, and Parenting in the In-Between by Erik Malewski
• My Grandmother, My Mother, Myself, and My Son by Jean Y. Leung
• His Old Man by Adam Berlin
• If I Don’t Laugh, I’ll Cry by Elizabeth Newman
• What Is Hard? by Catherine Arnst
• Being All the Things by Katherine C. Rand
• Better Late Than Never by Daniel E. Hood
• Two Poems by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Opening Up by Oliver Ardill-Young

PART V. Building Community and Changing the Narrative

• Finding Our Way Together by Sara Elinoff Acker
• The Single, Most Important Community by Alia R. Tyner-Mullings
• Reparation by Susan Ardill
• Late-Onset Motherhood: Many Stories, One Radical Plot Change by Elizabeth Gregory

Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Engaging, thoughtful, and provocative. —LA Review of Books

For anyone considering parenthood at a later age, scholars Vicki Breitbart and Nan Bauer-Maglin have put together an expansive collection of stories from 30 writers on the beauty and difficulty of being a 40-plus parent. —Bitch magazine

Tick Tock reads like a wide-ranging chat with friends who ask 'What’s your story?' These are human, lived tales that describe life-changing and interconnected issues—political, social, and personal. What a gift. —JUDY NORSIGIAN and JANE PINCUS, OUR BODIES OURSELVES

Tick Tock is a document, a community, a manual, a help line, a chorus of voices expressing the gamut of complicated emotions that accompany a person of a certain age contemplating the leap into parenthood. I wish this important book existed when I was at that crossroads, and am grateful for it today. —MICHELLE TEA, AGAINST MEMOIR

Tick Tock challenges readers to rethink what parenting means in this time in America from a wide variety of vantage points and through voices that are, in all their great diversity, eloquent, sharp, and deeply engaging...Brilliantly framed and beautifully written. —ROSALIND PETCHESKY, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science, Hunter College & the Graduate Center, City Universityof New York

Honest, personal, and often downright funny, these brave parents provide insight, solidarity, and hope for any over 40 who are ready to love a child…and laugh and cry and wonder upon the universe every day for the rest of their lives. May it always be so. —JESS P. SHATKIN, professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Pediatrics, NYU School of Medicine

As an over-40 mother myself, I appreciate how this groundbreaking collection marks momentous changes in gender roles, child-rearing patterns, and family composition. —JOYCE ANTLER, Professor Emerita of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis Universityand author of YOU NEVER CALL! YOU NEVER WRITE! A HISTORY OF THE JEWISH MOTHER

Tick Tock is an exquisite, understanding, and inclusive examination of the unique challenges and joys faced by older parents. An unforgettable book—undeniably important and a pleasure to read. —BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY, CAN YOU SEE THE WIND?

Brave, honest and moving...most important are the truths, both personal and political, that will resonate, no matter your age or parental status. —MARLENE FRIED, faculty director of Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP)

From the Publisher