I have become all that I ever feared:
old, and helpless, and without value in a society that believes in money, but not in Mothers.

Prate and preach about the sanctity of the hearth-fire and the home, and leave me no means to support either:
Snarl that I leech. Complain that I have nobody to blame but myself when there is no cash in coffer. Patronize when I go forth, children raised, into a world that wants thirty years of experience from a twenty-year old, Wants

the fifty-year-old to look twelve, Wants

all the experience in the world except for what you’ve paid decades of your life in learning.