Growing Older

Last year I turned forty. It shouldn't have been any big deal for me. In fact, I spent most of my youth wanting to be older than I already was. Adulthood meant that I would be able to leave crooked teeth (and the vast array of embarrassing orthodontic devices meant to correct the problem) behind, that I might actually grow taller and develop a figure (that only sort of happened, on both counts), and that somehow, someday, I might actually get to make my own decisions and be taken seriously.

That or reading the Beloit College Mindset List.

So believe me, I was as surprised as my poor husband was when, a few weeks shy of the fateful day, I burst into tears over the idea of turning forty. It had come out of nowhere. What did I have to cry about? By almost every measure, my life was exactly where I wanted it to be. I have a happy marriage, and a nice (though perpetually messy and in-need-of-repair) house in a good neighborhood. My boys are reasonably well behaved and do well in school. I have work that I enjoy doing, even if the amount of it that I get qualifies it more as a hobby than an actual career. Of course, last year I was still massively overcommitted to volunteering, but even then I knew it wasn't going to last forever.

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in my subconscious. I had actually left all the awkwardness of youth behind me. Adolescence was a hell I would never need to return to. I could fondly reflect on the days when my husband and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment filled with a collection of hand-me-down furniture that looked like it had been picked at random from the nearest Goodwill and know that all the inconveniences of sharing one coin-operated washer and dryer with the residents of five other apartments were behind me. I could even look back on my days of early motherhood and laugh indulgently at the young woman who thought it would be a good idea to re-read The Feminine Mystique while eyeball-deep in postpartum hormones, and who lugged around a diaper bag full of enough supplies to get Son #1 and me through the first week of a natural disaster in comfort. (For the record it is a horrible idea to re-read The Feminine Mystique when you have a newborn, unless you like sitting in a rocking chair clutching your baby and sobbing hysterically. And overloaded diaper bags are a good way to mess up your back and lose your favorite baby outfits because they get buried in the bottom of the bag.) So why the tears?

I think the first part was due to a quirk of timing in my life that yields much-deserved karmic lessons on a regular basis. You see, my mom had me when she was twenty-seven. I had Son #1 when I was two weeks shy of turning twenty-eight. So now when I look back on my childhood and think of how I viewed my mother at whatever age Son #1 happens to be at the moment, I am struck with the inescapable fact that he is probably seeing me the exact same way I saw my mom at the same time of life. When he was in early elementary school, this view was mostly pretty good. To my elementary-school self, my mom seemed both old and ageless. She was capable of anything in my eyes, and was always there when I needed her. And she always knew when I was trying to pull one over on her. I could tell by the confidence with which Son #1 expected me to be able to solve his problems that he saw me the same way, though on the inside I felt not terribly organized, just one step ahead of his needs. Hell, there were even days I felt as though I were the babysitter, and wondered what moron had decided to leave me in charge. And I discovered that the secret of my mother's seeming omniscience was that kids are really, really, really bad liars.

That started to change when Son #1 hit adolescence. It's obvious to him now that I don't know everything--all he has to do is ask for help with his math homework in order to find my Achilles heel. I am regularly treated to eye rolls and exasperated sighs, and as often as I am taken for granted as a source of solutions (i.e., clearing my calendar on a day's notice to help chaperone a middle-school hike) I am also taken as an impediment to the life he would like to be leading (how desperately unfair that I will not let him play the Xbox until his eyeballs bleed). I wonder if I am going to be paid back in kind for each eye roll and exasperated sigh I directed my mother's way, because if so I've got a long row to hoe yet. And is he looking at me with the same unsympathetic adolescent eye I turned to my mother, when she gazed in disappointment in the mirror? I'm sorry, Mom. Now I get it. I'm not sure where my crow's feet came from, or the cellulite on my butt. And why the hell am I still getting zits? I bet you were thinking much the same kind of thing back in the day--little did I know at the time that my day would come.

The other part was a far more sobering realization. It's that I have hit the point in life where I have to acknowledge that not everything is truly possible any more. Some options I don't care about now and never did--I never wanted to be an athlete (of any kind), and my efforts at exercise are just about evicting the aforementioned cellulite and keeping myself healthy. As fascinating as I find science, I know I don't have the math chops to be anything more than an interested observer. I'm too claustrophobic to go deep-sea diving and too prone to motion-sickness to ever go up in space. But some realizations are more painful. I know that taking thirteen years (and counting) out of the regular work force means that I will most likely never have a high-powered career of any kind, and there are times I feel like I let my own potential down by opting out. Despite my best intentions, I gave up writing for about eighteen years, and I'm not getting that time back. I will never have a daughter. As much as I used to enjoy the adventure of moving to a new place, I will most likely never live anywhere other than Los Angeles again. In other words, the life I have now is pretty much it.

It's not that I'm sorry to have the life I do (see paragraph two, above). In the grand scheme of things, I know how lucky I am, and how much of the good things in life I have in abundance. But now I think I get why people have mid-life crises. If I had looked around and been truly unhappy with what I saw, I might have felt desperate to start changing that right now. Instead I shed a few tears over the dreams that will stay dreams forever and moved on. The plans I make now will have to stick a little closer to reality, and that's okay. And if Son #1 is looking at me and thinking that I'm hopeless--well, someday he's probably going to have a teenage son who rolls his eyes over his receding hairline and horrible taste in music.

Some Random Thoughts on Being a Mom

[This was not what I intended to write about next, and it is a bit off topic for what I mostly intended my blog to be about. Still, I've been thinking about it enough that I wanted to write about it to get it off of my mind.]

As I recently cruised around the internet, reading this and that, I found a piece someone had written about women who hated being moms, which cited examples from various sites that the author had Googled using the phrase "I hate being a mom." Of course I had to go check it out for myself, since I'm just as much of a rubbernecker as the next person. But I didn't have the heart to read more than a tiny sample of the results--it just made me kind of sad.

Parenthood is hard, and I'd even be willing to go out on a limb and say the kind of stay-at-home parenthood traditionally associated with moms is particularly hard. Kids themselves are demanding, and as soon as you master one phase of development they change on you. I also found that a kind of anti-glamour descended over me when I became a stay-at-home mom (not that I was ever glamorous to begin with)--I could be in a perfectly kid-free situation, not obviously in my role as a mom, but once someone found out that I was a stay-at-home mom, it was as if some mysterious enervating ray sucked out their ability to treat me as a human being. I'd either get the politely glazing-over stare of the person devoting their mental energy to the quickest escape route out of our conversation, or I'd get the overeager condescension of the person treating me as if I were some sort of domestic saint for giving it all up to nurture a child. Meh.

For the record, my decision to be a stay-at-home mom was mostly based on economics and control-freakhood. When I got pregnant with Son #1, I crunched the numbers and figured out that most of my take-home pay would be required to hire a nanny (and other child-care options were, if memory serves, not easy to find where we were living at the time). I also knew that, of necessity, I would be the parent who would be taking off of work to go to routine doctor appointments or to stay home when the baby was sick, since my husband worked across the bay in a far more demanding job than mine. So my circumstances involved a choice, if not a fabulous one--stay at home with the baby and give up work, or try to do both and most likely feel like I wasn't doing a great job at either. More than once since then I've been grateful that I had a choice at all, since I know many moms who have to "do it all," whether they feel like they're "having it all" or not.

I like being a mom, even if I don't like all the parts of it. I'd advise anyone who wants to try it to develop a sense of humor and some thick skin--there is almost no way to get through having your child throw up on the bed you just changed (and the last set of clean sheets in the house) without laughing about it. It also helps to not take it personally. Just as your child didn't intentionally get stomach flu to keep you up at night, much of what they do that annoys you isn't done just to drive you crazy. 

You also have to accept that no matter what you do as a mom, someone is going to think you're wrong. At times it will be your kid, who thinks your "no ice cream before dinner" policy is tyranny, or your husband, who thinks you're too picky because you refuse to let the kids go bath-less three days running in the summer, or your mother-in-law (or maybe your mom), who drops broad hints that maybe your kid is spoiled because you let him have so many toys. It will definitely be the person behind you in line at Target, no matter whether you give in to your kid's temper tantrum over a pack of gum to shut him up or you tough it out over his 75-decibel wails. To take an example from my own life, I know that as soon as my  boys' hair gets long enough for my mother-in-law to think it is cute, my own father will start muttering about how they look like "damn hippies." Again, this is an area in which a sense of humor will really come in handy. 

The part I like the best, however, is going to sound a bit weird, especially given my aforementioned control-freakhood. That is that ultimately, I am not in complete control. I didn't get to decide who my kids are, and their personalities and their actions are often still a surprise to me. Son #1 can dive into a book and read for hours; he likes to write little fan-fiction scripts featuring himself and his friends in whatever game or book is his current favorite. Son #2 has a more artistic bent, which mainly expresses itself in building things out of paper and tape. I got him to finish his mission report in school last year by promising him that he could build a model of the mission after he finished. (Son #1 wouldn't have built a model of his mission if I had threatened him with the loss of his beloved Xbox.) And Son #3 is both charming and confident--he dismissed me on his second day of camp this week as soon as I dropped him off because he wanted to go run and play with the other kids, rather than having me lurking around cramping his style. To learn to be mom to three boys who have as many differences as similarities, I had to learn and grow myself.

But honestly, I don't believe motherhood is for everyone. (Obviously not, if the internet is exploding with testimonials from women who hate motherhood.) And I guess I'm a little horrified at the idea that there are all these moms posting often barely-literate wishes that their children would disappear or hadn't been born. My kids didn't ask me to have them, and if I didn't know what I was getting into (I didn't, even though I thought I did), it wasn't their fault. I guess all I can say without getting judgmental is if you don't have kids and think you don't want to--then DON'T. If you already have kids and aren't happy that you do--then I hope you try to do something about it more constructive than griping about it on the internet.

[To both of my regular readers, thanks for your patience. I'll be back to amusing anecdotes about my domestic disorganization in the next post, I promise.]