Coming of Age, Again

So, it’s 11:30PM again.  The only sounds in the house are the rustling of sheets, soft snores and the occasional crash of a bedtime story book being accidently kicked to the floor.  It’s finally my turn to go to bed. 

Sometimes in the calm quietness of these late nights I get distracted from my bedtime routine by the bright over-mirror light highlighting my facial imperfections in the mirror.  I just recently noticed my once smooth forehead now sports the most delicate parallel lines across it.  I raise my eyebrows up and down and watch them deepen and flatten, but not quite disappear. Dang it.

Once in a while I spend so much time inspecting my puckering face that when I lay down to go to sleep, I realize that I forgot to brush my teeth, and back to the bathroom I go.

It’s my birthday this week, the “cute” half of the thirties is firmly behind me, and I’m sliding face first into forty faster than I am prepared for.  Why does 36 seem young and 37 seem so, so old?

To accentuate my new found oldness, my daughter’s 4^th grade class recently got “the talk” from the school nurse.  She’s been fascinated with the idea of puberty since she first learned about the concept last year.  This milestone event at school has re-ignited her interest in the topic.  

Seeing my little girl grow into a little woman as I’m slowly pruning from the head down, feels a little bit like taunting at my new ripe old age.  Don’t be surprised if you see me splashing water from muddy puddles in the area on my face hoping to find that the fountain of youth is somewhere in the Meadowlands area. Bog water ought to be good for something!

Maybe waiting on full blown wrinkles is like waiting for boobs.  Looking for them consumes your time in front of the mirror, until they show up and it’s no big deal.

But in case it’s not like that, and wrinkles end up being a devastating occurrence, I decided to come up with some reasons turning 37 might be great anyway:

1. No more wasting time at the liquor store trying to find my ID in my suitcase of a purse.  I definitely don’t look “younger than 30” anymore.
2. What you see is what you get.  I’ve been waiting years to discover my perfect hair and fashion style, like my put-together friends who have chunky necklaces to match each blouse and blazer, but it appears that jeans and cardigan with slightly frizzy, needs to be dyed hair is my style.  It’s almost liberating.
   
3. Searching for those vampire (because you can’t see them in the mirror) wiry chin hairs will give me something to do while waiting in lines. 
   
4. Friends aren’t afraid to be real.  We’ve got nothing to prove anymore in the friend department.  If we lose one, we can always pull a kid off the bench to spend time with.
   
5. When the early twenty-something girls are dancing, singing, and acting wild at the bar you can shake your head & roll your eyes, but if you want to join them you can just say it’s “Mom’s Night Out”  and those behaviors become perfectly acceptable.
   
6. After years of falling asleep in make-up and not religiously wearing sunscreen.  My face is now a test dummy for every kind of cream, gel, and crème that come in tiny, expensive bottles and tubes in an attempt to try and reverse my bad habits before it’s too late. 
   
7. I get to be the old kindergarten mom as my fourth and last kid enters school “for real” this fall. I know nearly all the elementary school teachers, how the buses and lunch accounts work, and where the elementary art room is, which in the eyes of the “new” kindergarten mom makes me a god.  I’m pretty sure.
   
8. If we run out of lined paper, my first grader can practice his penmanship on my forehead.
   
9. And… with a little math, I’m finally a 10! (3+7=10) …Which will probably feel just as legitimate now, as it did when I was 28..ha!

 This coming of age, again, isn’t as exciting as the first time around, but the result will probably be the same... hopefully – a new found comfort in my own skin – Now with wrinkles and age spots!… and a rogue chin hair, here and there.

Going, Going, Gratitude

We all have to face the loss of a loved one at some point in our lives.  The hardest are the unexpected and tragic deaths, or those whose lives have ended too soon, but even when you know the time is near for someone, and you’ve accepted that their passing is the best outcome, the loss is still hard.

I got word that my grandma will only live for another week or two.  She has been on dialysis for the last few years and the process has slowly stolen her mind and body.  A recent injury and issues with dialysis have led my grandpa to what must be the hardest decision of his life, to stop her dialysis treatments.  Now, as her blood becomes more polluted, she will slip away to death, a process, the professionals say, will take anywhere from one to three weeks.

While the news wasn’t unexpected, it hit me harder than I thought it would.  I spent the weekend getting teary-eyed as thoughts and memories floated through my head.

I have so many wonderful memories of my beautiful grandma.  It’s selfish of me to not want her to go.  She doesn’t even really remember who we are anymore.  It’s only fair that her lovely soul be freed from her broken body.

But I don’t want to say good-bye, so instead, I’ll say “Thank You”.

My grandparents have always lived in St. Paul, where I grew up.  We spent a lot of time with them as kids and I thank my grandma for the carefree hours we spent rolling or sledding down the steep hill behind their house, or running through the sprinkler in our undies, as she and grandpa listened to the Twins on the radio.  I want to thank her for spending hours playing card games with us, as well as the occasional game of scrabble and dominoes.  And thank her for the sketch she drew of me diving off a diving board at swimming lessons in 1989, I still have it safely stored away.

I thank her for helping us “work” at grandpa’s auto parts store when we came to visit during the day, helping us up on the tall stools behind the counter to impress customers with our cuteness.  I want to thank her for her innocence and the laughs it brought – like the time when the internet was “new” and she was afraid to use our AOL dial-up because she was worried she might actually delete the internet.

And, thanks grandma for the weekend sleepovers complete with gram and gramps narrating a slide show of my mom and her siblings as they were growing up, we loved seeing the life size images projected on a screen in the kitchen. 

And thank you for the weekends when all the women in the family would gather at your house pre-holiday season to make homemade noodles that would become lasagna or ravioli for our giant holiday gatherings.  Grandma, mom and the aunts would knead and roll, while us kids would take turns turning the crank on the noodle maker, or carefully bringing freshly flattened dough to grandma’s big table to await it’s next turn through the noodle maker.  We’d get the left over noodle dough to cut into little animal shapes that grandma would cook up for lunch.

These everyday activities that have been cemented as memories in my mind, and stayed crystal clear all these years, are the result of the love and time she invested in us grandkids.

I will miss the delicate, graceful way she made her way though each day.  I’ll miss being embarrassed by the silly interactions between her and grandpa. So much of this has already been lost over the last few years.  What remains is the feel of her baby soft cheeks and that flowery grandma smell when you go in for an embrace, I will miss these the most. And the joy she would get of seeing any visitor, even if she didn’t know who the heck they were anymore.

I was fortunate in that I knew all grandparents and all but two of my great grandparents.  I lost my paternal grandma when I was about 4, I vaguely remember her, but rest of my grandparents, great grandparents and great aunts and uncles, even a couple great, great aunts hung around until I was middle school age.  Longevity is on both sides of my family with folks living until the late eighties, nineties, even my great grandma who lived to almost 104.  Which also means - I’ve been to a lot of funerals, but it’s been a while.  And this feels different.

Maybe my perspective has changed.  The loss of my grandma has conjured up a strange mix of sadness and relief.  Relief that her soul will be free of her aching body, but sadness for my grandpa, whose life will change dramatically without the partner who has been at his side for what seems like an eternity.  In time, the teary-eyed memories will hopefully just come with a smile, but until then -  I won’t say good bye, I’ll just offer my gratitude to the sweet woman who embraced the role of grandma, and will remain in my heart and mind as a wonderful example of grace and love.

  

Melting Down

It seems ironic that as everything outside is freezing up, I’m indoors melting down.  It happens every year about this time – the lack of sunlight, the weather keeping everyone indoors, the post-holiday dullness enhanced by the blah gray days that the calendar says will continue for a dozen more weeks.  It all gets a bit overwhelming.  

If I’m being completely honest, it’s overwhelming to the point of possible internal combustion, that point where human contact should be completely avoided because you can’t seem to say anything without the receiving end responding “Don’t get mad at me!” or “You don’t have to yell!”.

I’m not getting mad… I’ve gone mad. I’m not yelling, I can just no longer control the volume (or the tone) of my voice.  This is me, metaphorically hanging by a few fingers from a cliff while trying to nicely tell you to pick up your ever loving sh*t for the 100^th time. 

My cliff is not a rugged rock formation carved by wind and water over millions of years, but a wobbly mountain that has grown over the last 10 years out of missing gloves, dirty laundry, unfinished projects, work and other obligations – until it grew too tall to balance on, so now I’m hanging by the thread of some sweater/backpack/blanket/toy I was supposed to fix.

It’s a common misconception that our obligations weigh us down. In fact, I think they build us up. They create our identity and we take them on to grow into the person we think we should be, or what we think others want us to be.  And when it becomes overwhelming, we cling to them and the person we think we are, even when it hurts those around us…. Because.

Because we have to?

Because we don’t want to fail?
Because everyone else can handle all this, and sometimes more, so I should, too?

So I do, until a recent chilly winter day at the tail end of the kids Christmas vacation, I was struggling to get my work done so I can make it to the grocery store and back before dinner time. The kids were fighting and my list had gone missing… and when I’m finally – keys in hand – ready to leave, a condescending voice complains that I neglected to warm up the car AGAIN.  And that little thread I was hanging starts to unravel.

I remote started the truck as the cold winter walls and closed up windows of my home started creeping in, and wondered “why is it so effing hot in here!”  Looking for an escape, I “hid” sitting on the edge of the tub in the locked bathroom, silent, hot tears running down my face – meltdown eminent.

After a few minutes and deep breaths, I felt better –  grabbed some TP and cleaned up what was left of my eyeliner before emerging to a worried daughter that offered to spend part of her gift card to buy me some coffee at Starbucks, and a sweet hug from a 5 year old as he says “Love you Mama” in a way I never want to stop hearing. 

Their love and need strengthen me, enough – maybe, to swing my foot to the side of that cliff and catch my toe on the edge of a laundry basket giving me just enough leverage to push myself back up on to the top of the pile seconds before that thread gives way.

I don’t want help. 
I don’t need help. 

I just need perspective -  a way to level wobbly Mt. Obligation to make that helpless melt down feeling a little less likely.   A new way to look at not just my to-do list, but the season.

Nothing gives you more perspective than dangling from the edge of your sanity.  For the to do list -  my game plan is prioritizing the obligations in to what I MUST do, what I SHOULD do and, finally, what I MIGHT do, making that mountain into a series of rolling hills that are far less likely to drop me into a crazed oblivion.

Managing the season will be a little tougher.  I’ve never been a winter girl. I’d much rather trade the sleds and snowmobiles for blankets and books – but after a few days of not being out of the house, hibernation in your cozy home cave can start feeling a bit like being trapped in a cage.  I think my fix is to float some life rafts on to my calendar – a night out here, an activity there, an event or two to look forward too. 

 It’s bound to be harder than it sounds, but the result will be more of the me I want to be.  And… it’ll probably save me a bunch of money on TP and eyeliner.