Month: July 2009

(just a random photograph of my farmer’s market zinnias)

Tomorrow, it’s August. And that means it is the month that I turn 35. I am not looking forward to this birthday at all. Hilary finally made me realize, last year, that birthdays are not, on the whole, happy occasions for me. That has historically had little to do with getting old, but this year that fun detail is thrown in the mix as well.

As I drove home from Providence today I was thinking that I just do not feel 35. I just don’t. I am simultaneously an old soul (many, many people have commented on that to me) and an arrested adolescent. I often look at my children and wonder when the real mother is going to show up. To, maybe, show me what to do too.

I was thinking there are a lot of ways that I’m still 18 and also a lot of ways that I’m ready to join the AARP. Not that many ways that I feel like – or act like – a 35 year old mother of two. Though it’s important to note that none of these behaviors or preferences are deliberate – this is just how I act and feel naturally. But still.

Signs I am an 18 year old in full-blown arrested development:

• I dress like a teenager: jeans, juicys, sneakers, logo tee shirts, ponytail
• I eat like a teenager: crap, crap, and more crap
• My music tastes tend towards the teenybopper: Taylor Swift, Britney, Jessica Simpson – and who doesn’t secretly think Miley’s The Climb is a moving anthem??
• I bite my fingernails down to the quick – professional that’s not
• I paint my toenails dark sparkly blue
• The pimples that just will not stop, even when they battle for real estate with wrinkles

Signs I am a senior citizen:

• I prefer the 5:30 dinner reservation to the 8:30 one (hello, cmoore!)
• I like to go to bed before 10
• I could – and often do – eat the same four things every single day
• I can’t stand too much noise, smell, or overstimulation of any kind
• 4pm is the new 5pm when it comes to an end-of-day glass of wine (or several)
• The deep wrinkles around my eyes

I wonder if my birthday goal this year, other than limiting my seemingly-out-of-thin-air bawling, should be to find a way to feel more 35. I wonder, too, if this is connected to my general discomfort in my skin, the persistent insecurity about who I am that manifests in a multitude of awkward and unappealing ways. I should try to find a way, I guess, to embrace my 35 year old self, to relax into her middle-aged body and enjoy the joys of right now. Easier said than done, sadly, but a worthy goal.

I haven’t been able to get Aidan’s thoughtful post yesterday about the ways memory holds and haunts us out of my head (I guess it is holding and haunting me).

What strikes me, though, as I run through my own most prized and cherished memories, is how often they are not from the Big Days but, in fact, from the most mundane, regular days. How the things I hold most dear are things that happened in the grout between the tiles of life’s big experiences. Often they are things, moments, people that I may not have even realized were as important as they are when they were happening.

I can think of times in my life, very few, where I have been utterly present and simultaneously aware that I’m living something that I will very soon wish I was back in. Mostly, though, it is after the fact that I realize how special or moving an experience was, and I wish I could have lived it more consciously and with more awareness.

In those few moments when I know I’m living something special, a line from Tintern Abbey always comes to mind: “in this moment there is life and food for future years.” You may mock me for brandishing good old Wordsworth, but that poem… wow, is it full of great lines. In fact it is an entire meditation on precisely this topic: what we remember, why, and how some memories can sustain us.

I also, often, find myself hearing over and over a single line from Colin Hay’s gorgeous song, Waiting for My Real Life to Begin: “Just be here now.” If only I could. I try, oh I try! And when I succeed … there are no words.

I suppose what I am saying is that the memories that I come back to, rubbing over in my mind like a hand worrying a smooth stone in my pocket, are sometimes from days and moments that look utterly unremarkable, unmemorable, on the surface. The memories are often triggered by surprising things: some songs, other songs, certain smells, the way light falls on leaves at certain times of day. If it is the quiet moments of mundane days that end up staying with me, that implies that every experience has the potential to become one of these touchstone memories. Which, in turn, reminds me (yet again) that I need to work harder at being present.