TOO OLD TO BE A MOM?

Just this morning, I did the thing experienced mothers aren’t supposed to do.  I lost it on my daughter. She’s 11 and I’m 52.  That makes me the adult.  In fact, last year I was the oldest living mother in elementary school.  I should be a total ball of zen-nicity.  Yet suddenly I was going all Linda Blair after a morning of protracted nagging.  Perhaps this rings a bell?  “Hurry up – get dressed – brush your teeth, your hair, your tongue- shoes on- backpacks packed...move faster. Go!”  You’ve been there.  No expanded vocabulary required, just sixth grade level word retrieval.  And yet opening a can of whoop ass can feel satisfying sometimes.  Like binge eating foods dipped in Marshmallow Fluff.

 

Wasn’t it supposed to be a blissful experience entering mother hood again at 40?  Wasn’t I supposed to have more patience and understanding about “the long haul” and “how fast it all goes” with my twins? And yet here I am, shrieking as my hormones retreat, as snappish and churlish as one of those cringe-worthy reality show teen moms prevented from a night of clubbing by their colicky unwanted off-spring.

 

OK, maybe it’s not quite like that with me.  That was a tad dramatic.  But as I swam my laps this morning trying to re-balance, I wondered idly if I really was too old to have kids this young?  Was biology nature’s way of saying,  “you won’t have the energy for this in a few years?”   And yet how many of us are successful at making life fall in line with the perfect time to marry, procreate or change careers?  Is there ever a perfect time?  

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

I smile gently at the young women who emphatically tell me when they want to marry and how many kids they will have.  I long ago learned that we don’t write that script.  The friend with the repeated miscarriages knows that, the couple that can’t conceive, the mother who loses her son to a brain tumor, the wife whose husband up and leaves.  The greatest part of life is our ability to dream big, but most of us are unprepared when things go awry or when dreams don’t come true.  

 

When our first attempt to become parents at age 31 resulted in our son, my husband got on the bus to fatherhood with extreme speed.  He was thrilled and so was I, but then again I knew it wouldn’t change his life in nearly the same way that it would change mine.  But when our children didn’t come in the intervals we planned, when there was a loss and then a dry patch and then some sorrow, we were blindsided when the bad thing happened to us.  And why shouldn’t it have?  What made us any different from the family down the street?  It’s not human nature to always feel so generous, though.  The fickle finger of fate and the Ouija board are supposed to land somewhere else for the hard stuff. 

 

When my twins were born at age 40, our “Team B” as my husband calls them, I resolved to work less and Mom more.  I would be the chilled out mother I never quite got to be the first time around with the older two because I had been so concerned with trying to balance it all.  And while it didn’t exactly happen that way when the girls were born, (chilled isn’t an adjective normally associated with Moms of multiples) I learned to relax into my choices, to stop trying to mute the working part in front of my stay at home friends or dial down the mother part in other facets of my life.  I learned to accept that I am a person who likes her sack stuffed really full.  What other reason could there possibly be for continuing to stuff more in it?  Saying “yes” mostly felt better.

 

 

There is no question that as an older mother I have more patience than the 31-year old I once was who never thought she’d be spontaneous again.   A six-year gap between Team A and Team B equipt me with a fish eye lens.  I don’t sweat the small stuff and I do try to cherish the ride a bit more.  On my second chance, I didn’t want to talk about mucus and home made baby food, I wanted to discuss my middle-agedness, my politics, the struggles of aging parents and husband’s snoring.  I was never great at board games or watching Dora videos with my older kids and this time around I didn’t feel the need to pretend. I am no longer half-way apologetic or conflicted about working when I’m focusing on being a Mom.  I regularly absorb the whiff of envy from friends when I spend a night away in a nice hotel with room service and first-run movies.  I’m proud of my ability to earn my own wage at a career I love, even as I miss a few soccer games and a basketball tournament or two.

 

Motherhood is a selfless business.  And like so many parts of being an adult, there are repetitive parts, as same-old as emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry.  No wonder we grumble or watch our heads spin at times like a bobble-head on a dashboard.  No wonder we lose our tempers.  We all do. There are some who will swear that the right time to have children is when you are younger and full of energy. But in my 20’s I would have been too selfish, less patient, yearning to accomplish things yet un-named.  I would have resented the recalcitrant child, the ungrateful eye roll or lip curl that soaks through their very being because that’s precisely what they are programmed to do.  Anna Quindlen, one of my all-time favorite writers, says that “sometimes taking care of children full-time feels like a cross between a carnival ride and penal servitude.” Do any right-minded adults really enjoy a two-hour marathon of Candy Land or repeated rounds of Lego towers?  Be honest. 

 

Still, I wouldn’t trade this for anything, even as my friends with their newly childless homes are crowing about their lack of schedules and the fabulous sex they are re-discovering with their husband (yes, their husbands!).  I’m still packing lunches and right now boys are still just something to giggle about behind cupped hands.   I know that’s about to change.  We’ve just had our first discussion about shaving legs and puberty lurks in the bathroom corners.  I can smell it like basement mold.  Most days, the can of whoop-ass aside, I feel incredibly lucky to be experiencing this second wave of motherhood.  The first chapter feels like a temp job in retrospect. Time wrinkles and buckles, telescoping as the calendar flips ever forward.  

 

 

There will only be a short time left when they will ask me to crawl in bed and cuddle, a limited time they’ll still believe I might have something important to contribute in the way of advice.  But they’ll be back. Yes, they’ll come crawling back someday on their bellies as I did when I had children of my own.  I take comfort in that.  It’s already happening with my older two, the slow subtle gravitational pull of interest in what perspective their father and I might have to offer.

 

I’ll be 60 when the younger two go off to college.  And Lord, that used to sound ancient.  Now I can picture myself like one of those old Euell Gibbons ads for Grape Nuts as he leaps around the outdoors, brown as a berry.  I may be gnarled and gnarly, but I’ll be at graduation day standing as proud as the 40 something parents.  That will be me, the one doing the Bronx cheer.  I’ll be celebrating and mourning in equal parts, not only for the days to come, but for the unsung ones that have flown by.

BIRTHING A BOOK – THOSE WE LOVE MOST

The book-as-baby analogy, birth as a metaphor for publishing a novel, is just a little too pat.  Some talented folks who write diligently each day can conceive of and pop out a book annually.  And when I grow up, I aspire to do that too, to write for three hours a day, every day.  But that doesn’t seem possible right now.  I wear too many hats, and the truth is I enjoy it.  I’m not good at saying no or making the outside world go away.

Me?  The author?  I’m more the elephant model of gestation.  Elephants take 22 months to give birth. The alpine salamander has a three-year pregnancy and the frilled shark is 3.5 years.  That was certainly more akin to my style in creating this first novel.  The goal is to get a little faster.

On September 11^th, “Those We Love Most” will come out.  This process, about as long as the Spiny Dog Fish takes to reproduce, has been roughly three years in the making.

Over the past few months I’ve been toying with how to describe my book in a few sentences.  Here is what I have so far…… “Those We Love Most” is about generations in a family, the seasons of a marriage, and whether or not a relationship can survive secrets.  It deals with how one moment of inattention can result in paying the ultimate price.  In the story, as so often in life, everyone is both right and wrong.  What endures is faith in the people we love despite their loyalties or betrayals.  Ultimately it is a love story, love of family, spouse, lover, friend and even stranger.  And it’s about forgiveness and resilience, the getting through it.  Most all of us can relate in some form.

Recently, I read about a survey that claimed during these tipsy economic times, people want to read stories about fantasy, happy endings and sex.  And I understand the “take me away Calgon” effect of imagining yourself bound and gagged with silk Hermes scarves.  I get that escaping into a fight-to–the-death nihilistic futuristic world might remove us from the reality of the mortgage, the potential for job loss, the stale marriage or life’s paper cuts of disappointment.  But I tend to be drawn to stories about real life and the complexities of human emotions.  I enjoy reading all kinds of genres but I love discovering a book that details how we move through and overcome the hard things life can throw at us to find lessons and community and resuscitation.

It’s these stories that connect us as human beings.  They are the ones that make us say “ahh, me too” or “if they can do it so can I” or even  “look how much worse I could have had it.”

I love the fiction of Anna Quindlen, Sue Miller, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Ann Hood or Sue Monk Kidd with their searing autopsies of interior lives.  The authentic dialogue of Adriana Trigiani's generational characters brings them to life.  I hated coming to the end of “Little Bee” and “The Namesake,” nodded my head with Annie Lamott’s honest memoirs and marveled at Ann Patchett's prose and intricately woven tales.  The characters in the fiction of Lionel Shriver, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen stayed with me for days.

“Those We Love Most” grew out of a real-life experience.  I was out of town and a friend called me in a panic.  I can still picture that hotel room I was in all these years later.  A seventeen-year-old driver in her town had struck a child, and she wanted to know if I would talk to the parents and provide some hope based on my own family’s experiences.  After I hung up, I kept thinking about that one pivotal “in-an-instant” moment and all the lives that had been affected by a split-second action.  That call formed the basis for a fictional story about how one pebble dropped in a pond ripples out in many directions.

The intricacies within families—the secrets people hold, the love that ebbs and flows in marriages and relationships, and the bond between a parent and child—are themes all of us can relate to.  The business of living is chock-full of so many extremes, and while there are parts of my book that deal with sadness, real life is defined by a bubbling stew of love and loss, joy and sorrow, betrayal, triumph, and achievement. 

I wanted to examine the process of life coming unglued and then look at all the strengths and the wonderful qualities that lie within us to do the right thing for the ones we love most.

There are a few months before I give birth.  I’m getting the nest ready, booking engagements for the fall and preparing to usher this new project onto the stage.  I hope like hell people want to read it.  And I look forward to sharing it with you.  I hope I have the opportunity to cross paths with you on this birthing journey in one manner or another.    

Stay posted for the next installment about "Those We Love Most."  I'll be dishing about the cover selection process and how it feels a little like picking the outfit you will be buried in.

KEEP YOUR OAR IN THE WATER

My own mother’s words loomed large before I got pregnant, “do the things you want to do before you get married and have babies.”  And it was great advice.  By the time I gave birth to our first child, I had climbed the ladder in the marketing world, traveled and lived overseas.  My dream was to write a book and although I had cranked out a few measly chapters when we returned from a year in China, I didn’t have the JK Rowling in me to do it in between a full time job and my newly married life.

 

A mere two years later, our son was born into a time of personal transition.  My husband was leaving the security of the legal world and the moneyed track to be a broadcast journalist.  If I’d had any desire to stay home with this new baby, it was snuffed out by our new economic reality.  We qualified for food stamps in the state of California.

 

Moving around the country to bigger TV markets, having another baby, keeping my freelance writing and marketing business stoked was an enormous juggling act.   There were many times I envied the Moms who played tennis and lunched, the ones who didn’t feel the weight of financial contribution.  But mostly I loved my life.  I was energized and appreciated by forces outside the home.  I liked what I did and I moved among a slipstream of disparate and engaging female friends.  Before motherhood, I hadn’t thought a lot about whether or not I’d be a stay-at-home mother or try to work, there were no pre-conceived notions.  My role just kept evolving amidst the backdrop of our family and a larger picture.  I had no real master plan.

Today I sense a polite backlash among the present generation of young women who have watched their Moms buckle under the duel pressures of jobs and motherhood. They have shrewdly observed that the “sharing” of household duties by working parents still skews more like 70-30 in the most equal of unions. There is an often-unarticulated criticism, a whisper about the generation of mothers who came before who put careers first and motherhood on hold, stressed by the reality that you can’t have it all. At least not all at once.

It’s hard for younger women today to understand and appreciate the jackhammering that was done by previous female pioneers to even get to this point, the luxury and ability of women to choose.  The striving for equal pay and management positions seems so very quaint now, so “Mad Men” and yet it was not so long ago.  I still remember marching in a boss’s office my heart thumping, to tell him I’d discovered my male colleague, with the very same job and tenure, made $10,000 more than me.  I got a raise.  

Many young women think of “feminism” as a radical, cleaving and dirty word.  All that militarist bra-burning.  Yet it was that stridency, the elbowing and the path paving that allowed women today to expect to sit on boards and run for office, to go into space or attain a high rank in the military.  If you want to make a revolution you have to break a few eggs, said Chairman Mao.  Sometimes you get an omelet. 

My young daughters instantly fathomed the solution to the head-scratching riddle during my childhood about the injured child admitted to the ER.  The doctor, who was not his father, recused himself from operating because it was his son.  Q:  What is the relationship between the doctor and the boy?  A: She is his mother.

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

Few people got that answer correct in the 1970’s.  And yet today it’s a quaint and dated joke.  For all of the glass ceiling busters and groundbreakers, the throwbacks and the backlash, motherhood and career have moved slightly off the combative “either-or” arena and have mellowed into a “what’s right for me?” choice.

Young women today tell me they will not delay childbearing.  They have seen too many women wake up at 40 wearing the “I forgot to have kids” sandwich board. And I hold my tongue.  There is no cookie-cutter approach to any of this, no one-size fits all.  And when those young women have children who leave the home and they yearn for a reinvention, trying to explain the two-decade gap in their resume to a prospective employer can be disheartening.  The mothers of my older children’s friends confide that the empty nest has brought a search for meaning, an internal ransacking of who they are now and a need to re-purpose that is soul-searching and often stressful.

On a recent episode of CBS’s “The Good Wife,” a young law associate shame-facedly reveals she is addressing wedding invitations at work and discloses that she is engaged, newly pregnant and quitting the firm to become a wife and mother. 

“But you can do both, you don’t have to give up the law,” says the older, wiser, now single Alicia Florick, who has returned to the workforce after her husband’s Spitzer-like public infidelities are revealed.  “But I love my fiancé,” is the young ingénue’s doe-eyed answer. 

A priceless expression crosses the face of the older, experienced woman who has learned the importance of being able to care for not only herself, but also her children.  It is one I recognize on my own face as I think about my once bright naiveté, the beauty of that expectation that we can nudge life in the direction we wish by just applying a little will power and positive thinking.   And how we hope it will.  And yet the young lawyer has not allowed for the possibility that the child she is carrying might not grow to term or be healthy, that her fiancé might not always love her or be able to provide for her.  It is the great divide between 20 something and 40 plus, the canyon between innocence and experience.

I recently lunched with a friend who’d been blind-sided by the economy, her husband’s job loss, depression and subsequent raiding of their savings.  She had left her job 22 years ago to raise the kids and was wondering now, in the midst of divorce, how she would pay the next tuition check.    She is an indomitable, resourceful woman and she will undoubtedly reconstitute herself in a new world order.   Our talk turned to raising our girls, the messages we would give them based on our life experiences and the choices they would inevitably make about partners and marriage, careers and kids.  How would each of our experiences as working and stay-at-home Moms shape their own visions for their lives?

“Keep your oar in the water somehow,” she said wistfully.  “That’s the advice I’m giving my daughter.”  And, thinking about my own life, I nodded my head in agreement.