FACETIME

I’ve been a little slumpy lately.  Nothing major, just kind of in a middle-o’-life blah.  I can’t seem to motivate to work out the way I used to, the get up and go is less “go” and more “harder to get up.”  I eat healthy for a while and then suddenly purchase a giant box of Dots or a tub of chocolate covered raisins and consume the whole thing almost without tasting.  It’s not that I feel lousy; I just don’t feel like the old me.

 

That was the initial thrust behind the timing of a mother/daughter spa trip.  I’ve been thinking about doing this ever since my baby girl was born, 18 years ago.  And now she is home from her first year in college.  All in all she’s had a pretty good experience, with the expected ups and downs of leaving the nest for the first time.  She’s worked hard and made friends, all while trying to live up to the decidedly unhelpful “these are the best years of your life” advice that we parents have parroted to them for the last decade.  That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone as they tie the bandana on the stick and head out the door to live with four strangers in a room the size of a handicapped bathroom stall. 

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

The last two years of high school she was a partial stranger to us, distant, most of her in shadow.  I understood she was hard at work uncoupling from me, sawing off the umbilical cord, sometimes with a dull, Swiss Army knife.  Mother nature has programmed our children during this period to be as judgmental, sullen and eye rolling as possible, presumably to make it hurt less when they finally blow the pop stand.   We were all ready for her to go, mostly her.   And I honestly don’t think my daughter would have wanted to spend a stretch of time with me anywhere back then. I had nothing to offer beyond my cooking, cleaning, step n’ fetch-it skills and my vague resemblance to a punching bag.  So the thought of going to a spa with her in those years would have felt like a Club Med trip with Stockholm syndrome and no alcohol. 

But a year away had made a world of difference.  And when a work trip with her father fell through, impulsively I called a spa within driving distance to check out their advertised deals.  Maybe we could both jump-start our health and well-being, our mind-body energy and our mother-daughter mojo with a little downward dog and green juice?  This was high on my bucket list. 

Each of us has ways in which we have terminally crimpled our children’s wiring through our own life experiences, shortcomings, fears or phobias.  Let’s just say that growing up with parents scarred by a depression-era mentality, my sisters and I inherited what we’ll call a Scotch-Yankee, tight-fisted approach to spending.  Admittedly, we are cheapskates, some of us sisters more than others.   (Ahem, OK, me.) 

And as the daughter of skinflints, I still proudly cling to some of the pioneer-settler tenants of my childhood:  you want the extras?  Work for it.  Go bag a few groceries, rake some lawns and babysit a few snot-nosed kids up the street.   In short, I’m not the kind of Mom who regularly throws mani-pedis around.  I’m not stuffing bills at my kids like sorority sisters at a bachelorette party.  Believe me, no one is suffering in my household.  No one has rickets or scurvy, no one is digging through the Salvation Army bins to accessorize at the gas station.  No one has holey underwear.  My children have what they need and much more, and the truth is they don’t continually ask me for a lot.  By now you are getting the correct impression that it wasn’t characteristic or typical of me to bestow my largesse on this grand of a scale.  

So when I called my daughter, jubilant and bursting with excitement over my spontaneous spa generosity, her first question, uttered with prison guard level suspicion, was “Why?”

“Well, I just want to spend some time with you,” I stammered defensively.  “I thought this would be fun.”

Silence.  “Sure.  Sounds good.”

My sister called me later that night, the one who lives near my college student in Boston.

“I thought you should know that your daughter called to ask me if anything was wrong,” she reported and my eyebrows shot up.  “Wrong?” I answered panicked.

“She told me you had invited her to a spa and she wondered if you’d gotten some kind of major medical diagnosis or if there was anything bad happening with you and Bob that she didn’t know.”  It took me a minute to process that and then I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or be crushed. 

 

True, we are raising children in a somewhat scary time.  They are growing up surrounded by the low level muzak of September 11, war, economic uncertainty and divorce exploding around us like carpet bombs. OK, it’s not so different from eras of the past.  My childhood was punctuated by elementary school duck and cover drills, the Cold War, Kent State, and the polarizing horror of Vietnam.  There’s always some sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, isn’t there?  But I honestly don’t remember being so anxious. Perhaps I was. And while I’d tried to do my best to shield my children from life’s harsher glare, they had experienced the uncertainty of outcomes, the fear of infirmity and the grief of death up close. 

Still, did it have to take an act of God for me to invite my own offspring for a little loofa get-away with an enzyme facial?  Times were tough, all right.  But her reaction caused me to second guess my mothering. Had I actually been more “communist block mother” than nurturing and cozy?   I imagined myself to be a rule enforcing but sporadically indulgent parent.  And what about those hours of glue gunning I’d undertaken with them?  The homemade Halloween costumes, the bunny head cake at Easter and the Jell-O American flag on July 4th?  Had my puritanical approach been so extreme that my child’s first response to a fun trip was to cock her head suspiciously and look for a chemo IV?

As I went to bed that night, still reflecting on my daughter’s reaction to my proposition, I remembered hearing Maria Shriver speak at her California Woman’s Conference.  She had described coming to a life juncture where she needed to define herself, to figure out what was next.  Up to that point she had always been someone’s daughter, wife or mother.  An award-winning journalist, Maria had stepped back to raise a growing family but as her children became more self-sufficient, she was ready to re-evaluate a new direction.

As part of her vision quest she decided to sojourn to a desert spa for reflection.  This solitary repose was so uncharacteristic, that when she told her kids where she was headed, her daughter’s first response had been to ask if she had cancer. 

I felt slightly better remembering the Maria story.  I felt in good company at least.   Maria was a smart cookie, a good Mom and a Kennedy to boot.  Her girls hadn’t been deprived and warped by a cold Mother Scrooge.  I’ll be they’d owned every American Girl doll accessory and unlike mine, probably never wore hand-me-downs.  In short, they’d had a life of privilege and still her daughter had leapt to the same awful conclusions as mine.  I felt better.

When I called my daughter the next day I relaxed as I listened to her growing excitement about our trip. She had already visited the website, reviewed the activities we could do together and determined what classes and hikes we would take.  And me?  I can hardly wait for our weekend.  I’ve been daydreaming and picturing it since she was a wee lass.  I’m already imagining what it will feel like to have her to myself, the essence of that old “little girl” who is making her way back to me, as she peers out of the body of a beautiful young woman.

 

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.