Hello, Middle Age

Mahalo to my friend Keoki for snapping this photo.  

Yesterday afternoon, we were invited to a birthday party. While en route, a cooler tumbled off the truck in front of me. I idled on the two lane highway while the driver pulled over and ran for his cooler. Then he glanced up at me and smiled. I suddenly realized it was my friend, Keoki. He checked the oncoming traffic lane for cars and then ran toward me. "Hey Jenny!" He said, "What are you up to?" I told him I was headed to a party and he said, "For Sadie and Soyer? So are we! Hey, did you see any of my other stuff on the road?" I said, no, but promised to keep an eye out for it, just in case.

After I got to the party, I offered to watch the kids in the playground because most of the adults were cooking and setting up in the pavilion below. The kids handed me their balloons and snacks to carry. I am so habituated to carrying things that I forgot to tell them to lug their own loot. And anyway, I'm middle aged, now, I'm in carrying years.

I have wanted to be middle aged for as long as I can remember, perhaps because I imagined that these were the years of settling into whatever it was that I was going to do and actually doing it rather than preparing for it and wondering if it was possible.

Earlier this year, when I turned 38, I posted something on Facebook about how thrilled I was to finally reach middle age, to which several friends rained on my parade by telling me that I was not quite there yet. By the way, it is not very classy to rain on someone's parade on their birthday, just saying. Why deprive me the pleasure of reaching a modest and achievable goal like becoming middle aged?

I looked it up online, and it appears that middle age technically begins around 45 and stretches to 64. Who is behind these bizarre numbers? Could it be...the Baby Boomers? Anyway, for the purposes of my own blog, I will stick with my childhood understanding of middle age which was that it started somewhere between the ages of 38 and 40 or when you purchased a minivan, or when you took a practical job to simply to pay your mortgage, whichever came first.

Naysayers, please note: that means I am already there, save for the practical job, although my husband has two, thankfully. After wading through the murky waters of my twenties and (most of my) thirties, I have come to three principles of middle age that I'd like to share, in no particular order:

1) Don't Argue with Unreasonable People: I have always believed in having it out in an honest fashion, and when I was younger, I believed that I could say my piece in almost any situation and something good would come of it. But by the time I owned my first minivan, I was pretty sure that I had wasted too much of my twenties and thirties arguing with unreasonable people.

I recognize that unreasonable is an objective term. What is reasonable to one person is unreasonable to another. So when I say unreasonable, I am not talking only about differences of opinions (these can be navigated in all sorts of ways) I am talking about an emotional response to a perceived criticism that is extreme. If you try to say something to someone that you feel needs to be said, perhaps to tell them about how their behavior is affecting your life, and they respond with rage and a refusal to acknowledge your concerns, well, that's something. Maybe you can try one more time, but then it is straight to plan B, damage control: instead of explaining how you feel over and over and over (I have been guilty of this in countless situations) you simply work to limit the damage the other person can do, by protecting yourself and your loved ones.

2) Let Yourself Fail: This was a big one for me. When I was in my twenties I was terrified of failure. But it helped to try a lot things and discover that many of my best attempts yielded only so-so results. Take cooking, for example. I'm still not that great at it, but I find nothing more satisfying than sitting down to a home cooked meal, which is why I've decided to try to cook (and fail) often. Giving myself freedom to fail has made me bolder to try new things.

I've experienced this in my writing life as well. In my case, I sort of met my goal to be a writer by publishing five books by the time I was 35, but I can only say sort of because I think of the first four books as practice for whatever it was that I really meant to do. Three were write-for-hire jobs that paid well but had no connection to who I am, most especially "The Everything Organize Your Home Book" (which, please, don't get my mom started on the irony of me as author of that one, you will get an earful).  All this said, I am still a little bit proud of the fifth one Naming the Child: Hope-filled Reflections On Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Death because it was written from the heart--it took me ten years to summon the courage to write it--and strangers still tell me that it helped them, which lifts me up, always. But then again, I can only stay aloft for a few seconds, because if I take the book off the shelf and open it, I can find a bunch of things I would change immediately, which is why I can't actually open any of my books, ever.  And then, of course, there's my kids, who say things like, "Mom, one day could you write a fun book that people actually like to read?"

Okay, okay, so it might be my best yet, but it's not a fun book. And this is part of the glory of middle age: realizing that you can have a whole lot of near-misses, and sometimes you can miss the target entirely, but the people who love you stick around anyway, and the more you miss the target or almost hit the bullseye the less it seems to matter if if you miss again. You actually can't even think about it that much, because you have still have a quiver-full of arrows and the sun is almost down. Just keep shooting, for Pete's sake, which is closely related to my next thought...

3) Consider the Time: time is a bank account that you continue make withdrawals from but you can't replenish. That's kind of a drag. By middle age, you know that your time is not unlimited, even if you do still have many years before you. Being bitter (even if it is, in some cases, the correct emotional response to a situation) steals a lot of time and energy. As Fr. Tom Hopko used to say at seminary: just do something productive. Instead ruminating about things that didn't work out in the way I'd planned, I can get up and load the dishwasher, I can fold laundry and allow myself the luxury of watching old Parenthood episodes (ahhhh! free therapy) on Netflix, or hey, I could even start a blog!

There's a scene in Anne Lamott's book Bird-by-Bird that I think about often. Anne is shopping for a dress with her best friend, who is dying of cancer. Pammy has already lost her hair and is in a wheelchair, and Anne comes out of the dressing room to get her friend's opinion.

Lamott writes, "I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, 'Do you think it makes my hips look too big?' and she said to me slowly, 'Annie? I really don't think you have that kind of time.'"

So that's a question for me, in middle age, that has urgency that it didn't have before: do I really have that kind of time? And also, how do I spend my most precious and limited resource of all? The time when my children were little is slipping away. One is 12 and the other 7. Much of my twelve-year-old's childhood has already been spent. How do we spend the rest of the time that we have left together?

Middle age is the time when many of us carry small children, first in our bodies, then in our arms, then in our vehicles. It is the carrying time. I seem to be on the latter part of that spectrum, having put almost 17,000-miles on my minivan since I bought it in August. It is also the time when many of us find that we have to carry jobs, mortgages and aging parents (in whatever way we are capable of) as they transition from middle age into old age.

So that is a lot of carrying to do, and it is hard to juggle all that stuff, not to mention the random balloon creations and nests and empty plastic cups that make their way into our hands. I love the line from U2's song Yahweh, "Teach me what to carry." It's always a challenge to figure out what to carry and what to set down, and that is part of the delicate and necessary work of middle age.

Back to Saturday's party: with my arms full of balloons and snacks, a water bottle and even a nest, I leaned against a lava wall and watched Natalie climb onto a huge metal whale. Another child climbed onto the whale beside her and said, "The whale's name is Hina." Hina means gray, and that's middle age, for you. I thought I'd feel all settled and it would be just great, but instead, much of the time I feel more like a pack mule trudging up a mountain. But I also feel, in another way, freer than I ever did before. Free to fail, free to say no, free to choose what I'll carry and how I'll spend my time.

That day, watching the kids on the whale with a huge jacaranda tree dropping purple petals all around them, like spring snow,  I thought, this is just a little bit magical, isn't it? As Vincent Van Gogh said: "In spite of everything, yes."