BEsparkly

When you’re young, being old seems like something that’s never going to happen. Even OLD-ER seems out of reach and too mysterious to contemplate. If one is lucky, it does happen. Slowly, deliberately inch by inch, it reaches out and down and in...age. It’s so quiet one hardy even realizes that one has gently been drawn from the dawn of life into the afternoon, the late afternoon, the twilight. One doesn’t even really know when the dusk has arrived unless one looks back and realizes that the light just isn’t as bright as it once was.

I see it at my temples. There’s a soft, white curl that lives there now, nestled against the dark ones. It fascinates me with its softness and its intentionality. It’s as though time is living in my body, showing itself with a gracious presence that is absolutely resolute. Time will not be denied. Covering the silver will not deny its presence. Underneath my rebuke, the silver prevails and shines its sparkly message forth into the world. I’ve been here a while. I’ve lived and loved and laughed and cried. That snowy silver curl tells the story of all the days I’ve done well and all those during which I’ve faltered. It’s a truth. It’s a harbinger. It is, even, a badge of honor.

The sunny days of youth leave their mark on those of us in the afternoon. Eyes that crinkle

with the imprint of a thousand laughs, our faces folding into the memory of the joys of our life. How we fight it! The reflection of our expressions live on in our wrinkles, the sunny days show on our skin, the delicious meals live in the softness of our hips. How we battle it! Our wisdom, our calm, our prosperity comes at the cost of our supple skin and lithe bodies. Why do we resent this compromise?

The mornings of our lives find us in the center of our worlds, with parents, friends, lovers, and children circling around us. We are the shining light in the center, arranging the dance to suit our rhythm. We beam outward with bravado, our endless light seeming inextinguishable. We love and care and work and mother with the promise of endless days unfolding before us. Our place in the circle of life seems to guarantee us that. We are the center of our world. We are right where we want to be.

As the shadows lengthen after noon, the music slows. Our dance becomes different. We are in the background now. We become the voice or reason, the supportive ear, no longer the leading lady of our own lives. That role belongs to the next ones, and our job it to let them shine. We reach back from our place in the circle and pull them into the light, knowing the dance is now theirs. They have the starring role now. We are now called to lift them up, let them shine, share words of wisdom from our day in the sun.

How do they know how to find us? We are the ones with the snowy curls and the faces lined with laughter. We are the ones who remember the dance and sing their praises as they make it their own. We are the ones who have eaten the delicious meals, laughed the belly laughs, and can now share our recipes with them. They find us because we are waiting for them, hands and hearts open.

My place in the circle of life is no longer in the morning, or even in the early afternoon. I am somewhere in the shade where the light no longer blinds me and the breezes are cool. From here, I can clearly see all of you who are dancing in the light with the world circling around you. I am here waiting, cheering you on, marveling at your beauty. I am the one with the eyes full of a lifetime of smiles and the snowy curl on my temple. I am waiting for you.

When Life is a Hijacker

I knew what to expect; what’s more, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to marry my high school sweetheart and have babies. I wanted to make smocked dresses, cook when necessary, and learn to care about having a house clean enough to satisfy my mother. I wanted to plant marigolds and daffodils like my father taught me, pick them in the springtime, and arrange them jauntily in a yellow rose bowl like my mother’s—or maybe put them in the center of a homemade cake on special occasions as my mother did. I wanted a yard that bloomed with crocuses in the snow and crackled with crisp leaves in the fall. I wanted to support my handsome and accomplished husband, knowing that his successes were mine. I wanted the sweetness of a happy home, a noisy and haphazard family full of dogs and noise and chaos. My dream was simple, beautiful, huge.

By the time I had this dream, it wasn’t fashionable anymore. I grew up in a town with a sophisticated palate for female development. My high school friends thought my dedication to my beloved was quaint, whispering that I was selling myself short. After all, I was smart, talented, with a life ripe with opportunity. I was a child of the seventies—hearing women roar was the rallying cry of my time. Roaring didn’t seem to be my style, and I was completely ok with that. In fact, the strident feminism of my women’s college education turned me off. I wondered why it was necessary to view the world through an all-female lens. I believed, maybe before my time, that females were already equal and the time for hyper-focus on gender had passed. Of course, youth can be one-dimensional, and life has a way of softening, deepening, and mellowing perspectives like that.

I was well on my way to the life of my dreams by 1990. Married to that handsome high school sweetheart, pregnant with my third gorgeous son, my days were a blur of aerobics (as we called it then), get together with friends to let the kids play (no “play date” lingo then), and craft painting over coffee. I had supported my Navy SEAL husband through college, deployments, and many weeks and months apart while he followed his dream—OUR dream. I adored him, adored our family, loved my life. I wasn’t the best housekeeper or cook, but I was a damn good mom. I loved every minute of it.

Until it fell apart, August 13, 1990. A hot summer day in Florida, a haze of morning sickness and early pregnancy fatigue. A knock on the door. Dazed colleagues of my husband arriving to tell me he had drowned in an entirely inexplicable fashion for a Navy SEAL. He might not live, was in a coma, I should come quick. The long drive to the hospital, ferrying me out of the life I had known into a new and terrifying world.

I lost my husband that day, although it took me a while to realize it. He did not physically die but the person I knew was changed forever. He lost more than the kids and I did—he lost himself. His personality, his intellect, his memory, all became forever fuzzy and inaccessible to him. Worst of all, he developed a temper, a rage that was mostly directed at me and the kids and which cost us our marriage. After an interminable effort to try to fix my husband and our marriage, I decided that I had to save my children by leaving my love behind.

I walked away with my four kids and my dogs. I said goodbye to what I wanted because I couldn’t have it anymore. I buried my grief, my dreams, and my innocence. I turned my back on my crocuses and my daffodils, my cozy home and my childhood dreams, and turned toward a road I had never wanted and never cared about. I dig deep, pulled up my bootstraps, and shoved my sentimental nature way down where it couldn’t hurt me. I chose a career, put the kids in daycare, and left the nest I had created forever.

Somehow, the messages of my childhood and college days rose up to greet me. Through the depths of my despair, they reminded me that my softness had been forged from steel. The lessons I had learned in college helped me believe that survival was possible—that I could raise my four children, earn a successful living, and thrive through it all. The insurmountable task of raising our children would fall to me, but I had to decide I would be up to the task. Failure was simply not an option. My children believed in me. I had to believe in myself.

The days were long, hard, challenging. Fear and financial problems were my constant companion. I learned to ignore uncertainty and cling to faith. If I had indulged worry, it would have consumed me—I instinctively knew that. I refused to feel sorry for myself or allow the kids to. My children were cut from fine pieces of cloth and I knew the I had been entrusted with greatness to care for. I felt the hand of the divine steering me at every turn. Looking back, I have no idea how we made it—how they always had their school supplies, their swim team uniforms, their field trip money. I robbed Peter to pay Paul, took loans to pay loans, built a house of cards for only one purpose. I understood how women sold their souls to the devil for a noble task, because raising my children was mine. It was a marathon —one that I would have given my life to finish.

And finish I did. My children are grown. All four are brilliant, honorable, successful adults. All four have gone to college (and we have the student loans to prove it). They are the achievement of my life. Being their mom, raising them, has been the accomplishment of a lifetime. When life hijacked me, I learned what I was made of. I found out that the lessons of empowerment, the need for women to roar through life, all of it made sense when viewed through the lens of the detours life gave me. When I loved something more than myself, I became strong. When steeling against disaster, I found resourcefulness and intellectual wherewithal that had lived dormant deep within me. I roared as a mother lion and stood ready to visit violence against ones who would harm my babies. It wasn’t always pretty, didn’t always make sense, but somehow I carried them through those years thanks to the strength of my will and the guidance of my Creator.

Life, curated.

It was a beautiful moment. Me, the proud mother, two of my four children, and a dear family friend. The opportunity to spend an afternoon together at one of our favorite restaurants, followed by a wonderful visit to our favorite salon for a cut and color. As I sat there, I thought about how precious these moments felt to me, so fleeting, so rare, so unforgettable. As a mother who loves nothing more than to be with my children, these times happen far less frequently than I’d like them to. But I savored every minute that I had with them that holiday, and that luncheon was a festive and joyous occasion.

It was all that. Yet it was also much more. Just moments after this picture was taken, my daughter, who suffers from Lupus, was overtaken by severe abdominal pain so excruciating that it made her physically ill. The pain was so severe, sudden, and unrelenting that we were forced to cancel the rest of our lunch, along with our salon appointment, and make a beeline for the emergency room.

As I waited in the treatment room for the test results to come back, I looked down at my phone and saw this picture. I reflected on how joy had morphed into sadness in the blink of an eye. Our happy faces were blissfully ignorant…….as they should have been.

As scary as it was, everything turned out okay that day. My daughter likely has some gastrointestinal affects from her Lupus. We were sent home after several hours with instructions to follow up at home.

I posted this picture on social media without mentioning that the happiness captured in the photo only told a very small part of that day’s story. I’ve reflected several times since on how important it was to me that I gather my thoughts and complete the post that tells the complete tale of that day. There’s a lesson to be learned by the story of that photo, an idea worth sharing. Several weeks later, I’ve cultivated my understanding of that day sufficiently to try to convey its meaning.

One might be tempted to conclude that a pervasive sense of impending doom might be appropriate when looking at that photo. Yet I don’t think so. Why diminish the happy moments one has by fearing that an unhappy one might follow soon on its heels? As I look at this picture, I draw two conclusions. First, the obvious; we should savor those sweet moments with every fiber of our being. Know that sad and scary times might be intertwined with the joy—but that that is part of life and our resilient spirits can weather the dark days only by drinking in every beam of sunshine that precedes and follows them.

The other, perhaps more important, thought that this picture evokes for me is that when one looks at another’s social media posts with bright smiles, shiny hair, and holiday joy, it’s important to remember that the pictures we share only tell a teeny, tiny part of the story. There’s always so much more. As first described by writer Laura Turner, we cultivate, in turn, curated perfection and curated imperfection. We share the staged, the spontaneous, the perfect and the imperfect in very deliberate ways. We show our messiness, as we want others to see it. We show our tidiness the same way. I think by doing this, we sometimes think that the images of our lives will drive the reality of them—when indeed, the exact opposite is true. Yes, there was exactly as much joy as that photo conveyed in that moment. But that day was so much more. Our lives can be absolute perfection—for an instant—but how many tries did it take to capture that perfect instant? Our perfectly beautiful photo was preceded (and followed) by ten not so pretty photos that went into the trash, and by moments of ordinary and hours of sadness surrounding the happy instant captured within it.

Peace…Be Still

Most of us in America do not consider the fact that we are generally at peace, safe, and secure. We take it for granted because of the excellent good fortune of our birth. We seldom consider that the vast majority of the world is not nearly as fortunate. Most people of the world do not enjoy the wealth, security, and prosperity that Americans can count on every day. When we think about it, we feel sad, a little guilty, but generally relieved that most of our lives are lived while having all of our basic needs, and most of our wants, met.

I thought about this today while watching the survivors of the California wildfires wake up in a makeshift tent city that has sprung up in a Walmart parking lot. Their town, ironically named Paradise, is gone, destroyed by the fires that have burned countless homes and taken hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. In scenes like this, whether caused by fires, hurricanes, or some other disaster, one prevailing spirit is seen in interviews over and over again. Gratitude. People who have lost everything in their lives are grateful, still, because they have their lives. In situations like this, nothing else matters. Survivors are stunned, in disbelief, grieving—yet still grateful. They are not even beginning to consider the way forward, because there isn’t one yet. The entire infrastructure of their lives is gone. Yet they’re still grateful because the one core instinct for us as humans is to survive. When we drill down to that core foundation, everything else becomes extra.

Maslow described this well in his hierarchy of needs. At the very bottom is survival, followed by shelter, nourishment, then safety and security. These are foundational. After that comes the things we, as Americans, can also count on—belonging, love, self-esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. Looking at people in the wildfires, they have, in an instant, gone from the very top of the hierarchy (living in an affluent California town and enjoying various levels of belonging and self-esteem) to the very bottom (living in a tent city and feeling VERY glad to be alive). Amazing how fast that can happen and how quickly we realize that life is as tenuous as a butterfly wing and as fleeting as a summer breeze. Here one moment and utterly gone the next. We can’t live with this realization constantly in our consciousness. It would be too scary. Yet it is at times like this, when we watch our brethren experience such transformation, that we are well served to take a moment in consideration and grateful reflection. The peace we experience by virtue of our safety and security is easily torn from us, leaving us stunned and forever changed.

On August 13, 1990, my peaceful life changed forever. My husband, then a 27 year old Navy SEAL, suffered a drowning injury that left him in a coma and ultimately forever changed from an anoxic brain injury. Miraculously, he survived the accident (after having spent 12 minutes under water), but experienced amnesia, terrible memory loss, and worst of all, ferocious rage directed at me and our two sons (aged 3 and 1 at the time). His explosions of rage were terrifying and often left me fearing for my life, my children’s lives, and that of our unborn son. As a pregnant woman with two babies at home, I had never felt more vulnerable or alone. I learned, through that experience, to live life sometimes moments at a time. I discovered the value of prayer, devised ways to live with fear, and developed coping techniques such as not looking down the road to worry about things that hadn’t yet happened. It was a terrifying time for all of us, but yes….I was grateful to be alive, something that I suddenly was no longer taking for granted.

Eight years, a fourth child, and many scary outbursts later, we ultimately divorced. My husband, devastated at losing his family, finally developed some coping skills of his own. After having been a stay at home mom for many years, I suddenly had to go back to work and assume the mantle of a single mother of four children. My initial fear for my own physical survival became a near constant fear for the well-being of my children—for their emotional, financial, and physical security. The fear of failing them became as scary as the fear I once had of death. My profession became a lifeline, a way of providing them with security that was so very necessary. There were many sleepless nights. There were many times I wondered how I would be able to make it work—robbing Peter to pay Paul, financial magic tricks to keep body and soul together, and lots of stress. Oh, the stress! A near constant companion for me during those years. My tried and true coping mechanisms once again became all too necessary—for I never knew how things would work out. All I know is that they did. Every single time.

Those children are now adults. They are grown ups, successful, and educated. They are contributing to society and making their mother proud. As I write this, I am sitting in front of a fire, with my two dogs cozily sitting beside me. I am warm and safe and unafraid. Peaceful. It occurred to me this morning that I had not experienced this kind of peace since that summer day in 1990. The years of uncertainty and insecurity were so long and so seemingly inexorable that fear became a part of my being. Once the fear was gone, I was afraid to be unafraid.

It has taken me nearly two years to learn to be peaceful and still. At first, I waited for the other shoe to drop. I was anxious and afraid, and on top of that, angry at myself for being so ungrateful. It was a vicious circle; anxiety and guilt followed by berating and punishing myself. Didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Like the soldier suffering from PTSD, when we’ve been terrified for so long we get used to it and it’s difficult to stop, to allow ourselves to feel safe.

Paper Ephemera

The other day, an article caught my eye as I scrolled through Facebook. It was from the May 4, 2018 edition of Forbes, entitled Your Top Ten Objects Your Kids Don't Want. Naturally, having maintained a massive storage unit full of items from my kids’ childhoods that I’ve been certain they DID want, the article caught my eye. As I started reading, it became readily apparent that the author of the article had been roaming through my storage unit while writing the article—or at least, has children whose idea of ‘fascinating family antiques’ was pretty similar to those of my own grown children.

The quote from the first paragraph was my first clue. “Your house, and what it contains, is a minefield in the eyes of your grown children. They can see from your example that collections of stuff are a curse; such objects are superfluous to a life well lived. They want a clean, clear field in which to live their lives. Your grown children will not agree to be the recipients of your downsizing if it means their upsizing.”

That resonated. It hurt a little, but it resonated. I’ve noticed that my grown children, and those of my friends, seem to value a simpler aesthetic than mine. They appreciate a more minimalist approach, valuing simplicity, sustainability, and less material “weight” in their lives. They’ve taught me a great deal about conservation, environmentalism, and efficiency, all of which I have learned to embrace and even try to incorporate into my own life. I’m late to the party, for sure, but I’ve dropped in.

So back to the article. Scanning down, a first category caught my eye. “Paper Ephemera.” I liked the name, wasn’t sure what it was, but was pretty sure that I would find myself a top offender in this category. Sure enough; paper ephemera includes things like old photos, certificates, greeting cards, movie tickets, invitations, report cards, old school masterpieces created by my children—the very items that I have lovingly saved and toted throughout the last three decades of my life. Paper Ephemera. So what the hell is a mom supposed to do with her paper ephemera? Like most of us, I’ve scanned a freakin’ terabyte of photos, made albums galore, and even advanced to photo books in recent years (I’m that good). Still, the paper ephemera stares me in the eye like a puppy in an SPCA commercial. Am I supposed to throw out all those memories? Shred them? I get that I can digitalize every single one but the idea of throwing my sweet babies’ photos and honor roll certificates in the trash makes me kinda sick. I’m imagining a seagull in a landfill somewhere sitting on top of my son’s T-Ball certificate and dying a little inside.

So I didn’t make much progress toward mental minimalism there and my mountain of paper ephemera survived the purge. Next on the list in the article came things like silver plated serving pieces (the author says that adults today won’t polish them), sterling silver flatware (ditt0, unless it’s from Tiffany or Cartier), and fine china (kids today don’t dine formally the way our mothers and grandmothers did). So, yup, I’ve got all of that too, waiting lovingly to pass along to my children. Happily, though, unlike the paper ephemera, I DO use (and polish) my silver and china; although it apparently makes me a dinosaur, I do like to set a formal table on holidays and special occasions. If the kids don’t want that after I’m gone, at least I will have enjoyed it.

Next on the chopping block of my heart? Old, dark, antique furniture, steamer trunks, sewing machines, and figurines. Guilty. All of it. I’ve kept my grandmother’s antique table even though it’s broken into pieces and needs to be restored practically from the ground up. Same with the old chairs to match and countless other pieces I was sure someone would want someday.

As for the figurines, I’ve never been a collector of statues, like Hummels or Precious Moments. However, I have lovingly saved my rather extensive collection of Madame Alexander dolls that I adored playing with when I was little. I didn’t save them as collectible dolls because I played with mine and they are well-loved. I dream that one day, I will have a granddaughter who will love dolls and will be thrilled for Nana to break out her Scarlett O’Hara doll and Sleeping Beauty, Jo from Little Women, and an assortment of baby dolls for her to play with. No matter that my husband thinks that they’re creepy and calls them my “Chuckie Dolls” because their eyes open up and stare at him when we open the box. They’re staying.

The bottom line is that some of these memories still bring joy today. They’re still part of my life. Some of the rest of it is ephemera in the true sense of the word (although not of the paper variety). It just brings back memories, some happy, some not so happy. For me, some of the memory is just honoring the legacy of the many people who ate at those tables, used that steamer trunk when they traveled and for their treasures, and all the women who polished that silver before I did. That means something to me. Sometimes when I look in an old steamer trunk, I can almost feel the memories that are held within and that means something to me too.

The idea of the article, however, is that the cherished nostalgia of the past does not necessarily translate into the future. I think there’s truth to that. There comes a time when a garage or storage unit expensively holding space for the memories of the past no longer makes sense. Maybe it’s when someone spells out (thanks, Forbes) WHY it no longer makes sense. One really important reason is because the idea that future generations will prize our treasures is perhaps not as true as it was in the past. Maybe they’ll be much more discriminating about what they save. Maybe they’ll immediately digitize their children’s masterpieces and recycle the original. Maybe our children’s schools will one day be fully paperless and there won’t BE as much paper ephemera to save! Life changes and we must be willing to embrace the new and be able to part with the old when the time is right.

The time was right for me today. I consolidated the photos, kept the most important treasures and masterpieces from my children, and closed my eyes to keep myself from going back through the boxes just one more time to make sure. I kept the pieces of furniture that have happy memories for me and put the ones that don’t at the curb for the inevitable treasure hunters who come by at night to recycle people’s castoffs. I said a little prayer over them as I set them down that someone would find them, give them a new life with a beautiful coat of paint, and love them as they should be loved. Then my husband took my hand, led me in the house, and shut the garage door, just to make sure I didn’t go back out and drag it all back in again.

The Years Before Vintage

I drove by a brewery on my way to the gym today. I’m aware that this sounds like the beginning of an unfortunate joke involving a priest and a rabbi, but as it happens, the brewery is along the route of my daily outing to work out. I don’t usually pay much attention to it, but today I did. I noticed that the yard of the brewery looked like a pumpkin patch had been installed on the premises overnight. There were pumpkins everywhere, most prominently piled high in the back of an old Chevy pickup truck. The truck was parked proudly on the grass by the street with pumpkins bursting forth from every inch. As I inched past (it was a school zone and fortunately I had noticed in time), I found myself checking the truck out with interest. It struck me that it was an unusual choice. I expected it to be one of those adorable vintage ones that are all the rage—painted with teal chalk paint and proudly sporting ‘antique’ plates. However, this is not what I saw at the brewery. Instead, it appeared to be sort of a middle-aged truck—maybe late seventies or early eighties, with a liberal coat of rust all over where the adorable teal paint should have been. It looked about as cool as a “Member’s Only” jacket or an old leisure suit. I thought to myself, “You’re too young to be chic and vintage” before the absurdity of age-shaming a truck took over. The poor middle-aged vehicle was clearly intended for display purposes but probably needed another twenty years or so to achieve true pumpkin patch Pinterest-type coolness. 

As I drove on, I began to contemplate the difference between medium middle-aged and just plain old. At what point does one give way to the other, whether on a truck or on a person? I realized that there’s a risk of settling into old age too soon—grabbing too quickly for the elastic waist pants and house slippers—and that such premature relaxation is often viewed as “giving up” or “letting one’s self go.” Yet I’ve also noticed that there’s a certain cool rebellion in embracing one’s age. I see women who fiercely embrace themselves exactly where they are, proclaiming themselves as ‘vintage’ precisely when they, themselves, decide to be. They sport their white hair in pixie cuts, wear huge glasses, and wander around Manhattan in flowy caftans taking pictures for their Instagram. You know the ones. I don’t think I’m there yet.

I wonder, then, am I the rusty leisure suit truck or the teal chalk paint one? I’m not yet truly ready to embrace the idea of an antique license plate, but no longer do I recoil in horror at every silver hair I see on the top of my head. I watch a lot of women my age trying very, very hard to outrun the external signs of approaching age. We go to tremendous lengths to do so. No Botox shaming here—I’ve had my fair share, along with a few additional adjustments I’ve felt to be in order along the years. I’m all for it, if that makes someone feel better, more beautiful, ready to face the world with a joyful spirit. However, at a certain point, it gets harder and harder to deny the truth. We’ve all seen those who keep it up way too long and eventually appear to be frozen in time, their face imprinted with the expression of many years past. None of us wants that.

It would seem that there is an aspirational middle ground—one where we see the laugh lines, the crow’s feet, and the softening waistline with something other than disgust and contempt. How, though, does one find that? There are surely too few models of graceful aging; it appears that women, in particular, go directly from movie star to nursing home with very little in between. Who’s ready to give up the movie star part? I believe I am like many other women in that I don’t feel one bit different than I did when I was younger. I still feel vibrant and colorful and sparkly. However, the reflection in the mirror reminds me of the years in the sun and the quizzical squints and the countless laughs out loud. I’m not ready for vintage, surely, but maybe I AM ready to embrace the collected wisdom of my life, embrace the experiences I’ve had, and leave youth in the rearview mirror. Maybe I am ready to let the silver sparkly hair emerge, not worry so much about keeping my Botox up to date, and take a sledgehammer to my scale (oh yes, please)!