Acting my age

 Last week I was at my best friends lake house and we sat in the sun room at the end of the day drinking the brandy old fashioned's that I adopted from my years in Wisconsin.

It was a delight. Two women who met in 1993 as newly engaged, bright eyed young women who were in some kind of misguided internal race to become married, now sat at 55 and 56 remembering. Neighbors in a place where neighbors got you through the long stretches of winter when you were practically snowed under, or with whom you sat on the porch during the summer lobster BBQ on the front lawn and laughed your drunk assess off as people ran from the rain. 

She and I have long decided that it was we who were the prizes to be won and not the men  we had married. To be sure, we love them - but we are the bedrock of our families.  We were the prizes. We just didn't know it at 21 and 22. 

We try to spend a week together, relatively alone with one another. I spent my week working on the Fat fish rug. It's a present for her and I was hoping to finish while I was there. Its cold in the mornings on Bow Lake in September. I would wake up late - 9:30 or 10:30am, all cuddled up in my blankets. She would have already started working and I could hear her but it never bothered me.

I'd wander down, brush teeth, wash face, and get my small breakfast. I'd head out to the sun porch to see the lake, greeting an old friend. This lake where I was a new bride and a new mom. This lake where I dipped a new born Emily's feet, and later taught her to swim - and to be calm and collected around water, just in case.  Living with a lake outside of your front door means you don't fuck around in teaching your child water safety. No child proof fences  on the shore. 

Some days I'd lay on the dock and dangle my feet in the water.  It's quiet on the water this time of year. Sometimes the loons call, but mostly it's water, wind and lapping waves.  I like to think that the lake tastes my skin and remembers me. 

I would make bohemian lunches - cut vegetables, cheese, a fresh peach and crackers and hand them through her office door while I would meander some more satisfying my own strange and inexplicable eating jags.  She doesn't even question it anymore. Before I get there she will say "Anything I need to buy?". I never let her. I am so particular about foods, and also not fussy at all.  I am my own odd waterfowl. 

In the afternoon, I yell upstairs and ask when she wants dinner ready as I know my friend has work hours that do not match mine at all. That being said, I am entirely content in silence, or watching my Korean dramas. Given my job, I crave silence in the not at work times. 

Later, drinks in hand, we talk about life, and children, and work, and spouses, and extended family.  With a friendship this long, there is frequently no preamble needed. We know the characters, we have the shorthand.  We laugh. We tell each other things we would only ever tell each other.  We will take those things to the grave. We may cry a little as we talk about caring for our aging parents and the things we never knew we would have to do. We both picture those 21 and 22 year old women and what we couldn't know. 

I tell her that sometimes I wish I could go back to that Dawn and Jess and tell them how beautiful and amazing they are.  Tell them how they will be comfortable, middle aged women who spend weeks in beach houses and lake houses and drink brandy old fashioneds.

 I want to go to Dawn and have the body I had at 21 - absolutely gorgeous and free from health bullshit. Yeah, there were some glimmers of the mental health challenges coming - but nothing beyond some mild depression. She did not see the big trains in the distance. She could not imagine that her organs would fail her, literally.

I want to go to that Dawn, but have my 56 year old brain. I want to give absolute no fucks about worrying if I was pretty enough, thin enough, worthy enough. I want to walk into spaces and know that I am the shit. I want to tell her that yes, catastrophe will come and the world will fall apart but she will always eventually stand back up. She will hate the man she married, and then she will fall back in love with him. She will hate motherhood, but always love her daughter, even as her daughter forces her to grapple with her own mothering. That daughter will make her laugh and also read her for filth later in life. 

The absolute gift of being menopausal and 56 is deciding to live my life as I want.

I say to Jess "Yes, I would like to be 21, but with my brain now."

"Would you though?"

Maybe not. This body was hard won and this brain was even harder. This brain knows the impossibility of the gray in life, of love that is not romantic, and of the longevity of a friendship in which you can tell something that you would never tell anyone else. This body knows the birth of a child, health problems that knocked her off her feet, and the joy of menopause. Seriously. I love it.

At night I listen to the loons calling to each other, staring up at the post and beam ceiling of the very old lake house. I wink at 21 year old Dawn. She looks at me and sees an older lady who can't tell her fuck-all. I wink at her again, and hold up my brandy old fashioned in salute.

Spiderweb

 My urge to write is returning. It is so strange to read through the Past-Dawn and wonder how she was so funny. SO brilliant. How did she do those things and write those words?

Some is youth; She was young and running after a child , and  in  school, and working full time.  I can feel those days, far away, brushing up against my skin. The urge to write, to get it out of my jumbly head, to find people who thought I was smart and funny on this crazy newfangled thing called the internet was unstoppable. No one can know what those days were like when so many of us threw these small digital lines out into the universe not knowing what we may find.

Once I became a professor my jumbly thoughts slowed down. I had students to entertain and words to say all day, every day. My desire to write anything faded. I would leave work a little after 6 p.m. and just crave silence. Luckily I live in a relatively quiet family and a fair amount of space is given. Like a houseful of cats, we can be in the same room, but not really doing the same thing. 

Once Emily began college in 2016, our house got blessedly Quiet. Like Quiet x2. Terrance and I walked around for the first month just absorbing the silence. The lack of mess. The decrease in our electric bill. The cessation of the demand for meals cooked. Did I mention the absolute lack of laundry? Maybe two loads a week! It was astounding. We regarded each other with no child in the middle of us, and found that we liked each other. 

Parenting - for us - was a marathon of grit and tenacity. Emily was so MUCH, and needed so MUCH, that the tether between Terrance and I became the finest of spider webs. Nearly invisible. I spent much of the 2000's and part of the 2010's waiting for our inevitable divorce. 

It was terrible. 0/10, do not recommend. 

And then she went to college. Don't get me wrong. She was still A LOT. Phone calls, texts - millions of texts - all day every day. As the parent who does 99.99% of the emotional labor I was still a living battery in service to my child. Her awkward, anxious, weird self did not have the sort of free wheeling, social experiences that her mother, or her father, had in college. As she was 1200 mile away, it prevented her from running home and crawling back into my uterus. (Yes, I planned for her to be away, away from home for college. She was too much of an only child and needed distance to keep her in school)

For all of that emotional labor in service to her, through high school, through undergrad, through grad school, and then "real world" jobs and apartments and breakups and new relationships, my relationship with her father has continued to grow stronger. 

Occasionally we fight about her. However, those fights feature far more hindsight and distance. We fight about her  personality, common sense, and understanding of the real world. We juxtapose what our lives were like at her age and how she just assumes how things work at that same age. I remind him that we protected her from all of those realities and so it is ridiculous for him to get worked up. I do it gently because I also get worked up (She had no idea what a car loan was, people. NO IDEA. Because her parents have given her two cars : / )

I will touch him on the shoulder or hold his hand and say "I am so glad we stayed together. I am so glad we made it through parenting her." He will murmur and kiss my hand. 

I can't speak to the marriages of others.  As our 30th wedding anniversary looms in October, I have learned that I don't know shit about other peoples marriages. I do know that our decision to have a child, and the reality of who that child is, was nearly the cutting of the cord between he and I.  We both love her, fiercely, but Jesus Christ.

(When someone broke up with her I immediately asked where that person lived so I could go cut her tires.  My sister asked the same thing. Emily said "Why did you both ask the same question". My response "You don't come from a line of sane rational women. We are going to fuck shit up.")

My love for Terrance has changed, as it should. It has grown less urgent, quieter. What I previously interpreted as controlling was his anxiety.  I am not an easy partner to live with - with my continuing stack of health issues, and mental health diagnoses...oh, and menopause.  I've really pushed the "in sickness and health" part of the marriage vows to the limit. 

However, we've found our way.