47

At 47 I no longer think of myself as 40-something but rather 50ish.  Time no longer stretches out in front of me like train tracks with the infinity sign up ahead.  Being 60 used to be beyond infinity somewhere out there, in a land far away.  In the land of my 30’s, I was mired in an unhappy marriage with small children to care for and though each day was busy, they were also interminable.  Overcome with the trials and tribulations of parenthood, I didn’t think concretely about what lay ahead.  I lived with the "someday" mentality.  "Someday I'll do this."  "Someday I'll do that.”  That someday was always somewhere out there down the road, waiting for me to catch up to it and I believed I would one day happen upon it like a child finding a penny in the road.

Perhaps it is a natural part of maturing or maybe it is because I have more time on my hands to contemplate these things now that my children are out of the wicked woods of adolescence that I began thinking more concretely about my goals and what it would take to achieve them.   Let’s face it, the amount of time I have left on Earth to do the things I want to do, to go to the places I want to go and to own the things I'd like to own, is finite.  I expect that the last decade or two of my life will not be spent hiking mountains, taking adventurous travels or rowing sea kayaks, right?  I mean,  the end point of my life is nearer at hand than my start point.   The things I dreamed about two decades ago seem like folly to me now.  I want to create new dreams and in so doing, I have to ask myself, what is important to me?  What do I want to achieve, see, experience and what do I need to do to make those things happen?  In asking the questions, I realize that the power to do those things lies within me, and it always has.

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It was somewhere after 40 when I came to terms with the fact that "someday" was in sight but the things I had dreamed of were not.  I wanted to beat myself up for having not made plans for “someday”.  I was stupid and naive.  If only I’d planned ahead!  I didn’t think these things consciously but there they were, riding the rails of my subconscious and following along in the caboose was the belief that I had my children too young.  I had not lived enough or worked enough.  I had not figured out who I was or what I wanted.  Now that I have allowed them to become conscious in the process of writing them down, I think that it was just as well to have had my children when I did.  Besides the usual health related arguments supporting childbearing during early adulthood, I’ve decided that early adulthood is also preferable because during that time we lack the wisdom, insight or foresight necessary to make meaningful long term plans.  Hell, 50% of us who are married with small children will no longer be married in another decade and we didn’t see that coming when we said, “I do”.  All the better I say, to be self-absorbed, frantic and frazzled in the pursuit of surviving the trials and tribulations of child rearing, parenthood, marriage and the balancing act of our multiple selves - self as mother or father, self as wife or husband, self as athlete, friend, child, employee, artist, member of CHADD, MADD or AA.  Is there still time to soak in the tub? Calgon, take me away!  Yes, what better time is there to be anxious, self-doubting, and to dream frivolously of touring the Canary Islands via yacht than in our childbearing years?  What is the dreaming of someday if not a form of a “Calgon, take me away” moment?  I say, the dreaming of frivolity served its purpose.  Those were dreams never meant to be fulfilled.

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When I was a teenager I knew without a doubt what it was I wanted to do and there was nothing my school teachers or my parents or any other naysayers could say or do to convince me that it was a fool’s errand.  I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I wanted to prove them wrong.  I pursued dance with single minded purpose throughout my youth and the dream of proving everyone wrong was realized.   Yet, I wanted more than that.   I wanted to be a soloist one day.  I can’t say that I gave it conscious thought.  This seems to be a trend.  I knew I was not principal ballerina material.  I did not have that extra something, the umami, that makes one stand out above all others.  I was okay with that, but I did want to rise out of the herd of the corps de ballet.  Perhaps my lack of daring to give form to this inchoate dream was part of the obstacle in making it so, but I’d proven the doubters wrong.  I was good enough to make it.  If only  “good enough” had been the only ingredient necessary to endure the pressures of the calling.  A tough skinned psychological makeup was what I lacked and I left dance in the nascence of my career.  

There were many things I loved about ballet such that even in my most downtrodden states, when I thought myself fat and ugly, someone doomed to be past over again and again, I still looked forward to the daily routine, the work in the studio, the progressive perfecting of the body’s positions, the movement through the toes, the building of strength, holding the leg higher and longer, and the control required in the air, on pointe or during adagio.  I looked forward to picking out my leotard in the morning and matching my eyeshadow and earrings to complement it.  I liked the excuse the cold drafty theatre provided to bundle up in leg warmers, sweaters and down booties and I liked the way whistling both echoed and got lost in the rafters.  I observed how the older girls in the company had applied their liquid eyeliner to make their eyes look larger and how they used white to highlight or browns to shade their features.  I’d come in the next day and try to replicate what I’d seen.   Like Pavlov’s dog, I became physiologically responsive to the sound of the orchestra warming up in the pit which was piped into the dressing room through the intercom.  It energized and excited me for the performance ahead.  The ringing, toots and strums of the various instruments was a cue.  It was  time to put the last bobby pin into my hairpiece and to step into costume.  I looked at myself in the mirror as the dresser, standing behind me, connected the hooks and eyes running up the bodice.  I felt beautiful and oh, so privileged.   Though the sum of these things equalled an enormous loss when I left, it was losing certainty of purpose which pained me most.

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I have few distinct memories of the following few years.  That period of time exists as a fresh painting wiped through with a wet rag. One snippet of conversation from that time has stayed with me.  I had gone to meet with my teacher of English composition.  It was the end of the quarter.  I sat in a chair facing his desk and he handed me my final assignment.  We discussed my writing and he asked me how it was that I still considered myself an artist now that I no longer was dancing.  I said that I still believed I was an artist.  I just hadn’t found my next vehicle for artistic expression.  The question highlighted for me the fact that I was adrift, searching, but I didn’t know what for.  Even without knowing the object of my calling, I still felt its tug.  

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Last August I took a short road trip to Whidbey Island.  I stayed at this wonderful place with gardens and bird fountains.  My routine was simple.  I woke, dressed, made my bed, joined my hosts for breakfast, and then I gathered my laptop and my water and made my way to the Adirondack chairs on the back lawn overlooking the gardens where bunnies roamed in and out of the landscape, bees gathered pollen from the lilies and birds splashed in the fountain.  As the shade moved during the day, so did my chair.  I inched myself farther and farther under a tree until my chair could move no farther lest I wind up sitting in the gardens themselves.  Every hour and a half I’d get up to stretch my legs.  If it was lunchtime I’d make myself a tuna fish sandwich and eat it while I strolled around the gardens listening to an audiobook on my phone.  On other breaks I might venture down to the neighboring dirt road which was closed off to through traffic by a chain which crossed the road at midway.  Large blackberries grew on the bushes across the road from a well kempt property with a large rolling lawn and scattered apple trees.   A broad woman stood on the front lawn raking debris.  Her hair was long and gray.  It was neither pulled up nor arranged in any particular fashion but rather hung there over the back of her dress.  It was the type of dress difficult to differentiate from a nightgown, a muumuu, white with large red flowers on it.  I wondered if she had adult children who would be lucky enough to inherit the property when she died.  She looked like she bought it years ago along with her husband who was now deceased as evidenced by her being the one doing the yard work.  She was capable and loved that home.  Why shouldn’t she stay on after his passing?  She took pleasure in the upkeep even if she was slower than she used to be.  I hoped she didn’t mind my stopping to pick blackberries.  The blackberry bushes were not on her property, still they seemed more hers than anybody’s.  They were on unimproved land across from her house.  Hers were the only eyes which gazed upon the bushes day after day while she tended the lawn or looked up from the kitchen window while she washed dishes.  That seemed enough reason for the bushes to be hers.  Indeed, I felt like a trespasser as I walked up and down that dirt road passing her house again and again during my 2 days on the Island but it was such a good road to stretch my legs on and to prepare myself for another sitting in the Adirondack chairs.  

When I took my break at 5pm, I kept thinking that I’d get one more writing session in before calling it a day but that never happened.  I’d go out in search of supper then take it to the water’s edge to eat where I sometimes watched the people and their small children walk past and remember what it was like to have my own small children.  It made me smile to remember.  I began reading a book from the shelf of the cabin I was staying in and when I returned from dinner I did not want to put it down just yet.  Before I knew it, the sun was setting and it was nearly 9pm.   There was a rhythm and structure in those two days.   I slept well and I exercised my body.  Life was balanced and I, at ease.

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Writing is many things to me.  It is  how I tease apart, sort and organize my mess of mixed up thoughts and feelings.  It is where I make meaning of things.  It is a way to know and to be known.  It is intimate in a way that conversations rarely are.  It is something that I look forward to, something that doesn’t have to wait for someday.  It doesn’t require a whole lot of planning or foresight and when my pen hits the page, there is certainty of purpose.       It is a way to connect to the universal.  It is a way to heal.