Midlife birthdays are famously fraught with self evaluation and creeping thoughts of mortality, and mid-pandemic midlife birthdays are just as moody. Caveat: sample size of one. This may not be a particularly fair moment for any of us to take stock of our progress toward honoring our one wild and precious life. One reason that I dread birthdays is the temptation to count and compare social media, text messages, and phone calls each year.
I had conveniently already been enmeshed in an engaging cycle of household chores, resentment, and lack of personal meaning for weeks when this year's birthday arrived. My husband, always a rising star, has an especially important Very Important job these days, and has been working, or at least looking at his phone, nearly around the clock. I can rarely discern whether he is refreshing Twitter or trading emails about the finer points of restoring democracy with other Very Importants while I load and unload the dishwasher, mop floors, endlessly launder, wipe bottoms, and restrain screaming children. He is quite right to point out that he is also unhappy, but I think there is a certain privilege in being happy for your own reason, the unhappiness that comes from living the middle paragraphs of your own substantive obituary that was written by someone other than a family member. My unhappiness is an invisible footnote to his obituary, and the meaning of my life, when it is over, will be but an appendage to whatever his menat.
Nora Ephron had no patience for this model. She advised women to be the heroines of their own lives, rather than the victims. She divorced famed journalist Carl Bernstein after he cheated with a mutual friend and used the whole mess as fodder for her next novel, Heartburn. Women may be capable of particularly impressive feats when we shed the need to be well-liked and thought pleasant, to avoid offending the broadest swath of people.
So my happiness, making meaning of my wild and precious life, is mine to grab and hold onto. If I find myself in the orbit of any other person, instead of on my own path, the misstep was mine, and the task of finding my footing again is also mine.
I granted myself this time in my darkened office on my birthday, while older child screams through bedtime with my husband, because I felt I deserved a decent and private wallow. It understandable to have been forgotten on my birthday by a few friends whose forgetting stung me, the day after Halloween, two days before an historically important presidential election, in the midst of a giant upswing in a global pandemic. This has been an extraordinarily difficult year for many of us. There ought to be a moment of very pure gratitude for the many friends who sent kind notes, and for my very dear friend who baked lasagna, brought lunch, and endured late autumn chill to reminisce with me on the porch this afternoon.
I have been struggling to break from monotonous chores, endless parenting, a life that while fortunate in so many ways could feel even before the pandemic like an ill-fitting garment. Like when you buy something very expensive, elegant, that should be perfect and objective has excellent resale value but you can never find an occasion for, and just do not feel like yourself in. It seems very possible that this cold a midlife thing, a hiatus from hobbies, introspection, the types of close adult relationships that are built on conversations that are not constantly interrupted by a child who should be asleep.
The media has dutifully noted that the pandemic is stealing women's careers out from under them, as the dual roles of reliable worker bees and default reliable person in family clash and meet a breaking point. I see echoes of this in my office, in the lives of friends and friends of friends, and is is a pity about our careers. Also somewhat strange that the conversation is always narrowed to careers, when there is so much else that women seem to have stripped from them.
Or maybe I should just own my feelings without projecting them unto others as some kind of larger cultural moment. Facts. I spend most of my free time placing shoes back in the front closet, hanging coats, picking up toys and dishes, cleaning surfaces that will be filthy again in less than 24 hours. I am married to someone who commented recently on the lack of chemistry in our relationship and my first thought was surprise that he had noticed that too. I have that left behind feeling sometimes, like I am holding on to friends who are not as much holding on to me. I also have new friends and though none of us have very much energy to devote to knowing each other as people, I am grateful for that.
I spend so much time considering how best to support our daughter, who has become more prone to somewhat extreme outbursts in recent months. "I want to misbehave!" She may shout as she blithely tosses a large basket of magna-tiles all over our living room. She crunched salt menacingly between her teeth at her first appointment with her play-based therapist. She is almost always articulate, intelligent, terribly observant, and there is so much of her that she regularly spills over. I can relate. It seems impossible to impose limits. She is simply wired to push past them without regard for any reasonable consequence. Is she angry? No, she is happy and excited, she declares. It is apparently too young to even consider diagnosing her with all of the things that I have googled. I wonder if she should be back in school and whether, when we decide to enroll her again, she will be able to return.
But the behavior is more of a mirror than a mystery. She has more feelings than she can contain. She cannot name them and they look like aggression but she rejects that characterization. She is out of sorts. She is possibly lonely but connecting with other children feels difficult when she has the chance. She is restless and intelligent and not capable of working her way out of what she feels trapped in.
The therapist, G, is gentle and playful. E admires G's "house," the office where we visit G, a large carpeted room with open shelves of hundreds of small figurines of unicorns, snakes, fire trucks, giraffes. We discussed preparing a toolkit of sorts for E, a stash of sensory toys she can engage with when she cannot calm her body down. I ask E how sad and happy and angry feel in her body. We snuggle and listen to the feelings song. I pretzel myself to find a way to connect or understand.
I wonder if some fraction of this effort would be better directed toward my own well-being. I wonder if she senses that her trail guides have wandered off the path, are cross with each other, overwhelmed by the elements. We can easily complicate what is simple. There is shouting in this house, and sadness. There are adults who, when visited by difficult feelings, turn every direction but towards each other.
It should be simple to say, this is the life that I wanted. Or this is not. And if it is not, it should be simple to say, that over there is more like the life I wanted. I have not found it simple. But Anne Lamott believes in shitty first drafts. And even though I am not, may never be, a real writer, my stranger-mentor-women are wise, strong writers who broke the mold, painfully.
A shitty first draft of my next life, a place I could walk to from here, with courage and planning. I want either a partner who delights in and delights me or I want to be free to delight in myself. I want to wander back toward that person who painted flower pots and could laugh until tears streamed down her face. I want to be as good a friend as she was, but I want to expect more from the people I love than she ever dared to. I want to listen to my own voice and let it drown out whoever it needs to. I want enough space and quiet to think my own thoughts. I want to always have a dog. I want to walk daily without regard for the weather.
I would like to take a long train trip, visit national parks, take our children to Ireland. I really know that I would rather spend my weekends and evenings reading books to our children than clearing dishes and sweeping floors, but somehow I am always cleaning and too infrequently snuggling. I would love to learn to play the guitar and sing with our childrens' sweet voices, although I strongly suspect at least of them is tone-deaf.
How do we find our way home to ourselves, remembering what we loved as children, how deeply and bravely we let ourselves feel? Shitty first drafts and other failed efforts. The difficult practice of deep listening.
Thirty-six is not early days. The novelist Doris Lessing wrote, whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. And how many times have I begun to do what I am meant to do, only to wander off and fold laundry or load the dishwasher. How embarrassing to be human and living a life that is a string of first drafts. How humbling to show up for oneself again and again, having already been disappointed, carrying the doubts of all the years. I nonetheless choose myself all over again this year. I choose reading by the fireplace, walks in the woods, writing to hear my own voice, wherever it takes me. Less scrolling, less scrubbing, less laundry. More connection, more quiet, more joy, clearing a space for new dreams.
