aging

capacity & tears

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“Well some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown…”

~ Tom Petty (1950-2017)

I cried at my desk today. The tears fell quietly as I was reading…

About Las Vegas.

Puerto Rico.

The Virgin Islands.

Mexico.

Houston.

Florida.

West Coast wildfires.

About the genocide against the Rohingya people in Mianmar.

The violence inflicted on innocent people by Spanish police during Catalonia’s elections for independence.

The relentless disease of racism in our country.

The brutality and militarization of American police.

The mass incarceration of black and brown people on American soil.

About our national addiction to the right to bear arms over the right to live free from the fear of violence.

The destruction of the EPA because who cares about climate change when there’s money to be made.

Last night I cried into my daughter’s belly as we listened to Tom Petty, who may have, in that moment, been breathing his final breaths. I remembered details of when I’d seen him in concert in 2009, on one of the most beautiful spring nights I have ever experienced, watching the most gorgeous sunset over the San Francisco Bay. Quite possibly the most incredible live performer I have ever seen and heard.

Last night it felt as if all of the rock stars of my childhood and teen years in the 1970s and 1980s were being taken away, one at a time. Last night I felt every single one of my years, hyper aware that when you’re in your forties, the people around you start to die more steadily. Should I be getting used to this by now?

Today I learned that a childhood friend had died of cancer in the past year. That was the piece that got me in that deepest place in my gut, and then the tears fell more quickly, less gently.

A dear friend recently told me that she thinks my “heart and mind have tremendous capacity.” Most of the time I think I can hold all this, the deep pain that is all around me.

The wounds I know my refugee clients hold from their experiences escaping war and losing everything they had known before.

The brokenness and injustice, in plain view or hidden, in every corner of my city, my state, my country, my world.

The image of the two black people who were pulled over by two white cops a few weeks ago when my family and I turned a corner in our car and we pulled over to film what was going on, just in case things went south and somebody with dark skin ended up dead. Thankfully they didn’t this time, but the imprint of the potential injustice that was happening before my eyes as the cops searched the car for what…? An excuse to lock up – or kill – two more black people for a broken tail light? For driving while black?

When I was younger I used to feel like a sponge, super sensitive to all that was around me. But I’ve learned with age that it’s possible to connect with the pain all around without being quite so absorbent. How to hold the pain without it getting stuck inside. Still, though… Last week I took Facebook off my phone, with no regrets. I needed the reminder that I am the one in charge of what information I take in, and when.

* * * *

Last Friday night and Saturday was Yom Kippur. For the first time in many years, I felt moved to actually fast completely. I still drank water so that I wouldn’t get a three-day headache, but this year it felt good not to put anything else in my body. I also powered off my phone for the day, which felt amazing. During breaks from the services I read and wrote in my journal. I walked around and talked to people. I sat with two very tiny babies and their moms whom I’d just met.

I cried a lot. Not just during the Yizkor memorial service, but at other moments too. While the most incredible cellist played the Kol Nidre melody, accompanied by organ and choir and cantor, and even more magically, when he played the melody solo. While I closed my eyes and connected with each of my relatives who have died, picturing each of their faces in my mind’s eye, feeling them close.

The veil between life and death feels thin at Yom Kippur, and I held both the humbling awe of that understanding and the comfort of feeling held by my ancestors and even my tiny baby daughter who died before me.

I don’t take any of it for granted. I’ve been through hardship, tragedy, loss and struggle. I know how incredibly lucky I am for the stability and goodness of my life. For all of the people I get to love and hold dear. For my health. For my home.

For my life.

It feels like an incredible responsibility, to hold that gratitude along with the awareness that things are so bad and so hard and so incredibly messed up in so many places outside my safe little cocoon.

The awareness that there is so much work to be done, so much light I need to summon up and magnify to help balance out the dark.

And the awareness that it is all so temporary and fleeting. And so precious and beautiful. Even the tears.

 

on cankles and self love

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ClavicleExcerpt from Shrill, the amazing book everyone should read, exploring our views about fatness, by the incredible Lindy West.

Dear 15-year-old French boy I had a crush on the year I was an exchange student,

I still remember your name, I probably always will. I can almost remember your face 30 years later. You were adorable and you had a nice smile. You wore v-neck sweaters and button down shirts and nice pressed jeans like French boys did then, in the eighties. You were popular, you made your friends laugh, you made me laugh as we all sat in cafes after school and drank coffee from small cups and shared cigarettes, like French teenagers do. You and that one other guy, you were like the ring leaders, but no one seemed to mind because you made us laugh.

I doubt you remember me. I was only there for one semester, visiting your school all the way from California. The American girl who spoke fluent French because she had lived in France as a little kid. The one who wanted so much to fit in, to be as French as she possibly could be, who bought her own v-neck sweaters and smoked her first cigarette and drank coffee along with you and all your friends. It was so exciting to feel like I could fit in, like I could belong, even for just a little while.

You were nice to your friends, you were nice to me. Until that day you weren’t. But I doubt it even registered. I doubt you even knew what you did was hurtful.

You don’t remember, but I do. 30 years later, an amazing life, an amazing partner, an amazing family and an amazing community of my own, and I still remember.

We were sitting in a cafe with our friends and I was sitting next to you. I’m sure I was beside myself with excitement that you had sat next to me that day. I’m sure my heart was beating really fast. I’m sure it was the moment I had written to my friends back in California about, the moment I had hoped for. When you would notice me. You looked down at my legs next to yours, and you put your hand on my thigh, and you looked at me. I can’t remember exactly what you said, but the look on your face said everything: Look at the way your thighs expand when you sit. 

I can’t remember what I said or did in response. I know I must’ve been stunned. I know my heart cracked into a million pieces. I’m sure my face turned red. Nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. I think I looked at you questioningly and you laughed it off, the cruelty already dissolving in your mind, I’m sure. Then you started to tell a story to the group, and I sat there, still next to you, invisible but stuck in that booth between you and the wall.

I should have fucking hated you. I should have slapped you and asked what your mother would do if she heard you talk to a girl that way. But I didn’t. Instead my heart cracked, and I looked at my thighs, and it stuck. For life. The way my thighs expand when I sit. As all thighs do, by the way, even your skinny little French boy thighs in your pressed jeans.

I hope you grew up and never hurt another person like that. Or if you did, I hope you got shit for it from some girl more confident, at 15, than I was.

****

Dear friend from freshman year in high school who invited me to your slumber party,

Some years ago I was watching 30 Rock for the first time, catching on to the Tina Fey craze a few years later than everyone else. There was an episode where Tina Fey made a comment about a part of the body I’d never heard of before: her cankles. I laughed so hard I cried. And I cried, too. That’s it! I yelled to my husband. That’s what I have! Cankles! 

I didn’t know whether to be happy, relieved, proud, or incredibly sad that I had cankles. But at least, in that moment, I didn’t feel alone. If there was a word for it, if Tina Fey had them too, clearly I wasn’t the only woman on earth with thick calves and not-very-defined ankles.

Did you know that word 30 years ago, even though your legs were the opposite of mine? Even though you had thin legs and thin calves and thin lovely ankles, and you could wear heels without feeling like a duck? Do you remember what you said to me at your slumber party, when all of us were lying on your bed and we had our legs up against the wall?

This is what you said: “Ohmygod! You don’t have ankles!” You probably don’t remember, and maybe you can’t believe you even said it. Maybe you would feel terrible now if I reminded you. I hope so. But I remember. And it stuck. I’ve held it for all those years. My ankles that are barely ankles. My fat calves that go right to my feet. My cankles.

I thought about my cankles when I took a walk this morning. I thought about the way they hold my legs up, help my feet move, allow me to be able to take my morning walks. They work well, as well as your thin ones, I’m sure. Sometimes I joke that in my next life I’m going to have kick-ass amazing ankles and thin lovely calves, maybe I might even wear 4-inch heels. But does it really matter? Do I really care, or was a seed just planted that night at your slumber party that no longer belongs there?

****

Dear cute guy I had a mad crush on my freshman year in college,

Somewhere on some ancient diskette somewhere I have a computer diary I kept during the year I knew you. Probably 90% of it is about you, and the insane all-consuming crush I had on you. I don’t think you had a clue how in love with you I was, partly because I was only one of probably a dozen girls – maybe more – who felt the same way that year. But also because you didn’t see me.

I don’t mean you didn’t know I existed because you did. We were friends. You were nice to me. You were nice to everyone. You shared your beautiful smile generously. You flirted generously, making all of us who adored you feel like maybe, if only…

But for me there was one problem with that: You didn’t see me. Not that year, when I carried 60 extra pounds on my body, more than I felt comfortable with. You didn’t see me that year, after I had spent the previous year emotionally eating Ben & Jerry’s after my parents’ divorce. You didn’t see me when I was fat. You didn’t see me because I was fat.

Then one day, during my junior year, I ran into you on campus. I had lost much of my extra weight by then and I wasn’t fat anymore. You noticed me as I walked by and you invited me to sit down. You asked me how I’d been and you gave me your undivided attention. You were still nice to me, but in a different way. Because for the first time, you could see me.

I was flattered. I probably ate it up. But it hurts now, when I think about it. Because nothing about me had changed in those few years except my exterior. Well, maybe one other thing had changed: I was more confident without those extra pounds. But should I have been? Could I have learned to be a big girl and also love myself unconditionally? Could I have been a confident fat girl? Would you have seen me, sooner, then?

****

I have been the fat girl. I have been the thin girl. I have been somewhere in between. Regardless of my weight, my thighs expand when I sit. My ankles aren’t fat and neither are my calves, but I am built a certain way and I didn’t get well defined ankles this time around, and my calves are thick. But the thing is, even when I was fat, when I wore a size 16 and not a size 4, I was still me. I was still beautifully perfectly me.

Here’s another part of my body I discovered I had as I got older, as the weight came off: clavicles. It’s true, well defined clavicles are for thin girls. When you’re fat, they hide. My clavicles now can hold oceans. I love them. I used to love them because they meant I was thin. Now I love them because they are part of me.

And I love my flabby thighs that expand when I sit, with the stretch marks that remind me, each morning when I get out of the shower, that I was once fat. They used to make me cringe, my stretch marks, and fill me with regret. If only I hadn’t eaten all that Ben & Jerry’s… If only. But they don’t make me cringe anymore. Because they’re mine, part of me, and they tell a story.

I used to tell this victory story about how I gained weight really fast because of what was going on emotionally in my life, and then lost the weight in a healthy way; how I refound the body that felt like me. But I don’t tell that story anymore, it no longer serves me. The only victory, I understand now, is that I learned to love myself.

I think 90% of why I was miserable when I was fat was because I felt invisible and unworthy of love in that body – ashamed, ugly, hidden. We are cruel about fatness in our society. I’ve been cruel about fatness – my own and others’. And we raise thinness way up next to holiness, that thing we should all aspire to be: Thin. And if we get there, all of a sudden we are seen.

Take a moment to question why that is. Take a moment to question whether we can do better. As women. As men. As a society. Toward ourselves and toward others.

****

Dear 15-year-old girl I used to be,

One day you will be 45 and you will be thin. You will have clavicles that can be seen and they will hold oceans. You will be seen. You will see yourself and know you are beautiful.

You will also wish your boobs were bigger, not smaller. You will wish you had more curves, not less. You will still joke that one day in your next life you will have kick-ass ankles and wear heels. You will still wish your thighs were more firm.

But you will love your body. And you will appreciate all that you can do in it. And you will find comfort in that. And you will feel gratitude for all that you are. Because you are amazing. Your body is amazing.

Trust me. I know. And I love you.

the beginning

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Jewish Couple

(Photo: Rudi Halbright)

****

Look how young we look… Look at my hair, that’s my natural brown.

Look at my hair. It was so full and thick.

Mine too, long and curly and brown.

Look at my arms. I’ve got to start lifting weights again.

Look at our skin.

All that natural collagen.

Remember that night, when we stayed up all night and danced and then watched the sun rise in the desert?

Wow, look at us. We’re kinda hot.

And so young…

Scene: My husband and I are looking through photos on the computer. Photos from 2000 to today. We’re looking for something in particular but we keep getting sidetracked, distracted by how much younger we looked… when we were 15 years younger.

It’s kind of funny. We can’t help but laugh at ourselves as we do it. Realizing the cliche of longing (just a little) for plumper skin, flatter abs, hair free of grays, a few less cracks in our souls.

And yet… We’re never going to be as young as we are right now. We laugh that in 20 years we’ll be doing the same thing, except the photos we’ll be looking at will be from 2015.

There are definitely times when I would love to be able to dance all night again. I’d even love to dance for a few hours somewhere besides my kitchen, to music louder than what comes from my iPod speakers.

But what I couldn’t do then that I can do now is dance in my kitchen with my daughter. And she’s so fun to dance with. And in between moves she grabs me to give me huge bear hugs.

And that man, the one I met in the desert, we made her together.

I think about all we’ve done together since we met more than 16 years ago. Everything we’ve lived. What we’ve created. What we’ve lost. What we’ve built and rebuilt. The love we’ve brought into our family. The children we love and help to grow. The grownups we have become and the way we help each other shine.

We were just beginning, then, in those photos. And God willing, we’re still just at the very beginning.

the moment

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I was out last night when my children when to sleep. They had pizza and watched football with Daddy, jumped on the new trampoline we brought home yesterday. As I left for my book club, they were dancing in the living room. I came home a few hours later and went into each of their rooms to kiss them – as I do every night – before heading to bed myself. Each of them opened their eyes briefly when I came in, recognizing me in a peaceful haze of dreamy sleep, then closed them again and rolled over. They don’t usually do that;  they are usually so deeply asleep I can hold my face to the tops of their heads  and breathe in  their smells or kiss their warm necks without a single stir.

This is it, that future I imagined for myself when I was still a little girl. This is the place where I am surrounded by love, presented with purpose, in a house filled with noisy chaos. This is the family I couldn’t even have dreamed up, but which found me nonetheless.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

Before I left for book club last night, I stood at the table with my daughter and looked into her eyes – those hypnotic, deep, dark blue eyes embraced by the thickest, blackest eyelashes, those eyes that droop a bit at the ends, so kind and so sparkly and so intense at the same time. We stood facing each other and sang  John Legend’s All of Me to each other, spontaneous, unrehearsed, perfect. The entire song, from start to finish.

As I listened to her voice and mine, how they are similar and how they are unique, the way they go together, I noticed how powerfully my daughter sang. She sang each word with clarity. Confident, expressive. I thought about how she is ascending in her life, finding her voice, harnessing and embracing her power and her place in the world. I could hear my own voice singing with hers, also clear and loving, but a little more timid. Not because I am afraid to sing loudly, but because that is not what I was there to do in that moment. As I sang with my daughter I allowed myself to be her reflection, so that she could see how brightly her light shines. It is not my time to overshadow her, it is my time to raise her up, to help her shine, to support her growth into the amazing woman I already have glimpses of.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

****

It takes daily acceptance to age gracefully, without resistance. I have not mastered this – let’s just say it’s where my ship is pointed, my intention. Lately I’ve been unable to look in the mirror without noticing the way my eyes are changing. They’re still big and wide and dark, my eyelashes still long (though not as thick as they were when I was my daughter’s age). But they are more sunken than they used to be. Tiny lines reveal themselves in the light and the shadowy thinning skin underneath them is persistent, highlighting the sunkenness. I know I am the only one noticing these details about myself; we tend to dissect ourselves with the greatest diligence and scrutiny. Yet I feel aware of the subtle yet persistent whisper that reminds me, You are aging.

My husband reminds me that I am younger in this moment than I will ever be again. Maybe so, but I don’t feel (or look) young anymore. And it’s kind of caught me off-guard.

My children are young. Everything is open to them, everything is possibility. Their skin is unblemished, their foundation solid. Their eyes are wide and aware. They are assertive and fierce. Everything is a question, everything is desire. There is so much that they need, and they trust completely that it will all be provided. By me, by Mommy. By Daddy.

I had the realization recently that one day my children won’t need me in the way they do now. One day they won’t need to talk to me every day, to ask me a million questions. One day they will remember to wash their hair and clip their nails and do their laundry all on their own. One day they won’t need my hugs and kisses to begin their days. One day they will find their own answers.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

****

My father is a very handsome man. He was a handsome boy, a handsome young man, a handsome middle-aged man, and now he is a handsome older man. The older he gets, the more he resembles his father, whom I only knew as an old man. My father grayed late, but now his hair is almost completely white. His skin is thinner, more spotted. His body, affected by Parkinson’s, more unreliable. His hands still feel the same as those younger hands that held my tiny little girl hands. His own eyes are more sunken. But those eyes… They are the same eyes. Dark and deep and alert, reflective, loving. When I look at his childhood photos I see the same eyes. When I stumbled onto the black and white studio portrait from his twenties where he is dressed in a black suit, holding a cigarette like a classic movie star, I see the same eyes. When I close my eyes and find myself at my desk in my bedroom reviewing multiplication tables with my young father, I see the same eyes.

I see them now, within his older, more hazy, more sunken eyes that are somehow the same and different together. Just like my own familiar yet different eyes.

I think of the fragility of an aging parent, how I connect to this and also to my own aging. How one amplifies the other. I think of the contrast between my children and my father, and the place on the spectrum – somewhere in the middle – where I find myself.

This is it. This is the moment. The moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

on fear and courage

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I went ziplining with my daughter and a small group of women and one man a few weeks ago. My daughter was the only one I knew well in the group, but there is something about cruising 210 feet above the ground in 30 seconds, between two trees that stand a quarter mile apart from each other, that brings people together.

I was absolutely terrified but I knew I had no choice but to try it. I’m not much of a fear of missing out kind of person, for me it was more of a fear of disappointing myself, a fear of regret kind of thing. I knew that if I had the opportunity and didn’t take it, I would be letting myself down.

I told myself that I had already done something much more terrifying: I had jumped out of a plane on a tandem skydive for my 25th birthday, an unforgettable experience. How much more frightening could ziplining be? But then I told myself that I was almost 20 years older now, a wife, a mother, more personally aware of things like pain and suffering and loss… and death. I’ve noticed something about inhibition as I’ve gotten older: Certain things are more scary now than they were when I was in my twenties, while others feel so much more surmountable.

There was nothing logical about my fear. I knew that if anyone had died or been seriously injured on that zipline, the place would no longer be in business. I knew I wouldn’t fall. I knew I wouldn’t crash into a tree or fall off a platform. I knew that the worst thing that could happen was that I would spin around, go too slow and have to drag myself in at the end – basically that I wouldn’t get to go fast enough to have the most fun possible. Our guides were phenomenal and professional, I knew I truly had nothing to fear.

But I could still feel my heart thumping, fast and hard and loud. I still couldn’t believe what I was about to do.

My 11-year-old daughter was 100% totally and completely unafraid. She knew there was no real risk, so why waste a second being scared? She was excited and confident and I did my best to follow her lead. The other people my age and I were not surprised; we talked about how invincible you feel when you’re a kid – of course she was undaunted and brave. That’s also her personality – she came into this world with things to do and she has never looked back.

I asked myself when that changes, when fear enters in and why. I told our guides I would need to be one of the first to try the first zipline in our group of nine because I knew that watching eight people go ahead of me would give me too much time for further freak-out. My daughter said she would go first, and I would go second.

There were seven zips, and there was the option to stop after three. The fourth and fifth were the longest – the quarter-mile ones that last for 30 long seconds, provide the most beautiful views and are the most exciting. I knew I had no choice but to do all seven. Not because of any pressure from my daughter, but again… that fear of regret thing. And the determination that I could turn my fear into one of those surmountable things.

I was shaking and about to cry after the first short zip. I knew that my response was purely physical, it felt beyond reason and out of my control. I wondered what had just happened in my body chemistry as I experienced fear, and as I overcame that fear enough to do something absolutely frightening. What was going on inside my body that caused my hands to shake and brought the tears I did everything in my power to breathe through – all of these physical feelings I was having after having successfully crossed the first line and reached the second platform? Why was I clinging for my life to that tree trunk, afraid beyond logic of being so high up while I could see, not six inches from my face, the harness that would keep me from falling?

DCIM100GOPRO

I shook a little less after the second zip across, and by the third I was no longer shaking and I no longer felt like crying. Then I found myself staring down the fourth zip – the longest, highest, fastest one. The one where the opposite platform – my destination – was so far away that I couldn’t see it nor the guide who would be waiting there for me. We were told to look to our left at the incredible view of the Smoky Mountains as we zipped across, that it was breathtaking.

My heart raced, and I surrendered to trust, lifted my feet and told the guide on my platform that I was ready and she could let me go. My body felt rigid but I was determined to stay straight and move gracefully across. I could hear myself breathing as if I were laboring to birth one of my children – rhythmic breathing, consistent, loud and determined. I did look to my left and I did see the view, quickly, afraid that if I turned my head too much I would start to spin. It was breathtaking. And then I was on the other side. And I almost cried, but not from fear. From elation, from relief, from pride in myself.

I zipped back across that same distance on the fifth run. By then I felt like the fear was no longer a part of my experience, a thing I had surmounted. The sixth and seventh zips were short and easy and I even let go completely of my hands and let myself spin and play. The final tree’s platform sat way high up and the tree was small and swayed in the wind as it held us – 8 women, 1 man and 2 guides. I can’t say I felt stable until I was back on solid ground, but by then on that final platform, I knew completely that I was safe.

****

I’m not sure exactly when, but sometime in the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware of the finite nature of the years I have ahead of me. That is assuming, of course, that nothing unexpected happens and I get to follow in the footsteps of my paternal family and live an abundantly long life that takes me almost to 100. Ninety-something is a lot of years, and yet it feels like not enough as I find myself about halfway there. I have moments of panic where I think, How did I get to my forties already? Have I done enough already? Have I wasted time I can never get back? My usual response to calm myself down is to think of all the things I have done – the big things – and tell my story in a different way: My, how full and abundant the last 44 years have been! Look at me. I am so incredibly lucky.

Still, I feel closer to aging now than I ever have. My father struggles with a degenerative disease and I can’t help but wonder how long I have left when I can still call him on the phone. I think about my beloved great aunt who died two years ago at almost 96, how even though she lived overseas I could always call her and hear her voice, and how even though I can’t anymore it still feels like she is close. My parents’ generation has now become the grandparents, and my generation – we are the grownups. We are the ones holding the challenges our parents once held – the aging parents, the mortgages, life insurance policies, illnesses. We are the ones becoming aware of our fragility, of our finiteness.

I ask myself if it’s death I am afraid of. I’m not sure. When I was a child, maybe around my daughter’s age, I was sometimes afraid of going to sleep, fearful that I wouldn’t wake up. I’m not sure where that fear came from and I don’t remember ever speaking to my parents about it. I was a bit of an insomniac then, and I would stay up very late, the last one in the house to go to sleep. I would lay thinking and sometimes I would worry, and eventually sleep would take over. I felt relief in the mornings when my parents would wake me up and I was still very much alive.

****

I heard a story once about a very old woman who was on her deathbed. Someone was interviewing her for a magazine article and they asked if she was afraid of dying. She had a smile on her face and a sense of peace in her entire being, and she responded that she wasn’t afraid at all because she would at last be reunited with her baby. She had lost a child over 65 years before, at birth, and decades later she still waited to see her again.

Tomorrow will be seven years since I held my daughter Tikva as she breathed her final breaths. She feels closest to me in the most full and courageous moments of my life – which are sometimes also some of the most challenging moments. It’s as if she is saying to me, Yes! This is how to live your life deeply. I could feel her spirit whirling high up in those trees I zipped through. I knew very soon after she died that the grief I had to work through was for me, not for her – that she didn’t need me to spend the rest of my days sad and bitter because she was gone. I knew that I would honor her life most powerfully by living my life well. By truly living.

****

I consider myself an emotionally courageous person. The hardest parts of life don’t scare me, and I have been through my share. I am an easy crier, tears don’t scare or worry me, my own or others. I worry more when I’m going through something difficult and I can’t seem to cry, because it usually means I’m stuffing something down that will eventually catch up with me. (And it always does).

In seventh grade peer counseling class, I learned about active listening, and I found a language for something that already came easily to me. I know now that I was learning then about the power of compassion, about unconditional love. I learned early that connection is what I live for, that friendships feed my soul. I don’t shy away when those around me are going through something challenging. I can sit with emotional pain, with loss, grief, sorrow and anger – others’ and my own. In this space, I am unafraid.

But I have always felt much braver emotionally than I am physically. At least that’s what I came to believe. Maybe that’s just the story I’ve been telling myself and it’s actually just that – a story, one that isn’t really true.

I used to say that I can handle any amount of emotional pain, it’s the physical pain I can’t do. But then I gave birth. And I had shingles. And I’ve struggled with an autoimmune condition that at times has been incredibly painful. And I’m still here, a little scarred, a little cracked, but very much intact. Still courageous. Perhaps more courageous now than before. Definitely much more aware of the preciousness of life.

I used to say that I my strength is in my heart, in my mind, not in my body. But it takes great strength, great courage, great faith and fearlessness to live with a chronic illness – and to live well. And I think of all the physical things I have tried at different times in my life: Skydiving. Ziplining. Boxing lessons where I sweat more than I ever had before, and which made me feel like a total badass. Dance classes where I had so much fun even while getting tangled in my feet. Rock climbing at the climbing gym and feeling mighty and high (and totally badass) as I looked way down to the floor. Lifting weights with my husband when he was a personal trainer, spotting him on weights twice as heavy as those I lifted myself. In perfect form on the pilates reformer, unleashing the strength in my core. That moment when I had done yoga long enough that even the most challenging poses came with ease. And even those six months I spent trying out running before I acknowledged that it wasn’t for me.

****

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where fear originates, and also what creates fearlessness. I’ve been thinking about the true meaning of courage and all the ways every single one of us is courageous. I’ve been thinking about aging and death, and what it is that scares me when I remember, Holy shit, I’m 44?! I’ve been thinking about how fragile we all are, and how mighty we are at the same time.

I don’t think they are exactly opposites, but perhaps fear and courage are two sides of the same coin. Perhaps they need each other, cannot exist without each other. Perhaps it is fear that inspires courage, and I needed the fear to push me off that platform and across those trees.

It’s been a strange summer, one in which I have spent a good deal of time extremely aware of the fragility of life. The days I sat at my father’s bedside last month reminded me of the days I spent in the NICU sitting with Tikva seven summers ago, as she struggled to breathe and even on those days when she breathed a little more easily. I remembered the fear I felt in those moments when doctors and nurses would rush to her bedside in response to a code pink, and also the grace I felt knowing that she was held – I was held – by something so much bigger.

I held the image of the red tail hawk so tightly throughout Tikva’s short life, and seven years ago tomorrow I released it as her spirit was finally able to soar. When I went skydiving almost 20 years ago, what I loved most were the moments before the parachute opened up, the moments that were the closest thing to soaring I have ever experienced, when I was literally floating on the wind.

I tapped in just a little to that feeling as I zipped across the trees two weeks ago. Even in those moments of fear and courage, I knew I was held. And like my Tikva and the red tail hawk, I knew that it was up to me to play.

DCIM100GOPRO

another day in paradise

/ gal / 2 Comments

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Summer has felt elusive this year, like New Year’s Eve in the way that New Year’s Eve so often feels anticlimactic, idealized and seldom as satisfying as we hoped it might be. It’s the middle of July, school starts again in 3 weeks, and I don’t feel like I’ve had a summer yet. On Facebook, it seems like everyone I know has taken their families to Italy this summer. I traveled to Italy many times to visit my grandparents there when they were still alive, so it’s not the novelty of it that I crave; mostly it’s just the desire to be somewhere summer-like, to be on vacation.

I was home from California with my son for five days, and on the sixth day I was on a plane again – unexpectedly – heading back there, this time on my own. I landed in San Francisco late in the evening after the unfamiliar experience of traveling without children (I felt like an impostor, as if I was play-acting the role of solo traveler) and headed straight to my father’s bedside. I spent the night holding his hand.

While in California, I learned that I appreciate the people who care for the elderly and the fragile with the same profound gratitude that I appreciate those who cared for my infant daughter in the NICU. I learned that – after years regretting that I had never gone back to school to become a social worker or a nurse, and that now I felt too old to do so – I have no desire anymore to become a social worker or a nurse. I learned that sitting by the bedside of a loved one feels the same, no matter their age.

I learned that plans change. And change. Constantly.

****

I spent some time in the apartment my father has lived in for several years, and got lost for a few hours in photo albums of his childhood and my own. It was cathartic, reminding me again that much of my childhood was easy and free, stable and good, filled with so much love. It reminded me that the love I have for my father is built on the unconditional love he has always had for me.

I don’t think our essence changes between childhood and old age. I think at our core, in the purest version of ourselves, we are always the same. I could see in a six-year-old version of my father, in his 22-year-old portrait, in the 40-year-old man who carried ten-year-old me on his shoulders, the same person whose hand I held that week. His dark, striking and loving eyes, his serious brow, his warm, sometimes mischievous smile are the same.

Walking up to his apartment, I met one of his friends, a woman in her nineties who told me part of her story of survival during World War II. She told me about the concentration camp where her brother had been, the one she had survived, the one where, in her own words, her father’s body was burned. She was beautiful and I felt compelled to touch her soft hair as I told her how sorry I was for all she had suffered, and how thankful I was that I had met her.

Afterwards, I went into my father’s apartment and sat in his recliner and cried. I thought about things – literal physical things, the objects we gather and accumulate in a lifetime, some of which get passed on, others that are given away, still others that are lost or taken from us. I thought about a four-bedroom house that had become a studio apartment; and about my own boxes and bins of things gathered like treasures in my own basement. Will somebody one day read the dozens of journals I started keeping when I was ten years old, which have followed me in their boxes all these years? Will my photo albums or digital photos accurately tell the stories of who I was and who I became? Is there such thing as a true story, or are we constantly curating our memories, filtering what and how we want to remember through the lens of each present moment? How was I experiencing my father in that moment in his apartment, in light of where we were now and what still awaited us?

Do any of those things matter, or is it only the less tangible that will be remembered – distilled down to that one pure thing: LOVE?

That day, everywhere I turned there was music from the 1980s playing. I haven’t been able to escape the pull of my home town in the past month, so it seemed only fitting that the soundtrack following me matched the reality that every corner I turned held a memory.

I have a sewn-on patch of a rainbow on the knee of my jeans in that picture of my father carrying me on his shoulders. It reminded me that I always had patches on my pants, sometimes patches over patches. It reminded me of the transparent rainbow sticker I stuck on my bedroom window, which made things rainbow in my room when the sun shined through just right.

When I told my father about the photos I had looked through, he remembered the brown and yellow tie he wore as a child in his kindergarten more than 65 years ago. He remembered the name of the school.

****

Heading to his apartment, I passed a man as I crossed the street who smiled hello. He said to me, “Another day in paradise.” It was warm outside and smelled like flowers, and as I kept walking I spotted a single tropical orange-yellow flower that, indeed, belonged in paradise.

The ten days I spent back home again weren’t easy, but they didn’t feel insurmountable. I may not have had much of a summer so far, but I knew I was exactly where I needed to be and that gave me peace. There was work to do there – big work, loving work. I am in awe of the things my sister and I have achieved as a team on behalf of our father, and the love and trust that made it safe and nurturing to have even the most difficult conversations. Once more, I was held and nourished and housed by my closest friends, the ones who know me most deeply, the ones who brought dinner and wine and chocolate at the end of a difficult day.

I couldn’t argue with that man as I crossed him in the street – he was right, it was beautiful there on that gorgeous perfect day in that lovely place where I grew up. I’m not sure what paradise is supposed to look like – I imagine the picture is different for everyone – but I wonder if maybe it is meant to contain some of the messy difficult stuff as well as the beautiful things. Maybe, even, the muck is the place where the beauty is able to reveal itself – like the love in my father’s eyes or the softness of his hand. I miss him now that I am so many miles away; I got used to spending each day with him. I am grateful for that time and it comforts me even more now to speak to him on the phone.

****

When I finally returned home again to my family, my daughter hugged me for at least five minutes. She’d been at camp and we hadn’t seen each other for a month and it felt perfect to just hold her and stare into her sparkly eyes. Then I went upstairs, where my son was just falling asleep, and I whispered to ask if he wanted to cuddle. “Yah,” he whispered back, and I held him on the rocker for a long time, my nose nuzzling his curly hair and my hand on his soft cheek. It was the same softness as my father’s hand, and I felt in that moment the way in which there is no separation between my love for my children and my love for my father. And I cried quietly and exhaled all I had held since the beginning of summer, the surmountable-but-still-challenging stuff that called on my very best self to reveal herself.

“It’s better with Mommy home, isn’t it?” my husband asked my son this morning. “Yah,” he replied. Then he said to me, “Mommy not going anywhere? Mommy stay here?“

Yes, my love, Mommy stay here.

on humanness & love

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Far within me, where the memory of what I am is still unclouded, a little child is waking up and making an old man’s mask weep. (Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue)

I just got back from a two week trip back home with my son. Back home is where I’m from, where I grew up, but it’s not really home anymore, hasn’t been for a while. My sister and I moved our father into a skilled nursing facility during these two weeks, and I realized that I had just let go of my last remaining tie to my home town since he was now living in another city. It’s been twenty years since I’ve actually lived in my home town, but my childhood – both the easy breezy years and the more complicated ones – still reverberates so deeply there. Almost as if time travel is a possibility, in that way that all time is happening at once.

I walked outside there one night around 9pm and inhaled, and I immediately started to cry. It was the air, warm but not yet hot evening summer air. The smell of the place where I grew up. So deeply familiar it hit me within my cells and all of a sudden I was 10 years old again, riding my bicycle home from playing at a friend’s. I could even smell the swampy wetlands miles away on the bay, mixed with the bay leaves and pine and eucalyptus of Northern California. The smell of the dry golden hills around my flat suburb.

It wasn’t all messy, it wasn’t all complicated. There were some really good and simple years when I swam and biked and made mud pies and drank Slurpees from the 7/11. Ate ice cream from Baskin Robbins. Bought gum balls by the handful from the drug store back before all drug stores were chains.

I grew up in an insanely beautiful place. Large mature trees forming a ceiling of green as they meet each other in the center of a street. Green nestled by golden hills spotted with giant knotty old oak trees. Foggy mist cooling off very hot mornings, seagulls a bit off their course, reminding me that the ocean is just beyond those hills.

I could never afford to live now where I grew up, but I feel lucky that I got to be a kid there.

****

I was struck daily during those two weeks away by this: That we are all so fragile and also so incredibly strong at the same time. I thought repeatedly about resilience, about the way life pushes and shoves and beats us down – and how we manage to bounce back up, hopefully stronger, wiser, kinder. I thought about kindness and love and patience, how much patience is required by compassion. I thought about being gentle with myself, because I am always reminding those I care about to be gentle with themselves.

It’s incredibly hard to watch my father lose his independence because of a degenerative disease that is not going to get better. It’s hard to see him need so much help to do basic things. I want to lash out at the son-of-a-bitch that is Parkinson’s for taking away his ability to trust his body, the strength of his legs, the words in his mouth. I want to make it all better but I can’t. The words of a geriatric counselor ring repeatedly in my ears: Remember to let your father have his own experience.

Something about the container of my childhood home town, reminding me of my father when he carried me on his shoulders as we flew kites, hung a basketball net above our garage, biked with me to get deli sandwiches or ice cream. Those memories were formed a long time ago but they remain deep in my cells. I imagine myself in my nineties able to summon them as if they were yesterday. My 96 year old great aunt could do that, become a little girl in her parents’ arms again just by closing her eyes.

****

I turned 44 while I was in California. My son sang Happy Birthday with me in bed that morning and I opened cards from my husband and daughter who were far away, and from family near and far. I spent the afternoon with girlfriends I’ve known for many years, women my age and older who personify the grace and beauty of being able to hold strength and fragility simultaneously.

Our Supreme Court did the right thing today and voted in favor of giving all couples the right to marry and have their marriages recognized by every state in this country. Using the language of justice and freedom, they voted in favor of love – all love. I smile-cried reading about their decision.

That’s what it keeps coming back to for me – LOVE. My connection with my sister. The holding of my husband who video chatted with me while he was on another continent. The way my husband’s aunt and uncle supported and reassured me as my sister and I made big decisions for the care of our father. The love I feel for my father, which makes watching him struggle so damn hard, and which brings me peace knowing he is safe and cared for. The holding of my girlfriends who cared for (me and) my son on the days I was so busy with my dad. The compassion and understanding and unconditional love of some of my oldest friends, the ones who just know me regardless of time and distance apart. The love and light of my son, who is all smiles and cuddles, who kept me focused on goodness and laughter and silliness when I needed it most.

I think we get to be human – that we have no choice but to be human – with each other when we can see that it all comes down to love. I think when we let our humanness show – our fragile, delicate, vulnerable, messy, honest humanness – we give each other permission to do the same. To be both fragile and strong at the same time. To ask for help and also give support. To be genuine, sincere, real, even when we’re messy.

Especially when we’re messy.

the myth of perfect, or: you are not alone

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I sat down to write yesterday, laptop on a pillow on my lap, in the armchair in my office space off the kitchen. The house was quiet and the birds sang to the spring outside. It took about 3 minutes before I surrendered and let my eyes close, because that is all they wanted to do. I wasn’t completely asleep, but I wasn’t completely awake either. Catnapping with my reading glasses on, laptop now closed on its pillow, half aware of how good it felt to just rest, half aware that I should be doing more with my precious time. I dozed for about 15 minutes, then went to take a walk around the block. That will wake me up, I thought. As I walked, I wondered why I was so tired at 11 o’clock in the morning. No answer came except, Just tired, no reason. No need to figure it out.

I’m going to be 44 in a month and a half. Not much different psychologically than 43, I am still officially middle aged. But I am aware of the process of aging in a way I don’t think I have been at other times in my life. The grays in my hair and the tiny lines around my eyes are not new, but their presence is in sharper focus, consistent. Sometimes I still get pimples, which feels like a cosmic joke, my body saying, Hey, at least you’re still a little bit of an adolescent. But what’s different at almost-44 is this: I don’t really trip out about it all very much anymore, not in the way I used to.

A wise friend who is now in his mid-seventies once told me – as I bemoaned the auto-immune challenges I have lived with for 20 years – that it is an illusion to think that it’s possible to attain perfect health while occupying a physical and very human body. Think about that: There is no such thing as perfect health. Bodies are machines, and machines get old and slow down and start acting up. And some act up long before they are supposed to – like my Tikva’s fragile little body that struggled so hard simply to get enough breath; like my friends who have courageously battled cancer in their thirties and forties.

It’s liberating, though, the idea that I don’t need to get to perfection because perfection doesn’t exist. Liberating to accept that I can still feel good – even thrive – within the container of an imperfect, fragile and slightly beat down body. I look at my 11-year-old daughter and see myself at her age, before the regular beat down of life had begun and I never even thought of the state of my health because it simply was. I think of that time and realize just how lucky I am that I could take for granted what is not always guaranteed – healthy and abundant food, warm clothing, shelter, safety, community, friends, family, love. Health.

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I used to search for solutions, grasp at ways to heal from all that ailed me, ways to achieve the mysterious perfect, radiant health I was convinced everyone else around me had attained. I haven’t given up on the idea of radiance, the idea of thriving. But I’ve let go of perfect. And I no longer attach my wellbeing to a specific way of eating-being-living. I get annoyed, now, at the thousands of messages all around that promise complete healing of fill in the blank if only you eat fill in the blank, avoid fill in the blank and do fill in the blank every day, because if it worked for fill in the blank it will definitely work for you and me, guaranteed. I don’t trust it anymore, not simply because I’ve tried it all, but more because the only thing that’s been consistent for me no matter what magic bullet I’ve tried is that I get neurotic and obsessive and end up feel deprived because I can’t enjoy the things I love. I used to follow a doctor and author on Facebook who wrote about hormones and health for women. Once she posted on her feed the five things to stay away from in order to feel great and be healthy. They were: sugar, caffeine, gluten, dairy and alcohol. I had to laugh because… Really? Honestly, what is the point of life if you can’t enjoy chocolate and cheese? I stopped following her feed.

I can’t help but be in awe of just how fragile we are in these temporary vessels; how incredibly miraculous it is that so much works when it works; how impossibly difficult it can be when it doesn’t; and how every single one of us – when we are truly honest with ourselves and with each other – struggles with something. There have been stories out there lately, brave coming out stories where people of all ages write about their struggles with illness, sharing on Buzzfeed or HuffPost or Salon about what they have always kept private because they thought they were the only ones struggling – because we can feel so much shame about being sick. The thing is, there is no failure in struggling in our bodies or with our emotions, and there should be no shame. Our culture is afraid terrified of death, and so we shy away from looking illness straight-on. We deny it, we chase after the illusion of perfect health – the magic cure that will bring perfection – and we feel like failures when we don’t achieve it. We keep our illnesses to ourselves, we feel alone. Until one brave young woman posts a picture of her colostomy bag on Instagram, leading hundreds of other young people to come out publicly as courageously as she did; and hopefully some of the shame dissolves and we feel less alone in our fragility. Did you see them, those posts? I couldn’t take my eyes off them – these gorgeous young people who have struggled, some since childhood, with irritable bowel disease, a lifetime of hiding their shame and their challenges with a hidden illness while they struggled to simply feel well. And did you see the incredibly badass pictures of women baring their mastectomy scars; turning society’s shame on its ass, turning it into pride, into strength?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: The moment I have honestly and compassionately shared my own struggles with another person, I’ve let that person know that it is safe, acceptable and normal if they are struggling too. I’ve let them know that struggle is easier when you aren’t going through it alone. I’ve let them know that shame has no place where there is compassion.

****

I am not an athlete. I’ve tried many things, some for extended periods of time – boxing, rock climbing, dance, pilates, yoga, resistance training, running – but I’m not someone who craves exercise and keeping at it is not where I am most disciplined. In spite of this, though, I still feel active. At 5’5″ and 118 pounds, I can lift my 28 pound son up and down the stairs with one arm, full laundry basket in the other. Don’t get me wrong. I am entirely capable of tripping myself out with plenty of I should exercise more, my legs are flabby, I should eat more leafy greens, the pimples are hormonal and I need to get my hormones in balance and eat less chocolate, I’m scared of what the medications I take might do to my body long-term, etc. etc. etc. All that goes along with the house is dirty and I need to mop, I should be writing every day instead of a few times a week, tomorrow I will be more patient when my children are whiny, I need to make more time to be outside, there’s nothing in the fridge for dinner, etc. etc. etc. I’m human and the nag of perfection still whispers in my ears too.

I try to be gentle, though – something I hear myself asking my friends on a regular basis: Are you being gentle with yourself? What did you do today that is good for you? I try to remember to praise myself for all I do, for all I am. I try to express gratitude for my health even when it feels tenuous. I thank my (flabby) legs for carrying me (and my son) up and down the stairs, for walking me around the block. I try to let myself nap in my chair if that is what my body needs, and I enjoy a cup of coffee on those mornings when my son decides to wake up and stay awake at 4:30am.

To my friends and those I don’t know who are struggling, who want nothing more than to feel better in your bodies, who are fighting for your lives, who are feeling in a deep place all the pain that is everywhere around us:

I honor you.

I honor your struggle.

I honor your wellbeing.

I honor your good days and your shitty ones.

I honor the shame you long to release.

I honor your deep desire to feel better.

I honor your perfect imperfection.

wired for love

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Love is all you need

“The only map of your right life is written on your soul at its most peaceful, and the only sure compass is your heart at its most open.” ~Martha Beck

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What did you come here to do? What is that thing at the core of your being that most vividly expresses who you are?

Did you come to dance with confident abandon? Did you come to nurture others? Did you come to make the world more beautiful with your art, with your poetry, with your song?

What drives you? What pulls you? What moves you along the road of challenge and growth and expansion?

Are you driven by connection? Are you drawn to success? How do you know you have succeeded?

Are you wired for love?

****

I know this about myself: Love is what guides me, it is my North Star. In everything and always. Love is at the heart of all that matters to me. I think I have always know this at my core; but at this time, in this place, I am sure.

In the weeks leading to our wedding, my husband and I were asked by a Jewish teacher, What is the one word that best describes the other person for you? My husband, in my eyes, was calm. To him, I was caring. I believe in these, believe that they are more than just a representation of what each of us needed from the other.

****

Beatles music was the anthem of my childhood. I spent hours lying belly down on the shag carpet of our living room, Beatles songs playing while I looked at every detail of their vinyl album covers and followed along with the lyrics. George Harrison was my favorite, for me the most handsome Beatle. I preferred Paul’s voice to John’s, but some of John’s songs were my favorites. I could sing along to practically every song on every album with every member of my family. We always joined together on the shoop in Come Together, no matter where we were in our one-story house, where the walls were paper thin and sound traveled freely. I remember shooping together in the car on road trips when I was very little in France. I took to heart John’s reminder that love is all you need. Paul guided me to let it be when life felt heavy. Rocky Raccoon would invoke images in my mind inspired by the westerns I watched on TV with my dad. One day I might have to write a book titled, The Story of My Life in Beatles Songs, something like the Sgt. Pepper movie from 1978, which caused a short-lived crush on Peter Frampton when it played on TV in fourth grade.

In the months after my daughter Tikva died 58 days after she was born, we asked each other what should go on her headstone besides her name and the dates of her short but huge life. As the mother of a dead child, creating my daughter’s headstone was a way in which I could express my love, a way I could still mother her, call out to the universe that she will always be my child. A way of honoring the greatest lesson she taught me – I believe the most important lesson I will ever learn: how to love unconditionally.

Following our first meeting with the owner of the headstone company, sitting at an all you can eat salad bar with my husband, it was clear what those words would be:

Love is all you need.

The Beatles had played in the children’s hospital OR the day the doctors took our fragile daughter to another floor for an echocardiogram. Hey Jude, Let It Be, and All You Need Is Love, one song after another guiding the medical team. Her eyes were open so wide during that procedure as she experienced the shock of being in a place that wasn’t her small warm bed in the NICU, doctors and nurses all around her. I was afraid for her, I wanted to hold her and comfort her, put her at ease – something I couldn’t do because she was in such fragile condition most of the time and even a mama’s hug could do her harm. I had to step back against the wall and let the doctors do their job in that room.

So I stood back and listened to the music. I listened to Paul’s reminder and thought about the irony that a Jewish girl would feel such a connection to Mother Mary because of her lifelong connection to a song. I focused on love and I watched my tiny daughter in that big space, and I looked at my husband who had also been listening beside me.

Of course the Beatles are playing, my husband’s eyes told me. Of course, my eyes spoke back.

I rely on love with every fiber of my being. I rely on the love of others who have guided my way through their example and caring for almost 44 years. I rely on the love within to strengthen me during trying times. I rely on the love that I am in order to find my way forward. I try to shine love, reflect love, be love.

Sometimes I forget. Other times I remember. I know I have succeeded when I feel peaceful, trusting, connected.

****

I traveled back home with my family recently to celebrate Passover with everyone. Back home is where I grew up, where my husband grew up, where our daughters were born. It’s where most of our extended families live. Back home is familiar, the place that will always hold a piece of my heart. Back home is one of the most beautiful places on earth – I will never deny that. But it’s not the place that pulls me anymore, because for me home is where I am now, where my husband and children are, where we have made our home. What pulls me now about back home is our family and those I call my framily. My people whom I’ve loved for a very long time. And the Pacific Ocean.

IMG_6144I went with my father to visit Tikva’s grave during our visit. It was a sunny spring day with only a few clouds in the blue sky and a small breeze. As is his tradition, my father read Goodnight Moon to his granddaughter, as he had during his visits to the hospital. As is my tradition, I brought a rose from the bush we planted with her placenta in the garden of our aunt and uncle. There was a golden beetle taking a walk around the base of her headstone, like the scarab that represented eternal life in the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings.

Of course.

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My father told me the most beautiful story one day when I was with him. It had been a tiring day for him, but the grandchildren playing around him – my daughter and son and niece – brought light and peace. At one point we sat down together, away from the busy-ness, and he asked, “Do you want to hear a story?” His dark eyes got incredibly clear and focused and he started. It was a love story from when he was 21 years old, on his way from Greece to Israel. It was the mid-1960s and a romantic and revolutionary time to be moving to a kibbutz in Israel. He told me about a young woman he met on the ferry who lived with a disease she’d had her whole life. He didn’t remember what exactly, but it required ongoing care and blood transfusions. He saw her just a few times after they arrived in Israel, then fell out of touch.

Listening, I marveled at the clarity in my father’s eyes, which had seemed tired earlier that day. His words came easily as he told me this long and beautiful story, more easily than they come sometimes because of the Parkinson’s he courageously lives with. I wondered why this experience had come back to him then, 50 years later. He spoke about this woman, this young love, as if with some regret that he had not done more to love her for a longer time. I reminded him that he didn’t know then what he knows now, that he was only 21 years old, barely out of his teens. There was such compassion in his telling, as if now he understood what it is like to live with a disease.

I love my father more than the world. I always have. Without knowing it, he created for me from very early on my idea of the perfect man. Loyal and nurturing and dedicated and worldly and smart and soulful and handsome, so very handsome. He introduced me to westerns and science fiction, taught me history and politics and multiplication tables, brought me with him on planes to Europe, hung a basketball net above the garage for me to play with, brought me Playmobil and Legos and Kinder eggs from Europe on his business trips, took us to get donuts and sit on the roof of the car to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, took me on a bike ride around town to teach me how to navigate using a map, helped me buy my first car. After my mother left him alone with two daughters when he was about my age, he did everything in his power to keep our lives stable. My father helped teach me what it means to love.

It’s not easy to watch your parents age. It’s hard to do so without being hit with the thought that one day they will be gone. I know many who have already lost parents. During our visit back home, my husband pointed out to the extended family how much was the same as when he was a child, except that now we fill the shoes of our parents, and they fill the shoes of their parents, and the kids… well, they are the new generation who get to be the kids. The constant throughout time is the gaggle of cousins – this time ages two to eleven – playing together and chasing each other around the house; good and abundant food; and love.

It’s the love that is eternal.

time keeps on…

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Mix Tape

Cue the Steve Miller Band on a mix tape, followed by Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, and I am 17 again, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in my white 1980 VW Rabbit with the baby blue vinyl seats, windows down and arm out to catch the wind.

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Sometimes I feel like I have to be a little crazy to be parenting a toddler at my age. I’m too old for this crosses my mind daily. Too old for tantrums in the grocery store. And yet… I have a different perspective about it all this time around. I can usually remain calmer through the tantrums. I know now that 99.9% of the time there is no need to fix them. My son keeps me young, even if at 43 I am not so young.

It all makes me hyper aware of age, of aging. I’m not always sure what to make of time, the strange way it moves. How it all seems to exist all at once, in a way. I am 43 and I have an 11 year old daughter and I can also remember vividly being 11. That was the year that nasty bully made up that name he insisted on calling me well into late high school. It was also the year I met my best friend. And it was the year I had my favorite teacher, the one who taught me that, If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. I am 43 and my 71 year old father has Parkinson’s disease, and I can remember when he was 43 and the disease had just barely started to show up in his body but I still didn’t know. I am 43 and after dinner, when the kids are in bed, my husband and I talk about how we are saving for our retirement, what we want for our own future care. When I am my father’s age my daughter will be 39 and my son will be 30.

One night during my daughter’s first year of life, as I nursed her in the dark in the rocking chair, she placed her tiny hand on my arm and fell back asleep. As I looked down on her hand and my arm, a flash of future memory traveled through me like a wave. It was a split second vision but so vivid and true. In it, I was in a bed in a peaceful room and I was very old, in my nineties. She sat next to me, in a chair by the bed, and she, too, was older, in her sixties. Her hand was bigger, older, the skin around her veins thinner and more translucent, the veins themselves more pronounced, but it rested still on my arm. My daughter. At the foot of the bed there was another chair and in it sat a man. I could not see faces, but I knew these were my children.

I hope beyond hope that I make it to that moment. It has brought me comfort at times, knowing that I will live into my nineties accompanied by those I love.

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I used to think of myself as an extremely nostalgic person. A song or a smell would set me off and I would find myself years in my past as if no time had gone by, deeply moved by the same emotions. I still time travel a lot but without longing for a moment or experience I can never get back. Any song by Journey and I am in middle school again instantly. I heard an NPR piece once about why this happens with the music from that time in our lives – that we are at our most cognitively impressionable during our adolescent years and so those end up being the songs we remain most connected to (and which can make us most nostalgic) as we age. I am 43 years old and happily married to the love of my life and Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is can still bring up a twinge of pubescent longing.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I understand nostalgia differently. I think more than anything, I have always been especially aware of the movement of time; even as a child I had a sense of myself moving forward in time into my future, an understanding that the current moment was fleeting. I paid attention to my parents – to their dynamic with each other, to their moods, to their needs. I still remember the last time I noticed my parents kissing, several years before their divorce. Maybe all 11 year olds are this aware? So much imprinting into my soul during those years. Stories forming.

I was one of those kids who really liked hanging out with grownups. I found them interesting, compelling. I loved going to movies with my mother – she introduced me to James Dean, took me to R-rated films I barely understood: Fanny and Alexander, Chariots of Fire, The Hotel New Hampshire, Hair. I remember Natassja Kinski dressed in a bear costume, some man savagely doing something to his wife from behind, Treat Williams opening his mouth for a sugar cube… I was a popular kid among the parent set, precocious, intelligent, a sponge for connection. When I got bored playing with a friend at her house, I would go into the kitchen and talk to her mother. Babysitting during middle school, I would put the kids to bed and do the dishes (yes, I did the dishes), serve myself some ice cream, and then walk around the house and observe how other families lived. I’d look at the wedding photos in their frames and imagine my own marriage, my own future family. I’d look in the medicine cabinet at pill boxes and condom boxes and diaphragm boxes. Once I stumbled onto a turquoise glass bong, though I didn’t quite understand what it was. It was pretty and it smelled musty.

It moves, time. I think in a way the nostalgia transforms to a longing to have some of that time back. How did I get to 43? What happened in the last 40 years since I started retaining my memories? Or at least, what do I have to show for myself from the past, say, 20 years? What would I do differently if I could go back in time and change some things, make different choices? I was speaking with a nurse friend who is in her fifties, telling her that if I were 20 years younger I would go to nursing school. Or social work school. Or even medical school. I would take all those science classes I avoided that I am now so curious about. My friend replied, You can still do it, you know.

My daughter asked me recently, What’s the one big thing you want to do in your life? Besides motherhood? Write a book. I want to write a book.

I feel the fire under my belly now. The deep need and desire to leave my imprint; a meaningful, lasting, loving mark on the world. Time is moving faster now that I am on this side of 40, now that I am in midlife. There is so much I want to do. Confidence and a belief in myself that I have finally deeply connected to after all this time. Trust in my 43 years of life experience and the wisdom I have to share, which comes from all I have lived, from the challenges and overcomings and life lessons and adventure.

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In Montessori classrooms, children learn in groups of three grades at a time. The classroom more closely mirrors the real world, and older children help guide the younger children while learning how to mentor and lead. I don’t think we are meant to connect only with people in our age group. I love my friends who are older than me, who are examples of how I want to move forward in my own life. I love my friends who are younger, for they teach me too. So do my children.

I hope I can teach my children well. Teach them to age gracefully, to grow confidently into themselves, to not fear or dread the passage of time. I hope they will believe me when I tell them that the wisdom that comes with time is worth every wrinkle and stretch mark and crack in their souls. I know from my own elders that out of this wisdom can come ease and grace.

I’ve been writing my book in my soul for a long time. Gathering the pieces of life that have started to form a mosaic. As my best friend since fifth grade once said, Living my life for the story it will tell. For me, at 43, nostalgia has turned into something beautiful: a desire to tell my stories aloud, to write them down into something significant. Sharing stories gives my life meaning. That is the imprint I want to leave behind.