My life doesn't present itself in the normal trajectory. The fact that I have an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old at 40 makes me feel like a grandmother around first time mom's who are around my same age. It's like there are 20 or so space years between me and everyone else.
All the people I know who are having babies now will be nearly 60 when their kids leave home. I'm jealous of their roadmap, because it's easy, predictable, and secure.
But I just want to slap myself across the face when I think this way! Those extra 20 space years are an opportunity so few people have. All those dreams of travel, doing amazing things, making a real impact on some specific corner of the world... they could happen for me; I'm looking through the screen door, ready. I am more powerful and more myself than ever before.
I'm trying not to work myself up about the looming age of 46 (the age when my mom had her stroke). It's not genetic, etc., etc., but it does scare me to remember how powerful she seemed to me at the time when she had her stroke.
We just get what we get with life. If I'm truly to have a couple of bonus decades after raising two wonderful boys, before my body sours into old age, I get to bask in that. And if I or anyone else I love is stricken with something like a stroke, we have to deal with that.
I think this is why I am jealous of the freshly marrieds and new parents in spite of being in the awesome place I am in life. They see life as a somewhat neatly paved ahead of them. I had that perception of my own life once, long ago, but the truth is that it doesn't exist for anyone. I'm jealous of the certainty other people carry in their lives.
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