This morning I woke up a bit depressed, which makes sense because it’s my birthday, and big feelers such as myself have an ambivalent relationship with all things that are meant to be one thing: birthdays=happy; Christmas=merry; sports=fun. There’s also the tiny detail that I’m on my forty-third of these damn things; who allowed that to happen? All my peers and I are becoming middle-aged, and our parents are becoming (gulp) elderly. I did not see this coming.
And yet I did, every year, because one of the big things I feel is anxiety, which is like bad fortune-telling for the perennially nervous. So I’ve been preparing for middle age awhile now, just like how I start thinking of myself as my new age (and my children as theirs) months in advance. What a buzzkill.
It didn’t help that last night’s sleep was delayed and fitful (#preciouschildren), so I woke up with a headache and an urge to kill. But I dealt with that by going to the grocery store and buying myself a cake (the boys told me to get chocolate mud; I got a dye-filled rainbow sprinkle and they can SUCK IT), then going on a long walk through several beaches that echoed the eternal hikes I used to take when training for that cursed 60K, minus the blisters and hopelessness.
Deja vu is real, y’all. Everything that goes around comes around, and all that. Especially when you have kids and get to relive childhood through them, and also witness their need to live by constant repetition. A year ago, it was The Kid who demanded I draw a love heart on his hand every day so that he could press it and send/feel hugs from me; now (well, for one day at least), it’s Little Brother who grabs for the sharpie and sends me sideways grins as he presses the heart.
I remember the “last run” I took in Central Park in New York City; it felt freighted with meaning; then I returned for yearly visits and redid it every time. Not the same, but not totally different either. And there was the running route by our last (fourth) house here, to which I ruefully bid adieu when we moved, then a friend reasoned that I could reenact it whenever I wanted after dropping the kids at school. Which I did yesterday.
One way or another, you can always come back. A novel I recently read refers to this as the tidal life–the coming and going and coming again nature of life, the way people and places return to us, and we to them. The other night when I put him to bed, LB started crying and saying he doesn’t ever want to leave this house. He, we, need an unbreakable, unchanging home. I think we’ve proven to them–over the course of six in the past four years–that the house may change, but the home sticks.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” said Carl Jung, and if there’s one gift The Husband and I have given the boys, it is lives lived–all over the place. Adventures accepted. Memories made. Stories to be told. I’m working on some of those stories now, but these are the ones that include the boys–fiction based in real life that I’ve invited them to help me with, which may be a mistake because I didn’t count on them having so many opinions. Kind of reminds me of when TH and I were wedding planning and I’d ask him about a colour, or decoration, and he’d make the mistake of not saying “whatever you think.” Everything kind of reminds me of something, marks left from moments already lived that keep coming back: LB pointing to the remainder of red marker in a heart shape on his hand, urging me to wipe it off then forgetting he even asked, so that I get to see it not just once, but enduringly.