Time passes and years build upon years. One day you find yourself like me, sitting in a public place watching people and asking myself how did I get here? Not my physical location but at this point in time and space.
It doesn’t feel that long ago that I was a child on an elementary school playground making wishes with dandelions. That was before the concept of age and time had even begun to form in my brain. As a child, I just knew I existed. People always talked about growing up, but they never talked about growing old. I just thought old people had been born old.
Then, one day, I realized that I was an adult with all of the amazing and scary things that accompanied adulthood. I had the freedom to think and believe how I wanted. For the first time, I realized that my mama didn’t actually know every single thing about every topic on earth. The world seemed frighteningly larger than I had imagined as a child. The thought of a world this big without my parents in it made me shudder. I knew that age would betray the body one day for them and I would be filling up the slot they vacated.
Then the day came when I was a mother myself and I realized that parents just have to figure it out the best way we can. We aren’t perfect and there’s no handbook to explain every situation or emotion that accompanies motherhood. Boy, oh, boy I wish there was. Kids changed me and made me better. But it was like they were born one day and grown the next. I didn’t see it when the baby was screaming in the middle of a restaurant when I was just a few weeks into motherhood. I was insecure about my abilities to be a mother, a woman, and a human. I wanted nothing more than the baby to start walking and talking, and it all happened so fast. The days turned in to weeks and I could suddenly identify my child as being years old as opposed to weeks or months. School started and the years happened so quickly I don’t remember them all.
Now I am neither young nor old, ugly or pretty, skinny or fat. (Well, maybe I know I’m fat but I identify as a skinny woman.) I’m at this place where I’m the caretaker and on the threshold of being a senior adult. I just don’t know how it all happened so fast. I wake up now and have to stay in bed to give my bones time to be coaxed into rising. I have a bottle of stool softener in my purse and my medicine cabinet. The hairs on my chin multiply and thicken throughout the day, giving my razor no time to rest.
The glorious part of this phase is perhaps where I shed the opinions of others that have weighed me down for far too long. I said when I turned 40 that my give a damn was broken but I didn’t even realize that it was just the tip of the iceberg.
I watch these young girls with their designer purses and their fancy cars bee-bop through life like youth will never leave them. They look at me like I’m expired loaf bread on the shelf. I look at them, with a knowing look, and want to tell them it all happens so fast. So as I approach the days when silver begins to outnumber the blonde, I have to take a look at the clock. It’s not stopping for me to find a time when I’m skinnier, prettier, and especially not younger. It’s waiting on me to really realize that it all happens so fast.
Messpot Diaries 