I am no longer a teenager or twenty-something.
I haven't been for awhile now. As a matter of fact, I'm closer to a forty-something at this point. Sometimes, though, I forget. Does that happen to you? Yesterday I took the boys to the beach to hide from the humidity for a few hours. We drove down the highway blaring hip hop, and for a few miles, they were quiet, allowing me to slip silently into my own memories. When I was a teenager, I had this pink paisley bandeau bikini. I was all skin and bones and gangly limbs, but still. I wore that bikini with cut-off denim shorts and spent hours at the lake with friends. We were teenagers; we owned the summer. I kissed a boy I thought I loved and floated on my back under a sea of stars. I would be sixteen forever. When I was a few years older, I wore a different bikini at a different beach. It was the Fourth of July, and I made some ridiculously foolish choices that sill make me blush. Still, I worked on my tan and maybe kissed that same boy again and owned more summer. I would be nineteen forever. But then time marched on. I guess you would say my experiences at the beach have changed a bit. I wasn't sixteen or nineteen forever, and I won't stay in my 30s. I'm working hard to embrace this new season. I worry more about slathering on sunscreen than lip gloss, and I play frisbee with my kids rather than flirt with an innocent crush. And when I get home, I study the earned roadmap of wrinkles around my eyes, make peace with my age, and turn on the Lumineers or Alt-J as a dinner-making soundtrack. Now I kiss a different man; I make wiser choices. I am no longer a teenager or twenty-something. And that is just fine with me. That contentment takes work, though. In a world with picture-perfect magazine covers and plastic surgery, sometimes feeling my age feels more like inadequacy. When I walk through the grocery store aisles, I'm not turning heads; I'm trying to remember where to find artichoke hearts. When I study my reflection in the mirror, I'm not taking note of a tantalizing tan; I'm cursing the heredity that gifted me with varicose veins and too-small ears. But still. I think of my grandmothers, each with beautiful white or gray hair and wrinkled hands that were soft to hold. So I will try to study my face with a dose of grace and imagine my future with grandchildren holding my wrinkled hands. Maybe we'll be on a beach somewhere.
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Here I am in the city. My children are 12 and 13 and (I'm knocking on wood as I write this) mostly self-sufficient. This week they have spent their afternoons at basketball camp, and my afternoons have been free to fill as I please. This process feels a bit like getting to know myself again. In our previous small town life I would've filled my time with busyness or noise. Nothing to do? Turn on some HGTV. Not sure how to fill an hour? Might as well fold laundry and scroll through Facebook. This past month has forced me into more quietness. For one thing, we didn't have internet at the new house for a couple of weeks. That means I had to wean myself from the meaningless Facebook scrolling. I couldn't waste my precious data. Pandora couldn't even be streamed, taking away the background music that defines my world. Adding to this dynamic is the knowledge I will not be a full-time teacher in the fall. I am teaching one college course at a small private school, but in ways I feel like I've been stripped of my identity: high school English teacher. That's not to say I won't return to that profession, but it does mean that obsessive planning and reformulating of units doesn't eat my time. So here, in no particular order (and for the five people who might read this blog), are some things I've been learning/rediscovering about myself:
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September 2020
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