Don't it always seem to go...
Learning how to know what I've got before it's gone
A recent piece in
about body dysmorphia hit me hard with a truth that came up more than once in readers’ comments about their relationships with their bodies: how painful it is when you realize how much you didn’t appreciate something you had until it was gone.I suppose that having a distorted view of what you have, perhaps, goes hand-in-hand with not appreciating what you have. One of my common ways of seeing through a distorted lens is thinking in sweeping negative generalizations.
I have said/thought such things as: That was a bad year.
Or, The ___ (fill in a decade of choice) are so hard because ___ (fill in a common life challenge of that decade of choice).
These thoughts started to take me down a road of missing and regretting, one that I know is a dead end. So I turned myself around.
I wondered how it might be to think in positive sweeping generalizations, and I decided to make a list of things that were great about each decade—perhaps an exercise even more fitting as I am living the last year of my 50’s and wondering about what the 60’s might hold.
Childhood (years 0-10ish)
My body brought me so much joy. I could hook my knee over a metal bar on the playground and hurl my body toward the concrete below it—and my strong, beautiful body would bring me back to the top of the bar, over and over and over again. I ran flat-footed in my Keds on hard-packed dirt and beat all the boys in our 4th grade field day. I jumped and spun on ice skates, and even when I fell, nothing hurt. My work was to play, and I filled my days with drawing, writing, sewing, knitting, and creating long, involved dramas for my collection of small ceramic animals to act out. I had all my grandparents, all my great-grandmothers, and so many aunts, uncles, and cousins I couldn’t count them all. My grandparents were younger than I am now, and there was no place on earth I felt more loved than in their homes.
Teens
So many freedom-bearing firsts: First dates, first driver’s license, first job. I worked in the public library, but school was my real work, and I was good at it. It was easy to know how to succeed there, and I did. After an early, awkward start to adolescence, when my face was filled with braces and glasses and my body grew so fast I was all skinny legs and arms I didn’t know what to do with, I got pretty. Sex, when it arrived after high school, was mostly easy and simple and fun. Friends were plentiful, and a few right friendships were deep. We rode in cars with tops down, held our noses when drinking hootch we’d stolen from our parents, and loved each other far more than any of the boys we gave too much of everything to.
Twenties
Almost everything was still possible. The future was a blank canvas, waiting for me to fill it with whatever I chose. I got a first real job, and then changed my mind and got a different one. I bought a house, a sweet little 1920’s cottage in Portland, Oregon; I spent an entire summer sanding and painting woodwork in its living room. In our living room. I got a husband, and then changed my mind and got a different one. I got a dog and for the first time learned what commitment to a dependent being really meant. I lived in the city, and then on a mountain. I lived in two different states. I was too old to be an Olympian, and I didn’t love science enough to be a vet (dreams from earlier years), but there was still time to figure out where I wanted to live and how I wanted to earn money and how many children I wanted to have.
Thirties
I became a mom, falling fast and hard into the greatest love I’ve known. Raising children and teaching teenagers filled and entertained my mind with interesting questions. These were the years of glitter and mud and picture books and dress up and bed time routines. Because I wanted to remember everything about my babies and how they came to be, I wrote a book of poetry; it was published and won an award. I helped create a school. I was in what my culture considers to be a human’s prime, which meant that most things in it revolved around people my age. I wanted to read all the books and watch all the movies and listen to all the music because they all meant So Much. My biggest problem, as I wrote in a letter to my grandmother (I still had three grandparents!), was abundance; I struggled to fit all the good things in my life into the time I had available for them. What a problem to have.
Forties
It was no longer so easy to know how to be successful; letting go of earlier certainties helped me to grow beyond the stock narratives I’d previously used to shape and make sense of my life. I left first my marriage and then the classroom, finding new and healthier ways to love and work. I got to make the first home that was entirely mine, even as I filled it with other peoples’ cast-offs. I got to live without walking on eggshells and I got to give my children a place where they could be messy and make noise and even roller skate in the kitchen. We lit candles for dinner and played music and had friends over for impromptu gatherings. We got two dogs, one for each kid. New doors opened, and I walked through them. I got so many second chances.
Fifties
I learned that I am stronger than I ever thought I could be. I learned what really matters to me. I learned that I am never going to know everything, so I might as well live more from a place of curiosity than from one of imperative. I let striving go. I discovered the upside of being invisible. For the first time since I was 15, I don’t have a boss. I am back to doing lots of reading, writing, and crafty things. I own a gardening hat! I am an ice skater (again)! I’m learning how to cook! I am still able to do most things I want with my body, but I’ve lost most of most of the things that once kept me from living fully in it: fear, pride, comparison, shame. I have the means to care for myself in ways that I never did when I was younger.
Sounds pretty good, yeah?
Of course, there was plenty of pain in each of those decades, too. Illness, loss, disappointment, disillusionment, failure, grief. True, literally down-on-the-floor despair, more than once. As I learned in my 40’s, everything that’s good about us and for us has its shadow side. That wide open possibility of my 20s was both wonderful and terrifying, especially for a girl who’d grown up needing to do everything right (or, at least, to appear to). I rushed to fill that void, along with other chasms I didn’t even know yet were yawning within me, with the first, easiest things I could find. I have good reasons to read The Small Bow, a newsletter about recovery.
Which brings us to today
Writing about the gifts of each decade, I became acutely aware of my place in time, history, geography, society. The broad strokes might transcend such markers—many people in many times and places enjoy healthy bodies as children, experience the young adult years as the time of widest possibility, and the middle decades as fraught with fullness—but my particulars are, well, particular. My children’s particulars are already quite different from mine, and I know they will continue to be.
Like so many who’ve lived from a sense (true or false) of bedrock security regarding food, safety, and shelter, I feel a fair amount of anxiety about the time in which we are now living. I’ve seen that things I thought could never happen where I live most certainly can. As both the world and my understanding of it changes so rapidly, I know that I know even less than I thought I knew in my thirties about how to be OK.
Earlier in my life, I felt confident that I could have predicted what would come with my later decades—the 60’s, 70’s, and (🤞🏻) beyond. I’ve lost that confidence, and—thanks to the wisdom that has come in the last 10 years—I realize that such a loss is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it is a thing that helps keep me grounded in today, where I am usually able to center curiosity and gratitude.
Today, I am in the last months of my daughter living with me before she leaves to live her life with her husband on another continent, and I am letting myself feel all my feelings about this every day—which means that most days I am awash in love. My parents are relatively healthy, living independently in their dream home a few hours north from me. My son lives near my parents, working toward a future that will work for him. My brother is blossoming in his community-based home for disabled adults. My husband and I, after years of struggle and work and love, finally feel secure that our relationship can adapt and grow as it needs to in the face of our life’s challenges, whatever they end up being. Rather than making plans for the future, we focus on making possibilities for it. None of us has everything we want, but we all have everything we need, and I try to see and know that every day because, as Jane Kenyon so eloquently showed us through her work and life, it will all too soon one day be otherwise.
A few things from this spring break week I will one day miss (if I’m lucky!) but I will be comforted (I hope) by having not have missed knowing how much I’ve got while I’ve got them:
If my thoughts spark some of your own, please share them in the comments. I like to think of these writings as an invitation to a conversation.
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Joyful, honest writing Rita. Thank you for it.
Rita, first of all let me say that I now have the song stuck in my head 😂 but if I must have something in there then I’m happy it’s Joni Mitchell. I love what you’ve written here and I feel like it’s now a journal prompt I need! Looking at parts of my life with a gratitude (gratitudinal??) lens and writing what I took away from each decade seems like a perfect way to adjust some of the stories in my own head.
I am always reminding myself of my place of privilege, having what I need for myself and my family. But also realizing how much has changed in my lifetime, and how my 16 and 19 year olds are facing such a different world from the one I grew up in. It’s sobering really. But there is still beauty in the world.