Monthly Archives: May 2021

About Women Rowing North

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The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.

All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?

It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)

It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing North comes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.

What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.

About Having Babies

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[This throwback post is in honor of my niece Jaime who just added a third little boy to her brood in much the same timespan that Rick and I had our three little boys. There’s always someone around us having a baby – it never fails to call up all those memories of “the good old days”.]

Three little pirates circa 1999.

I don’t remember the exact moment that I signed up to be a parent, but I believe my endorsement was a reflex action after the stick turned blue. When Rick and I got married, we knew we wanted kids eventually. After all, my new husband had two years of schooling to complete first. Who knew that after four months of practicing “planned parenthood”, much to our surprise we were planning parenthood?  After three kids in four years and lots of curious people inquiring if we knew what was causing it, we were pretty happy to be parents. In a way, having children is like stepping onto a scary, exhilarating, stomach-upsetting roller coaster. Once you have one, you often ask your partner, “You wanna go again?”

For all the satisfaction of producing a cuddly, adorable, dependent little baby there is nothing that replicates the shock of being awakened night after night by the same hungry, wailing, dependent little baby. Things like a full night’s sleep (four hours in a row feels amazing), bathing, hot meals (after re-heating it twice in the microwave, you finally just wolf it down cold), spit-up free clothing and two free arms become a luxury, like a fairy tale beginning: “Once upon a time, a LONG time ago…”           

Well, we’ve made it through that stage of parenting and we’ve successfully weaned, potty-trained and surgically removed soothers from our three boys, but our training in selflessness is far from over. The same issues of sleeping, eating and crying just resurface with new challenges. The kids still wake us up at night with nightmares, sleepwalking or parching thirst. As if that isn’t enough, now they can get out of their own beds and crawl into ours. If it’s already been a pretty bad night and we’re particularly unconscious, we might not even notice. That is, until the next day when you wake up with a horrible kink in your neck because some child was sleeping horizontally in your bed with one foot stuck in your ear. Then just as you drop off in the afternoon to catch a few winks to make up for the bad night and the bad neck, some child (who is supposed to be playing quietly in his room) calls from the bathroom for your assistance with the toilet paper.

And do I really need to mention the pitfalls of trying to feed young children? Just when I think I’ve developed a safe repertoire of spaghetti, chicken nuggets and grilled cheese sandwiches, the oldest child announces that he no longer likes the very thing that used to be his favorite and his adoring younger brothers follow suit. My kids don’t even like potatoes unless the cholesterol and fat levels have been exponentially increased and they come in a red box with an “M” on it. Which isn’t to say that I don’t make them eat their requisite age-numbered spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. There’s just a lot of nose pinching and gagging that accompany the process. When people see my three boys and comment that our grocery bill will certainly skyrocket when they’re teenagers, I just think that I can’t wait to see them eat a full meal.

I do have to say that the crying issue has changed a great deal. I no longer cry as much as my kids do. The initial burdens of childcare had me weeping daily for lack of sleep and lack of resources for managing this parenting thing. After a few years of motherhood under my belt, I feel like I can pretty much tackle anything. The roller coaster hasn’t really changed, but maybe now I’m just getting used to it. In fact, I’m loving every minute of it.

About Electricity

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Marcus Wallis on Unsplash

A funny couple of things happened this last week. Well, not really funny-ha-ha, per se, but more like “we can laugh about this as soon as we figure out how to get around it” kind-of-funny. My husband Rick was leaving for work early one morning, pushed the button to open the garage door and nothing happened. The spring on the door had broken and that essentially locked him in the garage. It turns out that a spring is a terrific mechanical aid not just for electrically opening the door, but also manually. He called his handy younger brother to help – or fix if he could – and between the two of them they managed to get the door to open and free our vehicles into the driveway until we could get the door fixed.

And then yesterday, almost immediately after his alarm went off, the power in the house went AWOL. After a few extra minutes in bed, he got up and tried to figure out how to get enough light in the bathroom so that he could shower and get ready for his day. He did it mostly in the dark, which heightened our appreciation for bathrooms in our past that have had windows. He finished getting ready – without the usual Global News in the background – and headed to the garage when he realized that for the second time in a week, he was locked in again. However, with the new spring, it wasn’t too hard for me to help him open the door and release him – although we do question the door designer who failed to add grabber-handles on the inside.

Ah, electricity! How do we use thee? Let me count the ways! Lights, coffee, garage doors! And need I mention that very special friend of mine: the Internet. Oh sure, I could use some data on my phone if I really needed to. But I didn’t REALLY need to. Unless, of course, this pesky power outage persisted.

But it didn’t. Pretty much an hour later, at 7:15 when lots of people are just getting up, the hum and shine of my interior domicile resumed and I didn’t have to entertain the idea of breaking out the camp lantern later that night or running my laptop battery down to zero.

But what if the power didn’t come back on? My brain was rehearsing this thought for the few minutes before the electricity resumed. Remembering stories of ice storms that resulted in power-less days-on-end made me question how prepared we really are. Can we cook? Can we bathe? Can we internet? And if I take it further, thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, when the electricity leaves and never returns, how happy would I be then?

In some ways, this pandemic has made me think about things like this. What sort of things can I live without? And how do I make my peace with the things lost that I have no say about? No gatherings of family of any real size. No traditional celebrations. No concerts. No farmer’s markets – well, not ones that aren’t highly policed and sanitized. No eating out inside or outside a restaurant. And some of the time, no haircuts, no libraries, no school inside the actual schools.

But we endure, even if it’s not all how we like it to be. I’m thankful that it’s spring and that the warm weather allows for walks together or visiting outside. There’s still thankfully the internet and the ability to Zoom if we want to. And there’s the hope that if we fix what needs to be fixed and we work together, we can bust out of our garages and be free again someday soon.

About the Best Memories

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The other day on Instagram, Gretchen Rubin posted this quote of hers: “The things that go wrong often make the best memories.” I’ve read this in her books, I’ve heard her say it on her Happier podcast and it always makes me think of the Disney ride, Splash Mountain.

In 2010, our family took a trip to Florida. (It’s called travelling – remember?) Our destination was Orlando, or more specifically, ALL of the Disney theme parks and waterparks, enough to fill up more than a week’s worth of vacation. Even if there was plenty of new things to see and do, our favorite rides got our due attention and we fought the lineups to go on the best ones at least two or three times. And one of our all time favorites, both in California’s Disneyland and Florida’s Magic Kingdom, had to be Splash Mountain. Even if our Florida experience on it was…well, let’s just call it memorable.

Here’s the story I told in our travel blog back then:

Splash Mountain is a lovely log ride along a relatively serene Disney river punctuated with two or three waterfalls of varying heights and one exciting five-storey drop at the end. Since we rode this attraction before, we already knew when to expect the drops. We were also familiar with the announcement (in an appropriate Southern drawl) on the PA system: “Looks like Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox are causin’ some commotion upstream. Your ride through Splash Mountain will begin again shortly.” This was (supposedly) to allay any aggravation when the ride would stall for a bit. So when we heard the announcement on our last time up the river, we assumed we’d get moving again soon. We were wrong.

Me and my fellow Splash Mountaineers circa 2010.

After 30 minutes of being cramped into a damp, sweaty giant plastic log right next to a hysterical animatronic bear with a bee’s nest on his nose on a very short action-and-music loop, the “magic” was starting to wear off a little. Three out of five of us needed to use “the facilities” and Rick was ready to run interference with the crazy lady in the front log who was getting anarchistic. Trying to distract their little ones, two moms in another log started to sing the “Banana-nana-fo-fana” song OVER AND OVER again – essentially replacing the hysterical-bear-audio-loop which thankfully was turned off after much too long. Annnnnnd the newlywed couple behind us were acting like the honeymoon had definitely lost its bloom. It was no longer a Tunnel of Love, it you know what I mean.

Finally, after about forty-five minutes of expensive Disney time, some “cast members” appeared from the secret doorway that was no longer secret since all lights had come on at about the same time that the soundtrack was shut off. We were warned (in a sinister government-agent kind of voice) not to try exit the boats by ourselves. I was also advised to “put my camera away” but not before capturing some very revealing inner chamber pictures. We were escorted down the stairs and into the back lot, sworn to secrecy about this Disney underbelly and then plied with Fastpasses and ice cream coupons. Let’s just say, it’s all water under the log now.

Isn’t this magical?

As I said, we’ve ridden Splash Mountain a few times. But the only time I can really remember is this one. Retrospection is funny, in more ways than one.

What’s your best/worst memory?