Right, at Last, and Wide Open

Tags

Aging, Creative Nonfiction, memoir, mothering, Mothers, Parenting, personal essay, personal growth

Women Combing Their Hair, 1875-76, Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).

I’m letting my hair grow out. Like a girl again. It’s past my shoulders already, still mostly brown with a few shimmers of light woven through.

I don’t feel old. Few of us do, even while seeing the signs.

When I was young, I always felt young. Too young. Young in a lost, vulnerable, deer-in-the-headlights sort of way.

I could never understand how other children, teens, young women, seemed so confident, sounded so sure of themselves. When everything about me felt tentative, like I was only half-made, not fully formed, still waiting for some sense of wholeness to emerge.

I felt too-young even when I wasn’t.  When I should have known better. When others were counting on me being full-grown. Like my children.

Other young mothers seemed so secure and self-assured in their mothering, in their interactions with the adult world they inhabited. It was always a mystery to me, how they did that, how they could slip so comfortably into something that was clearly beyond me.

With my own children, at one level, we were one. When they were in my arms, on my lap, when we rocked and thrummed together, they were more me, more mine, more us than anything I had ever known. The circle was complete. I was all womb then. Part of some great mothering movement that wound round us. We were one, not two.

But when they stepped away, when we stood face to face, two again, these little people, staring back, startled me. They were like exotic flowers from some distant land who had been plucked and placed, amazingly, in my hands. Under my care. A person who had no idea what she was doing, who was improvising all the way, first this, then that, no gut-level knowing to clue me in.

Not a mother at all. Just this over-grown girl play-acting at best. Even my children, I’m sure, knew. But they played along.

I’ll be the mother and you be the children, we agreed. Sort of. Sometimes. The line blurred. Lots of give in our roles. But we grew into them eventually.

Somewhere along the way I became mom. The sense of wholeness I had been waiting for settled around me and I can’t really point to the moment I knew I was fully grown, at last.

I do not feel young now. But neither do I feel old. I feel somewhere in-between, swaying cozily in some hammock strung between the two. It feels wide open. I don’t feel the years bearing down. I don’t feel something precious slipping away.

I feel right, at last. And wide open.

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“The Mountain of My Love” – Poem by Hayden Carruth

Tags

Aging, Hayden Carruth, Love, Marriage, poetry

The Lovers by William Powell Frith, Public Domain

In the graduation speech that went viral last year, George Saunders wrote:

“Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was ‘mostly Love, now.'”

For a long time I could not find the poem he mentioned. But a reader who heard about my search found the poem and kindly shared it with me. Now I share it with you, a deeply moving testament to love and marriage, as our lives wind down.

Testament

by Hayden Carruth

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

 

“Us, Ancient” – A Short Love Story

Tags

Aging, Flash Fiction, Growing Old Together, Love, Love Story, Marriage, short stories, short story

Us, Ancient
by Deborah J. Brasket

You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.

My husband tells me not to worry. He still sees me perfect.

“What? When you shut your eyes?”

“Well, I don’t have to shut them.”

“I’m just saying . . . .” he says, when I give him that look.

He tries.

But I know what he means, this man who is fast turning into his father the older he grows. And his father! That scrawny, bald-headed buzzard was never much to look at, even when we met. Certainly nothing like his son, who I’m telling you, was hot enough to burn rubber back then.

But that’s not how I see him now. Not as his father, and not as he was when we first said I do.

There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore.

That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering somewhere around the body maybe. But more outside than in. And him, too. This man I married.

What I see now is not a body, but a being. A living, thinking, breathing being who just happens to fit perfectly into my arms. Someone I want to grow old with. And not just “till-death-do-you-part” old. But old. As in ancient.

Man-in-the-moon old. Mountains melting into the sea, old. Earth spinning off its axis, old.

Starships dodging dark holes, novae bursting into newness. . . . you see what I mean.

Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe, old. That’s how I see us.

This short story first appeared, in a slightly different version, in Drunk Monkeys in October 2013.  You can read it online HERE.

Here’s another short story I wrote:

“13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, And the Moment After”

And here’s a true-life love story:

Celebrating Lasting Love

The Joy of Aging

Tags

Aging, Growing old, inspiration, Joy, New York Times, Oliver Sack, short story

Oliver Sacks wrote a piece for the New York Times last month called “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding!)”. It ended with this:

“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

While I am still a long ways from 80, I’m beginning to feel this way more and more too. If this is aging, I hope it never ends!

I just finished a short story on this subject–my first flash fiction, 300 words! It’s called “Us, Ancient.” I can’t share much here because I’m sending it out to some journals and they frown on that sort of thing. But excerpts, I understand, are fine.

So here’s the first and last lines. See if you can guess what comes in the middle.

Beginning

“You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.”

Ending

“Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe . . . That’s how I see us.”

I’m not sure what it is about “the universe” I find so inspiring. I’m not alone. Humans have gazed at the stars in awe and wonder since the beginning of time. Perhaps, like me, they feel some strange kinship. They say we’re made of star-dust, after all.

I’ve always felt that’s why I have such an affinity for the sea. Seventy percent of our bodies are water. And that’s where life on earth all began, in the sea. Each human as well begins its life in the womb surrounded by a type of sea water. Amniotic fluid is salty.

They say that the molecules, cells, and even DNA of our bodies have a type of memory. Might that memory carry traces of its beginning at the dawn of time? I like to think so. I’m not sure how else to explain the feeling of deep empathy with the ocean and the night sky–as if I know them well, as if we are old friends, as if once I was rocked to sleep in their arms. As if I’m not done with them yet, and we are only partly parted. Something of me remains in them still.

This is what aging does, I guess. Allows us to slip the reins of reason and rationality into poetic license. I write elsewhere:

“There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore. That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering, maybe, around the body. But more outside than in.”

I feel that way more and more, as if this body that has contained me all these years is slowly evaporating, and I’m becoming freer to be what I always was but never quite realized. A poet called it “mostly Love, now.” Mostly joy works too.