nina turns 60

starting over

December 31, 2019: It has been raining hard and heavy for what seems like weeks now. It's cold, the type of cold that feels colder than if it were frosty or snowing. The heavy wet of a PNW winter. The kind of rain that brings floods and mudslides. My son texted me that he wanted to call me yesterday. My heart immediately started to beat faster. He's on a road trip with his sweetie in California, and I was afraid that they had broken up and that he'd be devastated. Instead, I heard his somewhat shaky voice telling me that they'd been in a car crash. Everyone was OK, he assured me. It was mostly a fender bender. But they were shook up. It had happened the evening before and today they were calling their families to let them know. He is not an overly demonstrative kid, physically or verbally, but he told me twice during that call that he loves me.

 

They were in Bakersfield and going to spend another night there while the car got repaired. Today he's been texting me photos of sunny California mountain passes. He let me know they might soon be out of cell range. 

 

January 1, 2020: A bit of sun coming into the house over my shoulder as I type makes me squint and smile. I haven't seen my shadow for days. I want to write more in 2020, to spend more time with my first love. I have things I've written that I want to send out into the world, and things I've written that need revising and, I hope, more things to write. I miss blogging, though. I miss that sense of writing to a friend that comes with this medium. So here I am, starting over, closer to 60 than 50, no longer able to identify myself as a single mom in the same way I used to, no longer sure about much of anything except my parents are old now and will likely not live to see the end of the decade. I'd better make it count. 

the first lie

I've been reading through the archives of one of my old blogs, Diary of a Single Mom on the Edge, which I wrote for ClubMom back in 2006-7. It was my first paid writing gig. 

There is some good writing there. I'm going to share some of my favorite bits here.

On expectations:

Motherhood is an especially difficult set of expectations to overcome.  We are told constantly not only how we are supposed to act as mothers, but what we are supposed to feel.  The first thing we are told is that we all want to be mothers in the first place, that it's our best, most natural role. That's the first lie, and it all goes downhill from there.

                                    —from "Post Halloween Stress Disorder," November 1, 2007

solstice

Usually fall is my favorite season, but this was a hard one, and I'm happy for the psychological turning point offered by the solstice. My basic struggle right now is to simply make the shift from an outward focused sense of goodness, my own goodness and worthiness, to an inward one. To base how I feel about myself, and by extension everything else, on some interior quality rather than on someone telling me I am a good girl. Yes, it's can take over 50 years to get beyond that. And I've only just now realized in a deep way how all of my little addictions, from coffee to sugar to obsessive social media reading to getting attention from a man, are just ways of COPING with my own basic and fundamental unhappiness and keep me from really taking action that would help me find a more satisfying life that would then not need all those little surface pleasures because there would be deep pleasure, true satisfaction.

Who knew my inner resources were so weak? I can't believe in a god to pray to. Nor that I have spiritual guides or angels or any of that. I return to meditation, to Buddhist thinking, which appeals to both my mind and my heart. I think about making art, about my writing. Writing will save me, it always has, but even that ends up being a quest for approval, for love. If I write well enough, will you love me? 

And then, there's Al, and that relationship and the ways that it has been both healthy and not-healthy for me. I am still grieving the loss of my lover at the same time as continuing my friendship with him, the daily correspondence. I have so few friends these days, and he knows me pretty well, knows my daily rhythms, my joys and fears. 

One more day of work, and then a small break, the holiday, the family traditions, the family shrinking. Nothing to do know but to keep going. As Phil would say, left foot right foot.

transit

So many transitions all around me. Kimberly selling her house, her and Paul's house. Paul gone for almost three years now. Not just my own child, but all the high school seniors in town, these beautiful, vibrant young people, are getting ready to take flight, and this place will be emptier and quieter and a little bleak without them. I do not know if I can stay here. And then my small heart trying to figure out if it has a home inside me or anywhere else.

The wind howls, vents rattle, garbage cans blow over. Coffee is not enough. Every surface in the house covered in papers, books, napkins, electronica, pens, crumbs, lists of things to do, old water glasses. My mother is losing words, not just names, but objects, sometimes whole conversations. My sister, scared and sad, lashes out at me for not doing enough. Then she flies away to her home across the country. She won't be back for months. My dad unstable, falls down hard enough to need his scalp stapled back together, but has no concussion. His systems are all go. 

The thing that wasn't supposed to happen, that seemed ridiculous and impossible, has happened. Nobody knows where we are going to end up. But everybody agrees we are going somewhere new and dark. I realize how wholly unprepared I am and how little it matters. My small heart hasn't stopped beating.