Will We?
Will We?
My tombstone will say:
HERE LIES OUR BELOVED MOTHER IN HER LAST REST ROOM.
Does no one realize that I “go” so often to get away from everyone? That my kidneys have been trained to a hair-trigger sensitivity so that I can lock a door somewhere and not feel guilty?
I recently read that the great thing about being a parent is that you find that you can be hated for long periods of time and not be bothered. Think of what a character builder that is! I have just stopped defending myself as a parent. I think the most effective thing to say when someone tells me what a terrible parent I am is, “Absolutely. You are absolutely right. You have no idea how completely right you are.”
However, we are now entering into the quasi-empty nest years. The years when they go, then come back, then go. Clay and I veer back and forth between exultant freedom and this illusion that we’re still young if we have kids at home.
We’ve lived so long that we’ve now become the heroes of the stories of what we were like when we were young. I exist in legend as this fun, energetic mom driving through Wyoming snow storms to take us home to Denver for Thanksgiving—but the kids tell these stories as if they are about parents only they knew years ago who were LOTS better than we currently are.
This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that now that they are leaving home, however erratically, I’m turning back into the person I was before I had kids, before I had someone telling me what I could listen to on the radio and what I had to wear. The person who had red shoes with sparklies on them and drove with the top down. My son said to me the other day that all the women he knows who are past fifty act like crazy people.
However, I’m also struck by this sense of fragility. These young people who are so insulting sometimes, so adoring at others, are my link with the future. Right now, I’m already dependent on them to tell me how to work my computer. Imagine what’s going to come up next as my connection to the modern world lessens and their power grows. I remember that first moment as my dad got older that I actually knew something he didn’t know! Aha! Revenge!
I’ve been thinking a lot about getting old and dying lately, speaking of tombstones, mainly because I looked around and suddenly realized that I know six widows my age and that our will is about 20 years old. It doesn’t even list all of the kids we have—typical Mormon experience, hadn’t had that last little “surprise” yet. We don’t have a “living will,” which has always struck me as the most bizarre name for this thing, so I could drag on for days hooked up to tubes. And maybe I could do that just to get even, lie there and use up all the insurance money. But considering how I feel about even a paper but, maybe not.
We have a yours, min and ours family and reading our old will was so weird. Back in the old days, when I was in my thirties, and still not completely aware that nothing we will ever do will really meet with complete approval from our kids, our first will and testament tried to give everyone exactly what they deserved: divided exactly into his stuff and my stuff. Now, twenty years later, we’re so jumbled together, it would take microsurgery to find those line and I just know we’re going to do something wrong.
But Saturday we were in Salt Lake helping “our” daughter and her husband clean their backyard. Her friends, handsome young couples in shorts and tank tops looking tanned and fit, climbed through the trees like Tarzans with pruning sheers and it felt like being in a soft drink commercial. We chopped and hauled and raked out a pile six feet high and twenty feet long for the Salt Lake curb clean up this week. Thanks to good health and strong teeth, we’re still a part of it all. In the afternoon, about four, when the wind started to kick up outside and the light started to change, I went inside and lay down on her living room couch and watched out the window. I just shiver sometimes thinking about how happy I am to be with my family.
I know I’m a goofy old lady and our relationships are so complicated. But, my gosh, the trip is worth it.
My tombstone will say:
HERE LIES OUR BELOVED MOTHER IN HER LAST REST ROOM.
Does no one realize that I “go” so often to get away from everyone? That my kidneys have been trained to a hair-trigger sensitivity so that I can lock a door somewhere and not feel guilty?
I recently read that the great thing about being a parent is that you find that you can be hated for long periods of time and not be bothered. Think of what a character builder that is! I have just stopped defending myself as a parent. I think the most effective thing to say when someone tells me what a terrible parent I am is, “Absolutely. You are absolutely right. You have no idea how completely right you are.”
However, we are now entering into the quasi-empty nest years. The years when they go, then come back, then go. Clay and I veer back and forth between exultant freedom and this illusion that we’re still young if we have kids at home.
We’ve lived so long that we’ve now become the heroes of the stories of what we were like when we were young. I exist in legend as this fun, energetic mom driving through Wyoming snow storms to take us home to Denver for Thanksgiving—but the kids tell these stories as if they are about parents only they knew years ago who were LOTS better than we currently are.
This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that now that they are leaving home, however erratically, I’m turning back into the person I was before I had kids, before I had someone telling me what I could listen to on the radio and what I had to wear. The person who had red shoes with sparklies on them and drove with the top down. My son said to me the other day that all the women he knows who are past fifty act like crazy people.
However, I’m also struck by this sense of fragility. These young people who are so insulting sometimes, so adoring at others, are my link with the future. Right now, I’m already dependent on them to tell me how to work my computer. Imagine what’s going to come up next as my connection to the modern world lessens and their power grows. I remember that first moment as my dad got older that I actually knew something he didn’t know! Aha! Revenge!
I’ve been thinking a lot about getting old and dying lately, speaking of tombstones, mainly because I looked around and suddenly realized that I know six widows my age and that our will is about 20 years old. It doesn’t even list all of the kids we have—typical Mormon experience, hadn’t had that last little “surprise” yet. We don’t have a “living will,” which has always struck me as the most bizarre name for this thing, so I could drag on for days hooked up to tubes. And maybe I could do that just to get even, lie there and use up all the insurance money. But considering how I feel about even a paper but, maybe not.
We have a yours, min and ours family and reading our old will was so weird. Back in the old days, when I was in my thirties, and still not completely aware that nothing we will ever do will really meet with complete approval from our kids, our first will and testament tried to give everyone exactly what they deserved: divided exactly into his stuff and my stuff. Now, twenty years later, we’re so jumbled together, it would take microsurgery to find those line and I just know we’re going to do something wrong.
But Saturday we were in Salt Lake helping “our” daughter and her husband clean their backyard. Her friends, handsome young couples in shorts and tank tops looking tanned and fit, climbed through the trees like Tarzans with pruning sheers and it felt like being in a soft drink commercial. We chopped and hauled and raked out a pile six feet high and twenty feet long for the Salt Lake curb clean up this week. Thanks to good health and strong teeth, we’re still a part of it all. In the afternoon, about four, when the wind started to kick up outside and the light started to change, I went inside and lay down on her living room couch and watched out the window. I just shiver sometimes thinking about how happy I am to be with my family.
I know I’m a goofy old lady and our relationships are so complicated. But, my gosh, the trip is worth it.
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