I recently celebrated my 50th birthday.  I had my kids that day, but luckily, my brother came to visit too.  Else the occasion would surely have felt swallowed by the whims and wiles of my sons, by their age-appropriate, yet still insulting, levels of empathy.  For a very long section of our lives it doesn’t actually feel like we’re aging.  We’re getting older, but not aging.  And then suddenly we are.  It’s impossible to isolate how I feel about my aging from its constant dance with the evolution of my sons.  They are getting older, but I am aging.  We’re a study in contrasts cause I had them late.

If boys aren’t playing video games or eating, they’re up in your face. Hashtag not all boys.  Fine.  But I’m always trying to dream up quiet, sedentary, non-screen activities that my sons will do independently.  A way for us to be around each other, but not actively engage.  Or speak.  Maybe that sounds awful.  But winter is long.  And my apartment is small.  On a rare occasion I’ll catch us accidentally settling into a peaceful vision:  my youngest drawing, eldest reading and me doing a puzzle.  It feels like a scene from a Renaissance painting.  Why can’t this be our life?  I’ll wonder.  And it lasts about as long as it takes me to ask.

I’ve always envied people who clearly have a simpler relationship to alcohol than I do.  Who can casually encounter a drink, with take it or leave it flair.  They always seem like elegant self-negating heroes to me.  But, of course, they’re not. New weight loss drugs, like Ozempic, are fascinatingly confirming that some people deal with a lot more food noise than others which makes resisting over-eating a more complicated, challenging and draining experience.  But one that has been stigmatized as a sad reflection of character.  People who seem to come up with better answers in life, are usually having a very different experience of the questions.

I’m not totally sure we just had Easter weekend.  I mean, I know I had two extra days off, making it a long weekend with my children, but because I’m not religious, I’m not really sure what Easter is supposed to mean.  As far as I can tell, much like Halloween, it’s basically about candy.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but parenting can give you this vague sense that holidays are supposed to be more substantial or meaningful than just temporarily suspending sugar restrictions.  And my confusion reminded me that, like biting into that cheap Easter bunny, events that get built up, can often feel pretty hollow.  

My 10-year old recently picked out a cool new pair of running shoes.  Funky bright yellow and very him.  Breaking them in though, he realized they were challenging to get on, and likely wouldn’t fit him for that long.  Sigh.  He was depressed at the thought that he would likely outgrow these shoes faster than he would do them in.  A minor reckoning ensued around growing and losing, and it took me a moment to appreciate that my feet don’t change size anymore.  It was a little reminder that though things are always changing, with kids – though it never feels like it when you need it to – they’re changing fast.

Like the luddite that I am, I still use a big ol’ fridge calendar to make sense of my life.  I’ve been known to even carry it with me to awkward places like meetings and the dentist’s.  Each month’s page is littered with little letter B’s written in green marker.  B is for boys.  The green B’s mark the days I have my sons.  The 50/50 custody schedule I share with my ex is simple and easy to remember, but the visual still makes it easier to plan things.  It’s also a weird little testament to a strange and stark divide.  I’m always a mother, but for half of my life, I’m not on the clock as one.

The longest I’ve gone without drinking – by far – were the two times I was pregnant.  The imposed sacrifice wasn’t something I enjoyed much, but it did teach me a few things.  Well, maybe one big thing:  ‘you can’t take the edge off, so don’t put it on.’  It was a recipe for living that had previously eluded me.  In the time since my children have lived on the outside of my body though, alcohol has often felt like an antidote, a treat, a crutch, a friend, the best balm I can think of for my maternally weary soul.  And that’s surely a problem.  But it’s likely one that points to bigger problems too.

Whenever a health professional asks me if I’ve been pregnant before, it takes me a second to remember how many times.  I’ve had two children.  I had an abortion in my 20’s.  And I had a miscarriage before my first son.  That’s four, I’ll remind myself.  You’ve been pregnant four times.  

The frequency of miscarriages is not matched by the amount of discussion they get.  Some estimates suggest that about 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage, making it a very unfortunate, but also quite likely scenario.  Given that prevalence, and the massive impact a miscarriage can have on a woman, a couple, and more people beyond, we would do well to bring the subject a little further into the light.

I’ve got a new pet peeve at the grocery store.  It’s those warning labels on packages announcing that the product is super high in sodium or sugar, or some other terrible ingredient.

Being empowered to make “informed choices” sounds lovely until you remember that you live in a world that constantly crushes you with information and bombards you with choice. We are stuck in a food environment that is at odds with our evolution and benefits corporations who’ve learned how to highjack our taste buds.  And now somehow that’s one more thing for me to feel responsible for?  Not fair.  And just one more reason for me to hate cooking.

It’s hard to believe that the terrible reign of COVID-19 started 6 years ago.  The pandemic sometimes feels more like a world we went to than a time we lived through, and we don’t much like being reminded of that place or care to revisit it. Usually when the pandemic comes up in casual conversation, it’s all sighs and sentence fragments.  We shake our heads and swiftly shift gears.  It’s a lovely little trick of our human nature that we have trouble conjuring experiences of pain.  But “the past is never dead.  It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner once wrote.  And whether we wish to speak any more of the pandemic or not, it continues, of course, to speak through us.