Hello friends! It’s been a minute!
Spring sprang, the end of the school year was especially hectic; I filed my taxes, met some new and incredibly special clients and friends, and now summer has settled squarely in with soaring temperatures (and electric bills). My kids are in camp and the after-camp screen time rules have gone in the garbage, but I honestly don’t mind the long afternoons spend languishing. Tousled muppet heads visible above the sofa line and balled up cats tucked in various places for hours around the house while the light changes to that certain summer yellow and seems to never die.
These long days are a little wistful for me; I keep thinking of the after-dinner neighborhood walks I used to take holding a toddler hand, with a baby tied up on my chest. It was an exhausting time in life, but with the prospect of bedtime just around the corner, I was almost always able to marvel in gratitude at these creatures (alive and interesting creatures!!) that I made with my own body.
What a thing to be a parent, and to be the child of a parent. It’s a theme that’s been coming up all around me lately, as my friends and I careen into mid life and our role as children of parents turns a corner into uncharted territory.
I am overjoyed by the wealth of new conversation around the challenges we face in our forties. Gender and labor divisions within marriage, gender and labor divisions within divorce, finding our joyful selves again now that our kids are less physically demanding, finding our brains again in order to combat the complete psychological warfare of raising teens, changing hormones (ours and our kids’)… Maybe these conversations were always happening and I’m just tuning in, but I think the information age is actually working in our favor to bare the lived realities of this phase, and to ask questions about it.
What I haven’t heard so much about, however, is the “more”-ness of it all: We’re forty (five), our careers AND our families are in full bloom. We have it all! Parenting requires more thought, more attunement, more money. Work requires more energy, more investment.
And then suddenly being the child of a parent requires more too. More involvement. More hard conversations. More logistics, management, concern. We are burning the candle at both ends and then the middle springs a wick.
No one is talking about the sandwich, right? It feels to me that this particular commiseration still only happens in kitchens, or in between interruptions at a backyard dinner. Maybe it’s because there’s a larger societal failing, so it’s risky to publish on the topic? Or a scary morbidity; or perhaps it’s too close to grief, which Americans seem to shun. I don’t know but man, it seems like everyone is feeling it, and feeling it alone, and it’s brutal.
A few weeks ago I was sitting in the lobby of the orthodontist office next to a woman on the phone. She had a packet of papers strewn out on her lap and I ascertained that she was talking to her sibling; they were comparing notes on various conversations they each had with her mother’s doctors, and they were formulating a care plan. During her child’s orthodontist appointment. My son came out of his appointment and I almost left without saying anything, but I decided to go back and tell her that I saw what she was holding, and it’s so hard. She cried!! And I wasn’t surprised!!
I am constantly awed and so deeply honored to be welcomed into the lives of overwhelmed people. I am very aware of the beautiful intimate vantage point that I am so graciously granted. Ten times out of ten, my clients homes become chaotic because they are busy actively performing love. What a gift to be given the opportunity to help create a peaceful space, a system, a plan, for people who are giving 200 percent and then are asked to give more.
