When We Get Older

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Jim Carroll - People Who Died

When we get older sometimes we can't help but look around us, and look back.  The allure of sentimentality and nostalgia are so great that in dark times, quiet times, monumental times, harrowing times, and lonely times we think of our former selves, and the people we knew.  Approaching 40 it seems natural to want to take a loose inventory of my life.

It strikes me that so many people I knew have died.  

I have a running mental list of them that I occasionally revisit to wonder about our merging and diverging paths - old friends, more than one former lover, sisters of my most important people, relatives, acquaintances.  All dead before I turn 40.  It is disturbing and baffling, and so senseless, to know this many people gone before their own 40th birthdays.


And then there are those who haven't died but our paths took opposite turns due to other reasons - homelessness, alcoholism, addiction... It is nearly impossible to determine which set of small (and big) decisions widened the gap between those friends and me.  But as we get older it becomes curious.  

Continuing to look around at those who are still in our lives in some way evokes deep emotions that seem only possible with history and the flattering benefit of time and distance.  It is visceral and crushing - that feeling when your high school sweetheart gets married and has kids with someone else.  Amusing when you find out that your prom date has five kids or that your junior high crush looks even better at 40 than he did in 1988.  Inspiring when your clean-cut friend-turned-heroin-addict-turned-felon-turned-clean-again becomes a responsible and loving father to his son.  Fascinating when your college boyfriend comes out with a book, your law school boyfriend evolves into a successful attorney with a remarkable wife and the best friend you traveled Europe with turns out to live just half a mile from you.  These discoveries are magical.

Without judging, knowing how the people we knew and loved and shared pivotal times with have turned out is part of looking back.  And looking around. Reflecting.  It is like another road map of how we got where we are, where we took a different turn, and where we might have gone, had things.... It puts our own lives in context while also showing the uniqueness of our own paths.  And, when the sentimentality passes and the losses fade again to the backdrop, I emerge back in the present and can't help but feel extraordinarily fortunate to be at the very spot I am right now.  And soon to be 40.

In the Company of Great Women

I am lucky.  I am surrounded by inspiring women of extraordinary talents and strength.  This Mother's Day I am thinking of women, mothers and non-mothers alike, who provide amazing examples of what is possible  - possible to do, to be, to become, to accomplish.  So many women who somehow find a way to make the impossible seem almost effortless and who show me the infinite levels of living (balls to the wall) ... as a woman.

From the women I know who somehow manage to raise smart and happy kids on no money whatsoever, without them ever feeling deprived in some way.  To the women who are changing the world with each day that they dedicate themselves to service and global development.  The women who are miraculously balancing their personal and professional selves, with or without kids, and contributing to the external world as well as their intimate personal worlds.  Women in school while working and raising kids, women raising kids in countries foreign to them and teaching their children to explore and appreciate the world and other cultures, women raising kids with their wives who have to endure ridiculous legal obstacles to fair and just treatment, women pioneers leading huge teams (of mostly men) in places like Afghanistan and Libya, women in shelters (often with kids) paying a high price to live a life free from violence, women raising smart and thoughtful human beings while juggling a thousand other relationships and obligations and demands, women following their dreams while simultaneously taking care of their babies or other people's babies, women who run marathons and break physical barriers, and women who bravely do what is right even when it is the hardest option.

This Mother's Day I am celebrating all women.  As a mother for less than two years now, I feel so fortunate to have so many examples of how to live; to have so many people to look to in order to remind myself of what can be.  It is easy to find motherhood full of challenges and daily heartbreaks - particularly when also trying to maintain a sense of self and contribute to the world in a positive way.  These truly great women (including my own mother) are important reminders to me of the incredible, unimaginable and outrageous world of possibilities that is open to me (to all of us) if I just fearlessly stay committed to living life balls to the wall.

And as I do that, as I stumble forward somewhat blindly but well-intentioned into all sorts of adventures and endeavors and travels and professional milestones, I know that I am being the best mother I can be.  One that continues to set the example for my own son of a live truly worth living.  One that is balls to the wall.