letter #7
we're all making our own sense of things
A friend of mine starts a new journal at the beginning of each year and begins by giving each new year a word. I can never stick at anything long enough to have either a journal or a word that is going to last me an entire year. But I do have a word that fits like a glove at the moment.
Bewildered.
There are so many transitions and milestones floating in and out of my life at the moment: my eldest boy turned 18, finished school, got an offer to university; my youngest is 16 and driving; and today I am 50.*
Learning how to be a parent to young adults has been an entirely different experience to anything I was expecting. Its complexity has taken me completely by surprise. It is almost as if, when I look behind, I am looking through a long, dark tunnel. At the end of the tunnel is light, but the light is diffused through an overgrown mass of leaves, branches, trunks and flowers. They are the preschool days. Tangled and knotted, but full of great beauty. The tunnel is childhood. Not because it is dark, but because there is more certainty of purpose. One foot in front of the other towards the light at the other end. And now I am here at the end of the tunnel, blinking in the light. And I am bewildered, because if anything, the leaves, branches, trunks and flowers are even more tightly knotted at this end of the tunnel than they were at the other. The colours are even more vivid. And when I breathe the air fills my soul, stirring feelings I didn't even know I had.
I went to bed last night, bewildered at the thought of leaving my forties behind. On my fortieth birthday I was so, so sad. Not about being forty as such, but there had been a great deal of loss and sadness in the years leading up to it. I was struggling to understand how to celebrate. I still knew that I had much to celebrate, but I couldn't work out how to do it.
I have been determined not to feel that way about turning fifty. Partly because who wants to be a cliche, but also because who wants to miss a chance to celebrate? I took a look at the things I can control (I learnt this from Adrian who excels at this skill), and of them, my one major disappointment in myself is that I have not written enough, not published enough, not written well enough. So I made sure I had my fringe show in process so that today if my brain tries to say, 'Fifty, and you haven't even ... ' I can say back to my brain, 'Ha! Well, that's where you're wrong because I have got a project going on right now and etc .. '
Of course there are still the doubts that come with any major project we undertake, but at least they are doubts about something concrete. They are doubts about something I can address. Besides the show, my work as a funeral celebrant is so deeply enriching that I do feel as if I have am making my contribution in the best way I can.
So as I went to bed on the last night of being forty-something I wasn't feeling sad or any one of the associated emotions. But I was definitely feeling bewildered. Because fifty? How does a person become such a thing?
Time and its passing are mysterious. We are there for every moment of it. We are constantly marking its increments: morning, afternoon, evening. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, weekend. When its rhythms--or at least the rhythms we are taught to understand--are disturbed, so are we. (Even after seven years living in Abu Dhabi I never quite managed to reorient myself to the Friday-Saturday weekend.) We talk about time constantly. We embody it. And yet, still its passing takes us by surprise. One day, we look up, blinking in the light, bewildered. Second upon second, and fifty years have passed.
Then, overnight, the bewilderment grew into something more. This morning, when I woke, I was filled with an entirely unexpected sense of euphoria. I am fifty! Second upon second has passed, and here I am. Fifty.
It was a good way to begin my jubilee.
Speaking of time, have you been watching Sex Education on Netflix? I liked it well enough, but I couldn't understand its setting in either time or place. They had British accents sure enough, but the school vibe was surely North American with its letter jackets, and to me the first few scenes of the first episode were more Grease than they were Grange Hill. And then I couldn't work out whether it was Grease or 80s aesthetic. I kept expecting Molly Ringwald and Winona Ryder to appear in the corridors. In the end I gave up because I couldn't get it to make sense to me.
Thank you for reading tc xx
*in the interests of accuracy, I was also 50 yesterday, but tinyletter wouldn't let me send my letter until today because they disabled my account. So although I wrote this on my birthday, it hasn't landed in your inbox until the day after. Just as letters used to be