Mama’s Girl

Yeah, I’m a big baby.

I’m past the half-century mark, don’tcha know, and yet the older I get the more I realize how much growing up I have yet to do, not to mention how much I am shaped by my genes and my formative years. And unlike many people, I find I am heartened and grateful when I look in the mirror and see my mother. There may still be hope I’ll turn out well.

It’s not just that I’m pleased to start looking more like Mom, though that wouldn’t make me sad in the least; I think my mother’s beautiful. But since we’re a pretty close-knit family, I like to think that enough of her more objectively wonderful qualities will have rubbed off on me over the years that I have a chance of continuing to improve with age in many other ways as well. To grow into some semblance of her patience and compassion, her grace and gentleness and big-hearted love is certainly a gift to be fondly wished.

Meanwhile, however, it’s Mama’s birthday. It’s she who should be getting gifts. But then, given my mom’s character, having her children turn out well ought to be just the sort of pretty good present she’d like most, and if my seeing her in my mirror confirms that the best I can turn out is as a good imitation of her, why then I’ll keep working and hoping and trying what I can to head in that direction. Hmmm. Maybe I should bring her a box of candy or something just in case.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

What if I Never Grow Up?

Aside from the fact that all of you know already that this is a given rather than a question, I can still pose it rhetorically and ask it of all people in general. See, I think about this a fair amount, and not just because of my own level of maturity at any given time or in any given category. It’s simply a question we all get asked in one way or another at some point, or should jolly well ask ourselves, at the least.

This marvelous Möbius loop of inquiry and insistence begins the first time we are told, as children, that we need to Grow Up, and it can be applied to any number of circumstances. The irony that this mandate is almost invariably handed down to us by a person or persons barely older and more grown than ourselves is of course lost on all of the parties involved, because we’re all too inexperienced and naive and, conversely, too full of ourselves to understand it. The bigger kid tells the littler kid to Grow Up mainly because the elder wants something that the younger has or has simply lost patience with her.

It doesn’t change. When we’re older, the toys and privileges may have changed to different brands of money and power, but as long as we think someone else has more of whichever kind we desire than we do, we’re just as inclined in adulthood to nit-pick at that someone for his supposedly lower maturity levels both as cover for our covetousness and in shallow hopes of shaming him into being more generous than we are ourselves. The failure of this silly system doesn’t change either, but it doesn’t stop the less magnanimous and less mature from nagging at those who are more so, no matter the age or the occasion.

There are perfectly good reasons to wish anybody, including ourselves, would think and act with maturity and keen sense and the wisdom of experience. Those things tend to lead to our being more level-headed in emergencies, more practical in the everyday, and more inclined to share those traits and all sorts of other things with other people–and that leads to better community. Who knows, even World Peace.

But isn’t it grand, all the same, to forever retain a large enough pinch of immaturity and, if not childishness, then at least the ability to be childlike, that we can still look at the wide world with the awe and wonder it requires. We should hang on, with youthful enthusiasm and gleeful tenaciousness, to innocence and hope, to curiosity and rambunctiousness, to unalloyed silliness whenever the moment permits. Maybe we should even be willing to get down there with the actual kids and roll around in the grass once in a while without batting an eye over how dirty it’ll get us or whether it might make our old joints sore tomorrow. If we can’t still do somersaults, then we’d better find other ways to regain and retain our not at all grown up point of view, because the world, especially while it’s still short of outright Peace, can really use a healthy splash of the ridiculous now and again.

 

Insisting on Persisting in Resisting

The more the situation calls for me to behave with gravity and proper decorum, the more I’m likely to drag my heels and stubbornly glue myself to being silly and irresponsible and to frustrate any attempts to make me act however is deemed suitable to my age. Those nearest and dearest to me have long since learned the futility of asking me to behave in any sort of adult-appropriate manner and they tolerate, or to varying degrees, enable this impossibly impish attitude on my part. No wonder I love them so.

. . . so I'll just keep lying around and looking at the pictures in the clouds . . .

Perpetuating Childhood

In all probability I’d be prone

to be an insufferable old crone,

a hag, a harridan, full of mold,

if I had to mature–grow up–get old–

because, in truth, the prospect’s grim

when responsible heart meets creaky limb,

and milky eye and baggy middle

drag joie-de-vivre down a little–

I’d rather, by far, annoy my peers

by being unfitted to my years,

guffawing, as boisterous as a sinner,

and eating six Popsicles for dinner;

skipping like a stone across the Square

and having wild grass seeds in my hair,

wearing skirts too short; taking much too long

to figure out what I’m doing wrong,

yet enjoying the doing things just the same,

since it’s all a bit like a great big game

anyway–this journey we call a life–

so why should we let it sour, be rife

with tedious, tiresome old-age gunk?

I’d rather go back to school and flunk

for excessive dreaming and foolish pranks.

Grow up? Grow old? Mature?

No, Thanks!

Dude, You’re Harshing My Mellow

I was darning my husband’s sweater (they were only small holes, so not worthy of being damned) and in mid-stitch, was thinking that perhaps this is one of those many things that tells my age on me. As it is, I will readily admit to my advancing age–a thing of neutral value in my estimation, balancing fairly comfortably so far between worthwhile accumulations of experience and adventure and the brink of crepitation that will begin my final free-fall towards oblivion. So it’s not a touchy subject.What really struck me during this little bit of mending was that however cloddish my technique, it was still a very antique skill that I had learned from Mom in my youth and she, in her turn, from hers, and right on back into the impenetrable fog of history. Furthermore, a skill that you’d think a truly slothful person like I am at heart would find just a teeny bit repellant; you’d honestly expect something more like my flinging the sweater in a pile of give-away items as I slouched by on my way to the nearest chaise longue. I live in a disposable and spoiled society and it would be quite conceivable that I would far prefer to go with the flow of self-indulgence, lean back in the shade comfortably sipping sweet tea, and buy a new sweater with no untoward holes in it.

But along with that darning bit of old-fashioned fashion in me are a few other quirks of age. It’s clear that my multiple personalities are coming out of the woodwork in all of their glorious contradiction as I grow older. I am more able, for example, to recognize what would be the more mature thing to think, say or do in a given circumstance, but less willing to conform to that with every day that slithers by. I grow lazier–I would say by leaps and bounds, but that would imply energy being exerted to do so, obviously a misrepresentation, so let’s say by exponential expansion–that’s another thing, coincidentally, that I’m doing along with age, since I eat more and exercise less whenever I think I can get away with it. Even when I know I can’t. And yet another of these oddities is that while I grow lazier as quickly and surely as long blue-green hair grows on expiring vegetables, I also grow more stubborn about getting some things repaired in ways that will last longer and prevent my having to repair them next week yet once more. So I darn the darn things.

Everyone and everything else continues to age right along with me, so I feel safe in assuming a certain amount of knowing sympathy among my crinkled compadres, as well as understanding when I say that I am also simultaneously getting more profligate and more tight-fisted with my money. There are so many things that in days gone by I would have continently held in heart-thrumming abeyance as long as I could stand, both to see if I truly craved them enough for the sizable expenditure and because I thought it more fiscally prudent and Mature. Now, I’m often apt to shrug with a rich Gallic moue and say to myself, But Darling, you could, howcanIsayitdelicately, CROAK tomorrow! And POP! goes the wallet.

Some things I have learned actually do fall under the get-what-you-pay-for rubric, making up in the long term what they scared out of me in the present expense. Such, for example, is this cashmere sweater I mended. I am quite fond of bragging that I’ve bagged most of my non-shoe wardrobe for under USD $10, but on a couple of rare occasions I have seen one of a kind items either at surprise availability or better yet, on sale (perhaps resembling in this my brother-in-law, whose middle name we have occasionally joked should have been HalPris, or Half Price, for his amazing zest and gift for finding bargains)–when those moments come, it’s time to pony up and make the grand purchase. Because (a) high quality does last longer and (b) some outrageous things are just too jolly fun to have. So as I’m loath to cast off a slightly moth-eaten cashmere, it was worth the effort of the purchase enough that I’m willing to undergo the momentary exertion of actually mending and maintaining such a thing. It’s like a smaller and less complicated version of the relationship I have with a house: I know that things will constantly require attention and maintenance, and what falls within my limited skill range must be determined to be either worth the trouble or not, destined to be cheaply slicked over or staring me down with the necessity and value of genuine, if expensive, care and improvement.As for the sweater with the holes in it, I just did the best I could making them disappear with some discreet back stitching and re-weaving of the threads. It deserved to be darned. The moth that munched the wool, him I did damn to perdition for his maleficence in undoing the pristineness of my husband’s only nice and slightly expensive sweater. Go back to your weed patch and chew on a rabid squirrel’s ankle or something, you mean MothMonster, why don’t you! And then I’d blow him away on a dandelion parachute, while lying back once again on my chaise as the sun drifts gradually down the afternoon sky.