If I live as long as my mother did (she passed away at the age of 92 of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s), thar would make me officially half her age.
That means I’m halfway done. Yikes!
I feel like I just got to my birthday party and I’ve been told I have to go take my bath and go to bed now. Bummer.
I also know that I’m speaking of my mother was my adoptive mother. My birth mother died at 69.
Which matters more–nature or nurture?
My birth mother had a difficult life–schizophrenia, shock treatments, and a heart conditioned probably exasperated by those shock treatments. She didn’t/wasn’t able to take care of herself. Not to mention the stresses of divorce, living in less than ideal care facilities, and the ravages of mental illness back in the 50s and 60s when the treatments were almost as harsh as the disease.
My adoptive mother had a calmer, fuller life. She was married for 52 years, enjoyed a long ministry and was respected in her circle. She bore the sorrow of not being able to birth a child, but they took a risk in their 50s and adopted me. Life threw her a few more curves–she had several intestinal surgeries, heart disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Her positive outlook, faith, stubborness, and personal care habits still afforded her a long life.
I have more in common with my adoptive parents–I was adopted at the age of four. I grew up with them, learned most of my eating, health, and exercise habits from them as well as lived in their emotional climate. And since she lived longer, I choose her as my role model.
We can’t physically do in our 80s what we can do in our 30s. We slow down, stay closer to home, and may even be cared for to some extent by others–our children, community, and others in our circle. Life can still be good, although the risks of cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s increase.
When you think about it, we spend close to 20 years of the first part of our life being cared for so perhaps it shouldn’t be competely unexpected that at the end of our life we spend a few years backwith family and in care.
I’m really feeling this half way thing, I’ve got to admit. It snuck up on me. I have so many dreams, goals, plans, aspirations, adventures I’ve planned. Will I be able to achieve them all? Even a tenth?
It’mnot bummed because I haven’t had a great life. It’s because I have. You can only want MORE of something you already enjoyed. More please, is what you say when you’ve licked your plate clean.
I spent my 20s getting married, making babies, starting a home, attended seminary and enjoyed a side career as a children’s minister. I spent my thirties still in full mommy-mode, and then began developing my writing career. Before my 30s were even over, I became my mother’s full-time caregiver. This lasted until I was 43 and my mom passed away. I returned to college, earned my degree, finished raising our children, began publishing short stories, essays, articles, poems, and have written 5 books to date.
I’ve also explored the rooftop of Notre Dame in Paris and climbed to the top of St. Isaac’s Basilica at midnight (still daylight) in St. Petersburg, driven a Lamborgini around the mountains of Northern Italy, smashed grapes with my feet in Napa, snorkled Molokini, an underwater volcano in Maui, taught children to read, helped build a school, and a thousand other adventures. I long to see the world, travel, witness nature, help others.
Life expands and contracts just like your lungs. Caregiving made my world small in many ways, but it also expanded my thoughts. Caregiving taught me so many things: the resiliency of family, the tenacity of love, how forgiveness is the strongest bond of love, how much more you can endure than you think you can, your ability to juggle, stay on top, reconfigure, mix it up, and fight it out–and how much I want to live and love before I leave this earth.
Another desire is about family–witnessing that part of you goes on, and it’s in part, seeing what I can do, what I’m capable of–it’s creating and recreating in a zillion different ways–biologically, spiritually, artistically, intellectually.
I plan to teach more children how to read and write, hold grandbabies, see the Parthenon and the aurora boralis. I plan to build more schools and hospitals, send a single mother to college–leave a legacy.
Are you half way through? What drives you? What legacy will you leave?
You may think it’s not, but I promise you, it will. You can’t face death and it not transform you.
Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
