I wrote about my experience of being a mom and having my children leave the nest.
Included in my chronicles, I reflected on turning sixty. I hated the thought of people asking me if I was retired. Beginning to become the non-person in the room.
Now I worry about health and people looking at me with sad eyes glad it isn’t them who is sick.
I didn’t like turning sixty. I have yet to get a grip on what it means to be in this decade. I want to embrace it but I don’t want to either.
Frankly, I want to be 30 — I have that feeling more than I want to admit. I want to wrestle again with those big questions; will I get pregnant? Stay pregnant? Where will I live? Where will I work that brings life balance?
I had my worries, but I knew I had time to watch…experience my life unfold.
I loved all the decades that followed, watching my children grow and become beautiful members of the universe.
Turning sixty and each year following brings the reality that life is tender and tenuous.
My father died at sixty-five and he didn’t get to meet all of his 19 grandchildren. He would have loved watching them grow and become…hockey players, soccer players, dancers and artists. Grinned to see them become loving parents.
Now that I am now closer to his age when he left the earthly world, I wonder how to be in the world.
I know I don’t want to do it the way I doing it. It seems wasteful.
This is my desire — to learn how to be here now.
Stop pining about what was and what can’t be and enjoy the gift I have right now. Life.
I am here. Right now. Thanks be to God.
