Later Life & Caregiving Archives - Page 13 of 13

Everything I Know About Love I Learned Late

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When I was younger I thought love was a talent.

Something you either had or didn’t. Something that came naturally to the right kind of person, the open person, the emotionally available person, the person who had not spent twenty years building a careful architecture of self-sufficiency because self-sufficiency was the strategy that had kept her upright in the years when there was not enough of anything to go around. I thought love was a gift. I had it but I was not always able to give it cleanly, without the residue of all the protecting, without the habit of holding some part of myself back behind the glass where it was safe and the watching-from-behind-glass felt like presence but was not quite.

I know now that love is a practice.

Not a skill you have. A thing you do, every day, badly sometimes and well sometimes, and the doing of it is the whole of it, not the feeling, the feeling is the beginning, the doing is the love. The calling when you do not feel like calling. The showing up in the parking lot. The holding the coat. The soup you cannot quite replicate but make anyway because the making is part of the keeping-alive of something that belongs to both of you. The choosing to reach across the distance that accumulates in long relationships instead of letting the distance settle into furniture.

I learned this late and I am not ashamed of the lateness.

The lateness is just how long it took me to unlearn the protection. To understand that the glass between me and the people I loved most was not keeping me safe from them but keeping me from them, and the difference matters, the difference is the whole of it, and the unlearning required years and a certain willingness to be wrong about something I had believed for a very long time.

I am less protected now. More present.

I get hurt more easily, which sounds like a loss and is actually an arrival. The hurt means something reached me. The hurt means I was in the room instead of watching from behind the glass. I will take the hurt. I will take the reaching and the being reached and the full contact of a life lived from inside the feelings rather than above them.

Everything I know about love I learned late. But I learned it. And I am using it now with everything I have left.

Fifty-Seven and Just Beginning

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The culture has no category for this.

Not the beginning category. That one is for the young, for the people who are starting things for the first time, for the first job and the first apartment and the first serious love, for the people whose beginning is legible to the cultural imagination as a beginning and is given the appropriate narrative, the opening chapter feeling, the sense that everything ahead is still possible.

There is no equivalent narrative for a woman at fifty-seven who is beginning.

Who is writing for the first time in a way that is not for anyone’s curriculum. Who is walking to the water in the morning not for her health, though it is good for her health, but because the water is where she goes when she needs to think and she is finally giving herself enough mornings at the water to actually think. Who is signing up for the ceramics class not to be productive or to add something to a resume but to know what her hands can do when they are not holding something that belongs to someone else.

I am at the beginning of something and I do not have a name for it.

I am trying to resist the pressure to name it, which is the pressure of someone who has spent a career in institutions that require things to be named before they can be funded, before they can be taken seriously, before they can be allowed to exist in the official record. This does not need to be in the official record. This can be a thing that happens, a turning toward, a slow and genuine reorientation of a life that has always been pointed in the direction of what was needed and is now being pointed, carefully, gently, with great tenderness for the woman who has been doing the pointing, in the direction of what is wanted.

What is wanted is more mornings at the water.

What is wanted is the writing and the ceramics and the long dinner with the people I love and the second cup of coffee and the book I read without checking the time. What is wanted is the rest of it, the whole unmapped territory of the rest of it, and I am fifty-seven years old and I am standing at the edge of it and I am not afraid.

I am ready. Finally, actually, ready.

Getting Older With Someone

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We are getting older together and this is not a small thing.

There was a time when getting older together was not guaranteed, when the together was still being decided, when I did not know if we would be the kind of couple who made it to this side of the hard middle years, who came out the other side still choosing each other, still finding each other worth the daily work of a long marriage, which is a particular kind of work that nobody tells you about when you begin, that has no description in the books because the books are about the beginning and this is what comes after the beginning, after the children and the years and the things that changed each of you in ways the other had to accept and sometimes could not accept immediately and came to accept eventually because love in a long marriage is also patience, is also the willingness to wait for the person to become who they are becoming and love them through the becoming.

We are older now.

The bodies are older, which we acknowledge with the particular humour of two people who have been watching each other’s bodies for a long time and find the changes both alarming and funny, which is the only sane response to the changes, which are real and which are not the whole of the story. The minds are older too, in the good ways, in the ways that accumulation produces, in the deeper knowing and the shorter patience with the trivial and the quicker recognition of what actually matters, which is each other, which has always been each other, which is clearer now that the noise has reduced.

We went for a walk last Sunday in the early morning.

Not because there was somewhere to be. Because it was Sunday and the morning was good and we wanted to be in it together. We have been going for walks together since the beginning and the walks have changed as we have changed, have been fast and then slow and then fast again and now slow again, slow in the good way, in the way of two people who are not going somewhere but being somewhere, who have learned that being-somewhere is the destination, who are in the morning walk the way I am trying to be in everything now, all the way in, nowhere else.

I looked at him on the walk and thought: thirty years.

Thirty years of this person beside me. And the thirty years are in his face now the way they are in mine, written in by the same seasons, and I know his face the way I know the route, completely, and I find it still interesting, which is the whole of what I was hoping for when we began, which is more than I had any right to count on and which I count, every walk, as a gift.

Enough

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I keep coming back to the word.

Not as a limitation. Not in the way I used to hear it, as the thing you said to someone who was asking for too much, as the drawing of a line, as the word that meant: stop here, you have used your share, the remainder is not yours. That was the version of enough I grew up inside, the enough that was a ceiling rather than a ground, the enough that said: this is all you get, be grateful and do not ask for more.

I am learning the other version.

The enough that is a sufficiency, a fullness, a condition of genuine satisfaction with what is present rather than the management of longing for what is absent. The enough of a meal that is actually satisfying, not just filling, actually satisfying, where the body and the appetite find the same answer at the same time. The enough of a morning that has contained what a morning can contain and does not need to be more than a morning in order to have been worth having.

I am enough.

That one is the hardest. I have spent most of my life in the condition of not-quite-enough, of the bar just above where I could reach, of the expertise that was used and the belonging that was withheld and the credential earned and the door that still did not fully open. I internalized the institution’s verdict in the way you internalize things that are repeated long enough and loudly enough, until the not-quite-enough was not coming from outside me anymore but from a voice I had built inside myself that was harder to argue with than any external authority because it knew all my evidence against it and had responses prepared.

I am working on the voice.

I am replacing it, slowly, with a different account. An account that says: you were always enough. Before the credentials and after them. In the contract years and in the years before the contract. On the days when you were competent and praised and on the days when you were exhausted and invisible. Enough is not a destination you arrive at after sufficient achievement. Enough is what you are. It was always what you were. The institution did not have the authority to decide otherwise, and the voice that borrowed the institution’s verdict was wrong, and I am retiring it, formally, with the same administrative quiet with which I retired the rest of the contract.

It is done. I am enough. The word belongs to me now in the version that holds rather than limits. I am keeping it.

All the Women in the Waiting Room

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We do not speak to each other but we know.

The ones who are there for their mothers, which you can tell from a particular quality of the waiting, a quality that is different from waiting for yourself, that has a different kind of attention in it, a more external alertness, the eyes moving to the door more frequently, the body slightly forward in the chair rather than settled back. We can identify each other. We are all in the chairs. We are all holding the book we are not reading or the phone we are not looking at. We are all waiting for a door.

We are a particular generation of women.

Born into the generation that was told we could have everything, which was both true and not true in the ways that most things that are both true and not true turn out to be, which is that the having of everything came with a cost that the telling did not include. We could have the career and the family and the life that was larger than our mothers’ lives, and we did, and the larger life turned out to include the caring for the mothers while also doing everything else the larger life required, which meant the everything was genuinely everything, was the career and the children and the parents and the household and the self that was somewhere in the middle of all of it, waiting for a turn that sometimes came and sometimes did not.

We are in the waiting room.

The literal one and the ongoing one. The chair with the book and the door that opens with news we cannot control and the returning home after to the rest of the everything that continues regardless. We are doing this without a roadmap because our mothers’ generation did not make this trip in quite the same way, did not live long enough or did not have daughters in quite the same position, and so we are making the map as we go, in the waiting rooms, in the parking lots, in the kitchens where we make the soup and pack the bags and hold the coats.

The woman across from me has a book I have read.

I almost say so. I do not. But the almost-saying is its own form of connection, the recognition that we are the same kind of person doing the same kind of thing on the same kind of Tuesday, and the recognition is enough, the knowing-without-saying is its own solidarity, and I carry her with me a little when I leave, this woman whose name I do not know, whose mother I will never meet, who was in the chairs when I was in the chairs and whose not-quite-reading felt, for a waiting-room hour, like company.

A Letter to the Woman Who Is Where I Was

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I see you in the meeting with your folder and your prepared remarks and your careful management of the expression on your face that says: I am fine, I am competent, I am not as tired as I am.

I know that expression. I wore it for years. I wore it so consistently that it became something close to my face, something that required a deliberate decision to remove rather than a deliberate decision to put on, and the removing of it was its own kind of work, the undoing of something that had started as a strategy and become, over years, a second skin.

I want to tell you some things.

The tiredness is real. I know you know this and I know you are not acknowledging it in the way it deserves because acknowledging it in the way it deserves would require a space and a time that the current situation does not offer. I am acknowledging it here, from this side, where I can see the full shape of what you are carrying: the tiredness is real and it is large and it is not a personal failing and it is not a sign that you are not strong enough for this work. It is the correct response to an unsustainable set of demands. Your nervous system is right. It knows exactly what it is dealing with.

You are going to make it through.

I cannot tell you how or when because I did not get a how or when and I would not rob you of the particular knowledge that only comes from navigating the thing itself. But I can tell you it ends. The contract years end. The exhaustion ends. The morning arrives when the thing you have been bracing for is no longer the first thing you feel when you wake up, and on that morning you will know it, you will feel the difference in your shoulders, and you will understand what I mean by this.

You were always good enough. The bar was always wrong.

Take care of the body while you are in it. Rest when you can. Call your friend more than you do. Let the people who love you give you things. Say thank you and stop there.

There is a morning on the other side of all of this and the morning is yours and it is good and I am in it and I am telling you from inside it: keep going. Not because the keeping going is the point. Because there is something worth keeping going toward, and you have not seen it yet, and it is real, and it is waiting.

All the Things I Said I’d Do When I Had Time

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I made a list once.

Not formally. Not a document I saved anywhere. A running mental list, the kind that accretes over years, the kind that you add to when you see something and think: when I have time I will do that, when I have time I will learn that, when I have time I will go there and read that and call that person and finally take that course and figure out what that bird is called and whether I still remember enough French to have a conversation. The list grew for decades, patient and unaccused, waiting for the time I kept promising it.

I have the time now.

And the list is doing something I did not anticipate. It is losing items. Not because I am doing them, though I am doing some of them, but because I am looking at them with the eyes of a woman who now has the time and discovering that some of what I thought I wanted was what I told myself I wanted in lieu of the things I actually wanted and could not admit to wanting because the actual things were harder to justify in a life that required justification for every hour spent.

The pottery class: yes. That one was real.

The language app I downloaded and opened twice: also real, still wanting, still there.

The whole project of becoming more organized: no. That one was anxiety wearing the costume of self-improvement. I am releasing it with something that feels like relief.

What I am finding, underneath the list, is smaller and more specific than I expected. I want to walk more. I want to read more slowly, the way you read when you are not reading to get through something but to be inside it. I want to cook a meal with no deadline attached to its completion. I want to sit with my mother on a Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to be and no clock running and let the afternoon be what it is.

Most of what I actually wanted, it turns out, was time that belonged to me.

I had the things confused with the time. The things were just the shapes I imagined the time taking. What I wanted was the time itself. And now I have it and it turns out to be both simpler and more enormous than anything on the list.

After the Diagnosis

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The word changes the room you are standing in.

Not the room itself. The room is the same room, the same walls and the same light and the same chair you have been sitting in for ten minutes waiting for the doctor to say the thing. The room is unchanged. You are changed. The word arrives and something in the architecture of your understanding shifts, some load-bearing wall you did not know was load-bearing reveals itself by the way everything leans differently now that it is no longer where it was.

I drove home without the radio on.

That is the detail I remember. Not as decision. I just did not reach for it. I drove through the city in the particular silence of a person who has just received information that has not yet become knowledge, that is still in the process of being integrated, that is sitting in the car with me as weight rather than understanding. I watched the traffic lights. I watched people crossing the street with their ordinary faces, with the faces of people who had not just been in a room where a word changed things, and I thought: that was me this morning. That was me at nine a.m. on the way to the appointment, face ordinary, not yet changed.

I called her from the driveway.

My first call was to her. That is the whole of what I want to say about what she means to me. In the driveway, in the car, with the radio still off and the word still sitting in the passenger seat, my first call was to her. She picked up in two rings. She said my name. The way she says my name is different from the way anyone else says it and I needed exactly that, exactly her, the voice that has been saying my name since before I had a life to protect.

She said: tell me.

So I told her. And she listened the way she listens when something is real. And then she said the practical things, because the practical things were also needed, and I let her say them, and the practical things helped, and the help was love, and the love was the reason I called her first, and she is eighty years old and sometimes does not know what year it is and I called her first, from the driveway, with the word in the passenger seat.

She was the right call. She is always the right call. I am so glad she is still here to be the right call.