“I see you finally found your mommy,” the lady cooed to my youngest when she saw me washing his hands in the restroom. He had been crying for me earlier on the campus where I was checking on some things. My friend was entertaining him, and although he is so fond of her that he plans to “marry Miss Rose,” he still suffered (or made me suffer) from separation anxiety. The lady in the restroom now recognized him as the owner of the wailing lungs. Then she paused to re-examine my face.
Whenever strangers stop to look at me, I become fearful or vain. Self-conscious that I might have spinach (or realistically, candy) lodged somewhere in my teeth, I shut off my crooked-teeth exposing smile and looked down to discreetly perform the tongue-as-a-toothpick probe. Feeling safe in this regard, I allowed a small and sad thought to enter my small and sad mind. Dare I think it? Did this lady recognize me from this column? Sometimes people do, and are kind enough to stop me and say so.
But I had little to fear here. The main advantage of being published in a family hometown newspaper is that you can continue to be just as anonymous as you might have ever hoped to be. The cooing lady halted and checked herself after conducting her facial cross-examination. She addressed my son again, “Oh, or is it Grandma that you found?”
Grandma? Grandma??!!! Too bad “Grandma” wasn’t equipped with her walking stick, or she might have executed a few deft, eyesight-improving maneuvers. Too bad Grandma was showing additional signs of aging and was too slow to retort with, “Oh, I’m not his grandmother, but thank you for the compliment. I’m actually his great-great-great-grandmother, arrived here fresh from the crypt.”
I realize that at 42 then, it is conceivable (pun intended) that I might be a grandmother. A young mom of 21 whose child repeats the feat, could very easily be a grandmother. And being an “older mom,” I should be used to comments like this.
I was 23 when my eldest was born, but after all, I was 38 when my last child was born. A few years before that, when I was 35 and expecting my fifth child, I had noticed an “AMA” stamp on my chart at the ob-gyn office. I might have been flattered to be included in the American Medical Association by virtue of being an experienced mother. Remember those old cough-syrup commercials that had taught us to appreciate the value of “Dr. Mom” with her maternal, medical wisdom and her keen ability to select the appropriate cough syrup?
But alas, AMA is no compliment. It is a red flag to alert medical personnel that the woman this chart represents is risking childbirth in spite of her Advanced Maternal Age. My nurse-midwife, in the initial interview, had asked, “Have you had a change of sexual partners?” No. “Are you now, or have you recently been using drugs or other illegal substances?” No. “Alcohol?” Again, the answer is no.
I’m sorry to disappoint people, but my life is just not that exciting. If I go to the grocery store and can actually find and use a coupon to save a dollar, that’s excitement. Getting a “real” handwritten piece of mail in the daily deluge of bills that pepper our junk mail, that’s excitement. If someone else changes a roll of toilet paper in the house, then that’s excitement, bordering on delirium. Getting my 3-½-year-old (who still wears 2T clothing) to actually eat a complete meal – that’s just about as giddy as my life ever gets.
Whether I seem young or middle-aged or incredibly old to you will depend on your vantage point on the great number line of life by which we define our time-strapped selves. It doesn’t matter one way or the other to me what my age is, because as long as you’re in circulation on Earth, I figure, you have to land somewhere on the number line. I must admit to paying closer attention to obituaries nowadays. If I may borrow the words of Arundhati Roy, the 1997 Booker Prize-winning Indian author of The God of Small Things, being 42 is like “Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable, die-able age.”
There are people whose every hope for happiness hangs on a number. What’s my age? What’s my salary? What’s my GPA and class rank? What’s my weight? What’s my car’s mileage? What’s my SAT score? What’s my credit score? How many kids do I have? How much money is (oops, was) my retirement account worth? I would like to pretend that numbers don’t really matter that much to me, because I know the One who holds my life in His hands. But in spite of that, I haven’t been able to achieve that state of sublime philosophical detachment from the numbers that shape and quantify my life.
So the other day, when I stepped out of my car and caught sight of a puffy-faced, middle-aged woman, it bothered me to recognize it as my own reflection. I don’t mind being 42, but I don’t necessarily want to be instantly pegged as being 42, if not older, as Ms. Grandma-Detector seemed to have done.
Fear and vanity are not only the pathetic plight of the middle-aged woman, they are the basis of a booming, billion-dollar industry of make-up, weight loss, tooth-whitening, de-wrinkling and cellulite-defeating agents. According to James M. Rubenstein in An Introduction to Human Geography (the textbook for an online course that I took through NOVA- Northern Virginia Community College), the United Nations reported that “Americans spend more per year on cosmetics ($8 billion) than the cost of providing schools for the 2 billion in the world in need of them ($6 billion), and Europeans spend more on ice cream ($11 billion) than the cost of providing a working toilet to the 2 billion people currently without one at home ($9 billion).” A sad and sobering thought, is it not?
So what’s the lesson in all this? To rise above self-absorption and not worry what I look like? At this age, apparently, the three B’s of basic hygiene (bathing, brushing teeth, and brushing hair) just don’t seem to cut it. Or is it to never venture out in public without eye make-up? On any given day, it depends on my resolve and my mood. Either way, though, I’m definitely going to look into that walking stick.
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