This morning I checked the weather on my phone, expecting to see some relief from the hot weekend weather we just endured.  Instead, I found that it was already 95 degrees, heading for over 100 degrees.

That’s just dumb and the result of the Santa Ana winds.  I guess it’s not all that unusual for this time of year here, but I’ve seen people wearing jackets in Facebook photos from other areas of the country.  I want to wear a jacket!  That seems normal for the end of September.

I worked today from 3 PM to 5 PM.  After work, I had to drive about 30 minutes away to a pizza place to do a “mystery shop.”  When I finished, I couldn’t help but notice the sky and I knew it would be a spectacular sunset because of the clouds but I rushed home because my husband and I planned to watch the presidential debate together.

The entire ride home, I was distracted by the sky.  (I took this photo at a stoplight.)

I rolled into the driveway at about 7 PM.  My husband betrayed me by watching the debate when it started instead of waiting for me.  (I joke.  He started because he realized we wouldn’t have time to watch it together because one or the other of us would have to drop off and pick up some kids  I’ll watch the beginning tomorrow since we recorded it.)

So, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the reasons I missed another glorious sunset.

Next time, I’m skipping the debate and heading straight for the beach.

Somehow I thought that when my kids moved out of the Sesame Street, goldfish crackers and naps stage of life, I’d have more interaction with actual grown-ups.  I had this imaginary life planned in which I’d meet friends for coffee (I hate coffee) and conversation.  I thought maybe I’d have hobbies I’d share with friends and we’d explore fabric stores, talking while we picked out the perfect fabric for quilts.

My kids kept their end of the bargain.  They grew up.  And I’m still here, feeding the guinea pig, the cat and the dog and spending whole days in my house slippers, feeling lonely.

Here’s the irony, though.

Tomorrow I have plans to go hear Ann Patchett speak about her new novel and I invited a friend.  Saturday night, my husband and I are taking a couple out to dinner.  And I’m already kind of sorry that I made plans.  Now I can’t just lie in bed and read or drive to the beach and walk in the waves while the sun sets.

Instead, I have to orchestrate my day so I can be at the meeting place at 4:30 PM.  We have to contend with Friday night traffic driving into San Diego.  We have to find parking and find seats.  I’m worrying about these dumb and simple obstacles.  I’m even worrying that my friend won’t enjoy the evening (sometimes she reads this blog, so now I’m worried that she’ll read this and think I am truly off my rocker).

Sometimes I think that I’m solitary because I am terrible at making friends.  Then sometimes I think I don’t make friends because I’m solitary by nature.  Sometimes I think I am lonely because I’m awful at reaching out to people and being vulnerable.  And then I think I am awful at reaching out to people because I prefer loneliness.

I am swirling in the whirlpool of these thoughts.  I spend time considering why I feel like I have no friends and wishing I had some friends and telling myself that I do have friends but then when push comes to shove (I love that cliche’), I’d rather just be alone with my thoughts, bleak though they may be.  And no one calls me, so it’s not all that difficult to isolate myself.  (Oh, poor, poor, pitiful me.)

I have never, ever been good at socializing.  I plowed through middle school, junior high and high school without ever really eating lunch in the cafeteria because the idea was so intimidating to me.  Who would I sit with?  What would I say?  Even while actively wishing I were a social butterfly, I cultivated an interesting interior life, full of ideas and opinions and stories. I wanted to be included, but if it involved a big group of kids my age I would have declined.  (Though I was deeply involved in a youth group through my teen years.  I was still on the fringes of that group, aloof.)

This unfortunate trait reads as stuck-up and unfriendly.  I know this, so I have practiced making small-talk and interacting like a normal human being in social situations.

And sometimes, I make plans for a Friday night and Friday comes, so I pick out clothes that a grown-up would wear, get dressed, fix my hair and go.  Pray for me.  Ha.

My right eyebrow has three snow-white hairs now.  If I pluck them, I imagine I will eventually end up without an eyebrow at all and then I’ll have to use a shaky old-lady hand to draw them in with a Sharpie marker.  So I let them grow.  One day I’ll have white caterpillars crawling across my forehead where my eyebrows used to be.

(Other unauthorized hair is removed immediately, just in case you wondered about my face but aren’t lucky enough to study it up close.  And believe me, very few people are that lucky.)

The point is, I’m getting old.  If you are older than me, you will cluck and think how ungrateful I am not to realize how young I am.  If you are younger than me, you might roll your eyes and think that I can’t possibly understand because I’m a fuddy-duddy, only you wouldn’t use that word because it’s very old-fashioned which just proved your point.  Am I right?  You think I’m old.

I’m feeling my age and not just in my lower back and my stiff hands.  When a teenager says my name in a particular way and calls me “judgey”, the stream of time between us swells into a flood and there’s no bridge.  When that teenager thinks I’m unreasonable because I won’t let her do a particular thing before she’s 18, I feel my age.  (I feel old.)

But it’s not all bad.  Age gives you a perspective that only time provides.  A year to a teenager is a big slice of his or her life.  Four years are almost incomprehensible when you are fourteen.

I’ve been fretting for over fifty years, though, and I have learned a little something that soothes my troubled heart.

First, a good night of sleep makes almost everything seem better.  That’s why there’s hardly any point in worrying about things at night or having a difficult conversation after 8 PM.  Just take that burden and tuck it into bed and go to sleep.  You can untuck that problem in the morning and pull its snarling face close to yours if you want, but at least you’ll be fresh and the problem won’t seem so impossible.

Or maybe it will.  But you lived through the night and doesn’t it seem slightly better?  At least you’re a day closer to a solution.

Second, I know this for sure: This, too, shall pass.  This good thing will pass.  This bad thing will pass.  This awful year will pass.  A year goes by fast, even faster if you are old.  When you’re twenty, you can barely remember being four.  When you’re thirty, you barely recognize your teenage self in photos.  When you’re forty, you can’t believe all the things you were allowed to do when you were a mere baby of twenty.  When you’re fifty, you know that your child’s unhappiness is fleeting and even though it’s only September now, it will be September 2017 in the blink of an eye.

(When you’re fifty you sometimes torture yourself by reminding yourself that you have most likely squandered half your life and you tell yourself mean things as you look into your own puffy eyes in that horrible mirror that reflects your face at five times its normal size and you think, why do I look into this mirror which magnifies my face into such a ghastly size and why do I look so old and also, what have I done with my life that even matters?  Or maybe that’s just me.)   (But you can’t get rid of that mirror because of the unauthorized hair mentioned in paragraph two.  So.  It’s problematic.)

Unfortunately, the whippersnappers in my sphere of influence don’t truly believe that I understand much of anything, including the nature of time.  Probably they’re just distracted by those three weird white hairs in my eyebrows.

Oh, who am I kidding?  No one’s looking at my eyebrows.  (Well, now you will look at my eyebrows.)

Anyway, I’m just a mom with fading eyebrows trying to do and say the right things. Time to tuck my burdens into bed and get some sleep because Christmas will be here in just a second.

 

 

 

Today, I set my phone alarm for 2 PM and then reset it for 2:15 PM and then hit “Snooze” once before I finally did it.

Did what?  I called the dentist and a doctor and made appointments.  The appointments weren’t even for me, so there should have been no reason for me to procrastinate.  The lady at the dentist’s office is so kind and remembers my name and we’ve even had a friendly chat in the office after an appointment, so there’s no reason I should dread calling her.

That’s just weird, right?  Yet, I wonder . . . why can’t I just email everyone so I never have to make phone calls?

During my work online, I saw someone complain that she missed a party because the invitation came via email and she asked everyone, “Do you check your email every day?” and I thought everyone would answer like I would which is, “Yes, I check my email forty-seven times a day.”  Right?  Doesn’t everyone?  Don’t you pick up your phone during commercials or while you’re waiting for a pot of water to boil or at red lights (WHAT?!) and check your email?  (Most people claimed they did not check their email every day.)

Nothing exciting is ever in my email “box.”  And yet, I obsessively check.

The thing I don’t do is check my actual mailbox outside on the curb.  A week will pass and I’ll think, Oh yeah.  The mail.  Then I find myself excavating an overly-full mailbox and come inside with an armful of mail.  Then I sort most of it into the recycling bin.

How many of these pointless tasks fill up my day?  My days are pretty much a mosaic of repetitive, boring tasks.  I spend time doing these dumb things when I could be napping.  I mean, READING.

Sometimes I think I should get back to actually writing–not just this blog (but also this blog) and then I think there’s no shame in just being a reader.  Why must I be a writer?  I can just devote my life to being an excellent reader.

But then I think that my brain will die along with my body and then no one will have the benefit of my vast knowledge and insight and opinion and story.  So maybe I should write before I die.  Because obviously writing is an easier way to preserve my brain than cryonics and cheaper, too.  My brain is already losing its clarity and sharpness.

My husband tells me things which I promptly forget.  For instance, a couple of weeks ago he told me this long explanation about going out to dinner with another couple (and their little kids) and I remembered pretty much nothing of it and so yesterday I asked him about it and he said, “Well, if you remember, I told you . . . ” and I said, “I DO NOT REMEMBER.  That’s why I’m ASKING you to refresh  my memory.”  These are the kinds of conversations we have after 29 years of marriage.  That and each time I say something, he says, “Huh?” and then answers me.  And every time he says something, I say, “Huh?” and then answer him.

It’s hilarious, only not at all.  But hilarious.

This morning at 7:10, I was sound asleep until he said to me, “There’s someone knocking!” and so I sprang out of bed, disoriented, wondering what this had to do with me. Nevertheless, I stumbled to the closet and found a robe and checked each bedroom and found every kid in my house sound asleep (even the one who should have been in class and so I woke him and said, “Do you mean to be asleep right now?” and he said, yes, he had a quiz he was unprepared for and so he skipped class and I thought, well, he’s in college and what college student among us hasn’t skipped a seven o’clock class?  Not my problem).

I went back to my bedroom and tried to understand why my already-awake spouse thought waking me up to deal with the phantom door-knocking made any sense.  He told me that since he wasn’t dressed, he didn’t want to be surprised by our daughter coming in without knocking but . . . there WAS (supposedly) knocking.  (By the way, he realized that the knocking sound was actually the half-grown cat thrashing about like a lunatic in the bathtub.)  And I told him that our daughter no longer knocks on our door.  If she needed me, she would text me, as any rational person with an iPhone would do in this day and age.

(And hour later, after I’d fallen back to sleep, my daughter did text me to tell me she had a sore throat and we went back and forth a few times and I was on the phone with the school to call in her absence and she suddenly remembered that she “had” to go to school and I asked no questions and just said, “Okay,” and tried to go back to sleep.)

The days when I’d open my eyes to a tiny person standing bedside, peering at me and Momming me (“Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom”) are long gone.  However, they have been replaced by the days of a husband waking me up to deal with imaginary noises.

To be fair, it was only one day.  And I’m not bitter.  By tomorrow, I won’t even remember this happened at all.

Procrastination and forgetfulness shall follow me all the days of my life.

 

(p.s.  The One Easy Step to Overcoming Procrastination?  Set your iPhone alarm and when it rings, just do it.  You’re welcome.)