I am a particularly sentimental person and now that my son is on the verge of adulthood, well at least according to Jewish tradition, I am almost sprouting sentimentality from my pores.
I’m feeling like on old woman who talks with an aged accent about when her son was just a baby or when, a million years ago, she was just a girl herself who roamed the wilds of Africa, although the wildest place she ever roamed in Africa was the corridors of her high school.
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Last night I dropped my son and his friend at the movies. They were meeting two girls. At the movies. At night. In my mind that’s a double date. Oh my god. My little boy on a double date.
Except he’s insistent it wasn’t a date. He’s probably even right. He just went to the movies with three friends. Two of them were girls and his mother is the irritating kind of woman who puts everything into little boxes that fit her preconceived social structures just right.
It took everything in my arsenal of zen mum not to insist on phoning the mothers of the two girls , I didn’t even vet them outside the movies. In fact, I actually dropped the boys outside with firm instructions to always treat girls (and everyone else) with utmost respect and then I drove away as if I didn’t have a care in the world. In fact if I wasn’t telling you now you’d never have even guessed that I was going straight to the Chemist to check out their supply of natural calmatives.
Armed with only the boring common-or-garden variety of rescue drops, I went back into the shopping centre to wait for the mother of Little Pencil’s friend. We urgently needed to talk, as girlfriends that haven’t seen each other for a whole day need to talk, and I urgently needed to be within jumping distance of my son should he need me (which I knew he wouldn’t but I was sticking to my excuse).
As I waited for my friend to come and join me I watched the people around me. In particular I watched the people that were leaving the movies.
It dawned on me that people who go to afternoon movies are of a very particular demographic. They’re almost all over seventy. Most of them are women (a common “problem” in a society where women outlive men) and they walk slowly and carefully, the weight of age making its mark on their every movement. They no longer stand straight rather they bow to their age.
I had just let my little boy go and here I was, somewhere between the teenager racing off with all the exuberance of youth to his ”non-date” and the old women at the movies who bore the burden of way too many dates. Literally in the middle of these two lives – about 30 years away from the teen and about 30 years away from going to afternoon movies.
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It briefly occurred to me to be happy that I was still so young, so snugly in between the two ages so as not to be old (although my son would laugh for days if I tried to explain that I was as close to his age as I was to old age). I looked at these people and tried to imagine where I would be in 30 years time. I felt a little bleak when I realised that not many of them were smiling on the inside. In fact now that I recall it not many were smiling on the outside either.
Perhaps I should be giving people benefit of the doubt, maybe they had all just walked out of a movie like Philomena and they were really feeling very emotional. But maybe not. There is a certain somberness that comes with being an adult.
All the learning, maturing and developing that we do in our youth is unfettered with the stress of responsibility. All the learning we do as adults seems to weigh us down. I’m not looking forward to going to afternoon movies and coming out afterwards looking like I’ve been eating lemons and my days on earth are numbered by a clock sitting heavily on my back . I’m not looking forward to being old, although the other option is worse.
How do we ensure that we grow old happily? What’s the secret to keeping the exuberance of life as a teen ticking along when you are older ? How do we bear responsibility while still maintaining optimism? .
Maybe the answer lies in seeing a movie with a date. And not in the afternoon.
Maybe we just shouldn’t waste all of our youth on our youth.
One of my favourite people in the whole world is Maria. Maria comes to my house, kisses my dog for half an hour while he cries with joy at her very presence and then she cleans my house like some kind of hygiene ninja.
She makes my life easy, tidy and very, very clean but when she doesn’t come over our lives crumble a little. Like over the holidays when she takes some very well deserved time to spend with her family while my family rolls around in the dirt.
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Little Pencil started tae kwondo when he was four years old. I encouraged him to start because it was very convenient. What mother wouldn’t love a sport that took place in a shopping centre? He wanted to start because he was a boy and he had plenty of energy and a huge desire to kick and punch.
Even though my decision to start him training in martial arts may have been based on convenience, there were a few other factors at play. He was really small and I thought that knowing a few moves may give him some confidence, I had also heard that martial arts was good for focus and discipline and who wouldn’t benefit from that?
What I didn’t know is just how much he would get out of it, not just physically but emotionally, socially and intellectually.
When my son was born almost 13 years ago I started to worry about his Bar Mitzvah.
While the Bar Mitzvah may be a rite of passage for the Jewish boy who becomes a “man” on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah it is the rite of a Jewish mother to worry and it’s something that I took to rather like a duck takes to water as soon as it’s born. As soon as he was born I started to worry about his thirteenth birthday.
Strange as it may seem to people that know me, it’s not the idea of Little Pencil becoming a man that has been driving this 13 year worry. It’s not him singing his portion in synagogue in Hebrew in front of 200 people that fills me with apprehension, I’ll leave that to him to worry about. It not even the actual function that is worrying me, in fact that is pretty well organised and it’s going to be amazing. What has worried me all these years is photographs.
One of the reasons that I became a teacher a million years ago was to justify my repeated and rather grandiose stationery expenditure. I used it as an excuse, but the truth is that teachers don’t actually need heart shaped erasers, staple-less staplers and electronic erasers any more than they need farm animal shaped paper clips and sweet smelling textas. Funny that. [Read more…]
My son is right on the cusp of adolescence. He’s thisclose to being a teen even though, quite frankly, I’m not ready to be the parent of a teenager. I don’t feel much older than a 19 myself (except when I try to run, then I feel close to 100)
But time isn’t going to stop and it seem like I am going to have to get used to the surly moods I can see slowly beginning to creep in, the testosterone fueled tantrums, the sight of Little Pencil trying to be swallowed into the ground when I sing and the fact that he would rather be with his friends than anyone else on earth.
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I have so many diets going around my head I’m actually struggling to concentrate. Seriously my mind is like a thesaurus for the words “weight loss”
I could blame the plethora of magazine covers that I see every time I am standing at the checkout counter paying for the food that is actually causing me to need to diet.
It is enough to make your head spin. Should I be doing the super-easy plan to get a flat belly, should I be doing the Monday to Friday diet? or should I be detoxing?
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To every single person who has clicked on this blog, who’s commented on a post or just read what I had to say, to every one that has liked my Facebook page and to those people that follow me on Twitter this is for you.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to me rant and rave, for thinking about what I’m saying, for joining me when I laugh and when I cry. Thank you for making it all worth my while. I want you to know that the one thing I most love about blogging is reading your comments, chatting to you on Twitter or Facebook and just getting to know you. You mean a lot more to me than you could ever know.
I wish for each and every one of you only happiness and health, may your wishes come true and may you and your loved ones find peace, health, success and unending laughter in 2014.
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May the the best of your 2013 be the worst of your 2014 and thank you again for your support.
