When I imagined myself as a mom, it was always as a young mom of very small children. It is a pure shock to me that that stage has ended in many ways for me. I can’t really explain my utter lack of reality, except to say I like babies and wish my kids could be Peter Pan.
However, my oldest will be a TEENAGER on Saturday, and I feel like Alice when she went through the looking glass.
This whole middle-aged mom life thing is really weird to me.
A few weeks ago, I went out to dinner with a friend from church. She’s about a decade older than I am, and somehow we started talking about birthdays and how hard it is for us to get older. I turned 40 last year and I’m still reeling from the shock of it. Everyone promised me that 40 was the new 30, but that is a lie. 40 is 40, THE END.
My friend didn’t make me feel any better about turning 50 one day. (But by the time I hit that decade, she’ll be 60, and still the world will spin on its axis. This truth is shocking to my very core.)
Which is ridiculous. We are both women of deep faith. We love Jesus. We love watching our kids grow up. Our latter is better. Heaven is our destiny. We love what God has brought us through, and all we have learned, and we don’t want to be young and lacking the wisdom that we’ve gleaned through the years.
And yet. There we were, in a diner, eating pancakes and enchiladas, comparing the elasticity of the skin on our hands.
Aging just goes to prove that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. (And wrinkly and a maybe a little thin and crepey.)
However, one of the perks of my new, middle-aged status is that my kids are old enough to stay at home while I run to the grocery store, or workout at the gym, or run away from the madness for thirty minutes of peace at a coffee shop.
For a woman who homeschools her kids, this is a kind of glorious liberation I knew not of before now. I’m practically sixteen again, driving in my car BY MYSELF to Walgreens to pick up a bottle of Pantene and a bag of gummy bears. Since having my first baby thirteen years ago, I have been alone in my car exactly eleventeen-shmomething times. (I can only count these solo trips in mythical numbers, because being alone is the unicorn of early motherhood.)
Being alone is so rare, in fact, that I have become a real superfan of the single public bathroom in recent years. Any restaurant or shop with a bathroom with only one room and a lock on the door should be rated as a multi-star Michelin establishment. First of all, I love that these bathrooms give me an excuse to shut a door and lock it. This alone makes for an experience that is akin to a trip to the spa. I’m in a public place, and yet no one is shouting at me from under another stall or talking too many words in between flushes about the thing they want for their birthday in two Novembers.
