Motherhood, Perceptions of Age and Theater
About a week ago, I went to see a play by Dan Fishback, a very talented man whom I know from a few glorious years of doing Shakespeare on UPenn campus. His production, Why Won’t You Let Me Love You, was fascinating but I can’t talk about it until I admit one affect the evening had on me. Waiting for the play to begin, sitting in a room in Kelly Writer’s House on Penn campus, I was surrounded by young people, people who had recently graduated from university. They chatted, laughed, adjusted their thrift-store long-johns and argued about the relative addictiveness of coffee and heroin. They all seemed about to do something, about to have a new idea, about to write a play, about to fall in love, about to dance. I thought about my children sleeping at home and how much laundry I had to do to keep them dressed. I thought about how I don’t listen to music any more because there’s always so much noise even without a CD playing. I thought about how I don’t have passionate conversations about Nicaragua or existentialism as substitues for having sex. I felt very very old. So when they invited us to stay and talk about the show, instead of throwing myself into the thick as I once would have, I slipped out, guiltily, sadly. I felt like what I was couldn’t speak to this, that I was outside this conversation somehow. I went home and talked to Ed about getting rigid, drying up and getting old.
I used to look very young for my age (at 25 refused beer in an English pub because they wouldn’t believe I was 18, startling my students on the first day of class because I looked more like one of them then one of Them) but motherhood has aged me severely. Well, you can’t grow and feed two human larvae without that taking some toll. Also, six years of almost never getting a full night’s sleep might have something to do with it. Nevertheless, I still look young(ish) for my age. Just not quite so young. Not quite so perky and pretty. This oughtn’t matter but I think that being young formed part of the core of my self-image. Age seemed to me solid, dependable, reliable and dull. Age seemed worn-out, unimaginative, settled and sad. Age seemed over. I was not aged. I was never going to be aged. I am aging now.
I absolutely relied on how young I looked for continued membership in the core (or do I mean corps? well, the core corps) of doers, of experimenters and players. I don’t mean that I raved or did drugs or wanted to party party party. This had never interested me. What I wanted was to do theater (lots of theater) and still be considered for the pretty parts. I wanted to sit in someone’s living room with my feet up and argue about Marxism and feminism and other isms like they really really mattered. I wanted young beautiful men to flirt madly with me. I wanted to believe I had huge stretches of time lying before me to create in, to love in, to be vibrant in. Now I feel out of place, like I have crossed a barrier somewhere. Like I have been retired from that merry band and am taking my place in the gentle good night ranks.
Much of this is about being a mother. For my children, I will be reliable, available, solid and dependable. I will be there, at home, quietly accessible. I will be as calm as I can. I will be plain. I will not primp when I could be playing. I will not take from them the adult they deserve. They need a mother more than I need to be young. But it makes me sad, sometimes.
I really want to be graceful about this. I know I am still interesting, interested and vibrant. I know I can still rock the casbah, as long as the casbah finishes before midnight because I really need my sleep (but I was like that in high school — good for nothing after 9 pm). I want to believe, as part of me does, that aging does not necessarily mean drying up, that it is possible to be beautiful in ways other than unlined rosiness, that age has its own power. Part of me believes this and part of me feels like I have died a little death.
Sitting in that audience, I wondered whether in ten or fifteen years all these grown-up children would have mutated into grown-ups with jobs, partners and children. With houses, laundry and dishes. With sensible haircuts and baggy sweaters. With a preference for dull solidity. I wondered whether it was a personality def
ect in me that I felt so much more cynical, more solid than those around me. I wondered whether some people never solidify but stay flexible and growing their whole lives long.
It’s not about being young. It’s just easier to be groovy and growing when your hormones are running wild, when you are experiencing everything as new and amazing, when you have no house, no laundry, no family. More people are young when they’re young and only some stay bendy and fluid as they age. I’m working on it, but this stage of life calls upon me to be certain, to be solid as a tree, to be dull and dependable. I have a terrible time remembering that I think this is more about having small children around then about being 37.
I can’t tell you how much I relate to everything you said. It was like I was reading my own thoughts. So much so that it almost made me cry. And cry even more when I got to the last line, because I am 25 and feel like that. And sometimes I really feel like I lost something because I missed out on that youthful intensity you describe since I had my first child at 20.
But I think maybe, that my children have shaped me in ways more enriching and real that discussing existentialism and such would have.
I have to think that.
I come to you, young and dumb. I write because you have moved me. You are mourning something that I am (kinda) experiencing right now. I get to live that life of staying up and talking to people about important things and beauty and truth and philosophy.
And I have seen the faces of women who are mourning, as well. I am not one of them.
I do not dare say I know what you are going through. All of the things you’ve discussed in the past are important…but not nearly as important as where you are NOW, what you are doing NOW. You have chosen the toughest role in the world-motherhood. And all the late night conversations at coffee joints will never amount to the single act of one quiver of your pinky finger, for you are ushering in the new time. With those babes.
We get this, women do, more so than men. Our lives move from maiden to mother to crone, and it is distinctly felt. We know when we are ‘in season’, we know when we are ‘virginal’, ‘sexual’,'matronly’. Women’s lives are dominated by these periods (no pun intended). And yet, we must move through them, seemingly putting away ‘childish’ things for new segments of life.
But you will ALWAYS be that girl who got the pretty parts, and the girl who has SOMETHING to say, and the girl who is young. Because it is your mind (so extraordinary) that keeps you young.
I say this to you as a woman who can only hope to be as wise and kind as you, one day. I say this to you as a woman who yearns to be a mother, someday.
I can vouch that the majority of the kids in that room, once they procreate, will weather their transmogrification into stability and security with less glamour and intelligence than you. I don’t say this to disparage them, but rather to laud you – you, who have pulled the thickness of your sexuality through the tiniest holes in the wall of American domestication. You, who, pendulously pregnant, straddled a couch in a dank basement, before an audience of aroused college students, and gave flesh to the sexiest of theatrical text. You, who hung out with a bunch of us manic-depressive undergrad whackos, not out of early-20s nostalgia, but out of a common passion that made specific ages boring and rather obsolete. You transcend all this, far, far better than anyone I’ve ever encountered or heard of.
You are not out of place in a crowd of mindful young people — you are that, condensed. You are oil of that. You are tincture of that. Show us how it’s done!
Also, thanks for reminding me to stay up late talking about philosophy, cuz usually we just end up talking about bands. What was I thinking?!
Love
Dan
Beautiful post. Those pangs of “missing out” – the want to slip backwards – into the time when everything was new and rich and full of textures and I was out and about and FABULOUS and not responsible, dependable, me.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m so glad I read it…
Are you really 37? I thought you were younger!
I agree that having children ages you, and that people want their mothers to be stable. When I was in college, I wrote a column for the student newspaper, and occasionally I’d mention my mother in a glancing way. She would get upset if I implied that she was somehow conventional and out-of-touch. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but now I know how it must have felt–to want to say, “But I’m more than this!”
I really think that in a way school and university suck because they make you think you can do lots of different things–work, and volunteer, and go to class, and pursue art–and then slowly, you have to give almost all those former interests up. I can barely speak a word of French any more, even though I came close to fluency in college.
Thank you all for your thoughts, solidarity, challenges and love. You have all twisted your fingers into my brain and it is feeling massaged. (Hey, that’s not too weird an image, is it? You know what I mean.)
There is an essential conflict in me, perhaps in every mother, between the selfish I, the I who wants what I want, wants to sleep late, eat cereal for supper, go out at night, dance in silly shoes, admire and be admired, flirt and be flirted with and so on and on and on — and the larger I, the I who embraces that I am not I, am not alone, am part of a larger dance in which I have a part and without me, the dance collapses and without any of the other dancers, the dance collapses so we are all in this together and that I also wants but what this I wants is to love my children, to warm their hands when they are cold and sing them songs that keep the monsters away.
These two I’s can’t both have what they want all the time. They have to take turns but they are both always there, wanting to be out when I’m home, wanting to be home when I’m out. When I gave birth to a baby, I also birthed another me, and I am still learning to live with her (cause let me tell you, she can be a right pain).
Krista, I am in the trenches with you — how old you in numbers matters not at all. For some of us, there was never going to be enough late night coffee. But we will (I do believe) be better late night coffee drinkers and philosophy arguers someday because of these days.
Fritz — you are lovely — your roaring faith in the glory of motherhood strengthens me.
Dan — I hardly know what to say; you remind me who I am. You do. (And bands are philosophy. Just not philosophy 101.)
Still fabulous, Roxy (you go, writer girl)
Tess — you’re so right and one of the challenges of mothers must be to remain more than our children will ever willingly see. It is too easy to let our children’s need for us to be dull become reality. We can fake it for a while but secretly be whoever we really are. Someday they might get it and if they don’t, oh well. Maybe we should try posting in other languages every so often. Hmmm.