By Barbara Curtis
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
~Madeleine L'Engle
"Mom, how old are you?" my fifteen-year-old daughter Maddy asked me yesterday while we were fluffing up the pillows on the couch.
"I'm fifty-nine, sweetheart," I said, as though everything about this conversation and where it might lead was perfectly normal.
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
~Madeleine L'Engle
"Mom, how old are you?" my fifteen-year-old daughter Maddy asked me yesterday while we were fluffing up the pillows on the couch.
"I'm fifty-nine, sweetheart," I said, as though everything about this conversation and where it might lead was perfectly normal.
"Oh, that's what I thought. When I told my friend Sarah that you were fifty-nine, she couldn't believe it. She said her mom is only thirty-eight."
"Well, did you tell her that's how old your big sister is?" I asked.
But Maddy's phone must have vibrated. When I turned around she was off in Text Message Land. End of story for her. A day of memories for me.
While Maddy's used to having an Older Mom, I don't know if I will ever get used to being one.
It's not that I got a late start. My first daughters, Samantha Sunshine and Jasmine Moondance, were born in 1969 and 1975 respectively -- like bookends to my intensely counterculture years in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.
By the time I met and married Tripp in 1983 and he shouldered responsibility for my daughters, I was ready for a normal family -- though since we ended up with twelve children, our family would prove to be not very normal after all.
Bearing children over a couple of decades has led to some sitcom moments -- like being pregnant at the same time as my oldest daughter and swapping maternity clothes with her. Sober ones too -- like breaking the news to her that her newborn brother Jonny had Down syndrome, just as she was expecting her own first child.
Madeleine was Number Nine, born a year after Jonny. She is what we call "normal," if you consider a little girl who could belt out tunes like Patti Lupone and who needed no coaxing to sing -- anytime, anywhere -- normal. Plus there's her Doris Day demeanor/Pollyanna personality. No matter the setting -- public or home -- Maddy is the most consistently cheerful, upbeat, and enthusiastic person I've ever met.
From her early years I suspected that people wondered if I was her grandmother. Though these days, in trendier locales, there is no lack of graying new moms who let their biological clocks keep ticking until seconds before the final alarm. They're now sitting at back-to-school night in those teensy-tiny chairs surrounded by parents young enough to be their children too.
The only difference between them and me is that I once sat in those teensy chairs as a normal young mom. And now I've been sitting in them for thirty-eight years. The novelty's worn off. The body begins to protest.
Last fall, when my youngest son started kindergarten -- you see, it wasn't crazy enough that my husband and I forgot to stop having kids, we also didn't get the memo that said we were too old to adopt a few more -- a mother called me to arrange a Play Date. How to explain that I just can't do Play Dates anymore?
I have twelve grandchildren already. I really should be just a grandma -- you know, that wonderful woman who picks up the grandchildren and devotes a day to making them feel special while their mom stays home and does laundry and rids the refrigerator of moldering leftovers. That wonderful grandma who has time to tell stories and bake cookies at her house, then takes the kids home and collapses for a few days before going out with her friends to swap pictures and stories. Or play golf.
Instead I'm still in the trenches, with my own refrigerator to clean, mountains of laundry from six still-at-home kids (eight when the guys are home from college), grocery shopping, and shuttling of the next generation -- well, my next next generation -- to soccer, play practice, voice and piano.
I'm exhausted -- in my worst moments muttering things like, "I know you had a plan, God, but what could you have been thinking?"
But I'm grateful as I pick myself up and -- much like the Energizer Bunny -- press on with the art and science of mothering.
"But you don't look fifty-nine!" people tell me -- at least on my good days. These kids keep me young because I'm not allowed to feel old. Being an older mother in some way is like drinking from a Fountain of Youth.
But then again, I wonder: what if I let my hair go gray?
I remember years ago when Maddy asked me why I was older than the other mommies, and for a moment I wished that I could be like all the others -- young and pretty and full of energy.
Then I remembered that once upon a time I had been a young and pretty and energetic mom. And I remembered how back then it was always about me. And that's the difference between being a mother of young children at the appropriate age and being one at mine.
I guess that's the upside of being an older mother. Children have changed me, made the rough edges smooth, the hard places soft. I'm just becoming aware of how the pieces come together and life begins to make sense even though there's still so much to learn. It gives me an inkling what God may have been thinking after all -- giving me this second generation of children at the perfect time!
"Well, did you tell her that's how old your big sister is?" I asked.
But Maddy's phone must have vibrated. When I turned around she was off in Text Message Land. End of story for her. A day of memories for me.
While Maddy's used to having an Older Mom, I don't know if I will ever get used to being one.
It's not that I got a late start. My first daughters, Samantha Sunshine and Jasmine Moondance, were born in 1969 and 1975 respectively -- like bookends to my intensely counterculture years in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.
By the time I met and married Tripp in 1983 and he shouldered responsibility for my daughters, I was ready for a normal family -- though since we ended up with twelve children, our family would prove to be not very normal after all.
Bearing children over a couple of decades has led to some sitcom moments -- like being pregnant at the same time as my oldest daughter and swapping maternity clothes with her. Sober ones too -- like breaking the news to her that her newborn brother Jonny had Down syndrome, just as she was expecting her own first child.
Madeleine was Number Nine, born a year after Jonny. She is what we call "normal," if you consider a little girl who could belt out tunes like Patti Lupone and who needed no coaxing to sing -- anytime, anywhere -- normal. Plus there's her Doris Day demeanor/Pollyanna personality. No matter the setting -- public or home -- Maddy is the most consistently cheerful, upbeat, and enthusiastic person I've ever met.
From her early years I suspected that people wondered if I was her grandmother. Though these days, in trendier locales, there is no lack of graying new moms who let their biological clocks keep ticking until seconds before the final alarm. They're now sitting at back-to-school night in those teensy-tiny chairs surrounded by parents young enough to be their children too.
The only difference between them and me is that I once sat in those teensy chairs as a normal young mom. And now I've been sitting in them for thirty-eight years. The novelty's worn off. The body begins to protest.
Last fall, when my youngest son started kindergarten -- you see, it wasn't crazy enough that my husband and I forgot to stop having kids, we also didn't get the memo that said we were too old to adopt a few more -- a mother called me to arrange a Play Date. How to explain that I just can't do Play Dates anymore?
I have twelve grandchildren already. I really should be just a grandma -- you know, that wonderful woman who picks up the grandchildren and devotes a day to making them feel special while their mom stays home and does laundry and rids the refrigerator of moldering leftovers. That wonderful grandma who has time to tell stories and bake cookies at her house, then takes the kids home and collapses for a few days before going out with her friends to swap pictures and stories. Or play golf.
Instead I'm still in the trenches, with my own refrigerator to clean, mountains of laundry from six still-at-home kids (eight when the guys are home from college), grocery shopping, and shuttling of the next generation -- well, my next next generation -- to soccer, play practice, voice and piano.
I'm exhausted -- in my worst moments muttering things like, "I know you had a plan, God, but what could you have been thinking?"
But I'm grateful as I pick myself up and -- much like the Energizer Bunny -- press on with the art and science of mothering.
"But you don't look fifty-nine!" people tell me -- at least on my good days. These kids keep me young because I'm not allowed to feel old. Being an older mother in some way is like drinking from a Fountain of Youth.
But then again, I wonder: what if I let my hair go gray?
I remember years ago when Maddy asked me why I was older than the other mommies, and for a moment I wished that I could be like all the others -- young and pretty and full of energy.
Then I remembered that once upon a time I had been a young and pretty and energetic mom. And I remembered how back then it was always about me. And that's the difference between being a mother of young children at the appropriate age and being one at mine.
I guess that's the upside of being an older mother. Children have changed me, made the rough edges smooth, the hard places soft. I'm just becoming aware of how the pieces come together and life begins to make sense even though there's still so much to learn. It gives me an inkling what God may have been thinking after all -- giving me this second generation of children at the perfect time!
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