“I grow old.. I grow old..."

I watched my son as he zoomed around the fellowship hall. He was flying high. Well, as high as a three-year old can get when he’s riding a tsunami-sized blood sugar spike from liberally doled out cookies and full-strength juice. I cringed. I was less concerned with the peace he might be disturbing and more worried about safety. You see, at our church we’ve got a lot of older folks, and I mean people who are well into their eighties and nineties. The intergenerational aspect is one of the things I love most about the place we’ve found, but it also means coming face-to-face quite often with the many ways that our bodies succumb to those currents of time. I tried, in the moment, to redirect my son and ask him to calm his body, but he’s the kind of kid who really needs quiet and stillness to process. He also needs to understand the reason behind the request. So I waited. And when I laid him down for a short nap that afternoon, I revisited the issue:

“Hey buddy, do you remember when you were running around and having so much fun at church?”

“Yeah, I do!” He giggled.

            “I love watching you have fun. But do you also remember that I asked you to slow down a little bit and make sure your body wasn’t bumping into other people?”

“Uh…yeah!”
“Well the reason I asked you to do that is because we have a lot of people whose

bodies have gotten older and might not be as strong as they were. If you bumped into them zooming around so fast, they might fall down and break something…like an arm or a hip. Can you understand that?”

            “Yeah, I do.”

He was quiet for a few seconds as he continued to process this information, and then he asked, “mommy, are you very old?” He cupped my cheek with a tiny hand, caressing my face in that way that I’ve caressed his so many times.

“Well,” I laughed, “not yet, honey.”

“Yeah, not yet,” he said in his half-serious, half-amused way, “but one day you might be.”

One day, I might be old. It’s a notion that I hadn’t really considered. I’ve never really been a visionary. Sure, I make plans and work toward goals, but I don’t ever look toward the future in a “one day when” kind of way (hello, despair with a smile, here). Lying there beside him, at the end of another exhausting holiday season, I was suddenly enthralled with the idea that I might get old one day. I suppose it was especially revelatory because around this time of year I feel a deep-down-in-my-bones weariness that tricks me into thinking that I’m older than I am. This year, that was compounded by the weighty realization that my mother is no longer with us. I know, I know, this whole blog is more or less about that fact, but last year we were still reeling, still in a state of disbelief; I think I’ve reached a place of acceptance. I feel the fullness of her absence stretching itself out in me from limb-to-limb and settling down quietly in that place of real knowing. That is to say, that there are few things I know more fully right now than my mother’s absolute and irrevocable absence.

That certainty found me as I began the process of playing Santa for my son. At 11 pm on Christmas Eve, after six hours in the car, for a five-hour visit, with family one state away, I packed all of his trains and tracks into a bin so that I could erect a construction site in their place. And as I stared at the table emptied of all it's clutter, I was struck by the way that we typically move, almost imperceptibly, from one phase of life to another. We never really clear out the clutter completely, we sort of just shuffle through it. New things make their way onto the table while, hopefully, old things find their way off of it and before we know it, we’ve transitioned into something different. So there was something jarring about the table’s absolute barrenness.

The past and present coalesced momentarily on the surface of that table through that telescopic lens of my mother’s absence. She bought the table for my son’s first birthday “because,” she said, “it was something that would grow with him for awhile.” And it has. It served, first, as a supportive object: he pulled up and walked around it, beaming at his newfound dexterity and independence. Then it became a catchall for whatever toys happened to be in favor at the moment. Eventually, we laid tracks and rolled trains. We’ve spent incalculable hours around that table over the past two years, and in that time he has grown inches, acquired language, discovered those first inklings of interest and passion, skyped grandparents, and daydreamed about whatever it is that toddlers daydream about. We’ve bumped our shins and stubbed our toes on it. We’ve found joy and frustration in equal parts at that table. In hindsight, it was both utterly remarkable and categorically mundane in its everydayness; we barely noticed the way that we moved from phase to phase.

That table has been, in all the myriad ways we might use this phrase, a transitional object. It was the first and last tangible gift that my mother gave to us, and it signified so much more than a space for play. Bennett and I have both found ourselves in the four corners of that table—him as an individual with interests apart from me and myself as a mother and a woman apart from my mother's understandings of those things.  I realized, as I placed the tiny orange cones around the table’s perimeter and poured the rice into the plastic bin, that this newest phase, the things that I was in the process of laying down and the things I might later remove were things that she would never know. And when the moment righted itself and time resumed, I felt the shift inside me in the way that you might feel a bone popping back into place—my mother was thrust into the past and I was firmly relocated in the present, in that space of endless transition that we claim for the living.

It’s always around this season of Epiphany that we begin to throw those tired phrases around. You know the ones I mean—“carpe diem!” or “Live each day like it’s your last!” We make promises to ourselves and to others about the things that we’ll change or that we’ll endeavor to do. But this year, I’m not doing any of that. I won’t feel harried or hurried to fit it all in, to cross things off the bucket list, to know where I’m headed or what I want, to be fully actualized (whatever the heck that means), to unburden myself of all the things that weigh me down, etc. Nope, I won’t live with the scarcity of time biting at my heels. I’m going to live as if, one day, I might be old. I’m going to live slow and sure and steady, for the long haul rather than the sprint. My mother didn’t have time to grow old; she died at 58. But even then, as she was dying, it wasn’t the things she hadn’t done that she regretted. If anything, it was having done too much. She sat in my living room for weeks just looking out the window and she said, as I hovered anxiously, “I don’t think I’ve ever had time to just sit here like this.” If I live to be 65 (which, for the record, isn’t very old at all), I will have grown older than my mother, and I will have lived longer without her than with her. Certainly I hope to have done some things along the way, but I also hope that I will have taken the time to clear off the table completely, to bask in the stillness and emptiness that can be found between things. So long as there are transitions to be had, there is new space to be remade into almost anything we can imagine. 

A Lineage of Love

Sometime last year, I read a piece in the The New York Times about the relationship between a child’s resilience in the face of difficulty and his/her sense of an “intergenerational self.” Reading that piece, I contemplated the lack of an intergenerational narrative in my own childhood. My maternal grandmother is the only grandparent I’ve ever really known, and for much of our lives, distance, language and culture have posed nearly impassable barriers in our relationship. Both of my father’s parents and my mother’s father died before I was born, and neither of my parents talked openly about their lives before one another very often. In fact, when I stopped to tally all the stories I have from their collective childhoods, I realized that I could count them on my fingers and toes. I channeled my six-year-old self, tongue in cheek, brow furrowed, thinking, “wait, is that right? That can’t possibly be right!” But it is.

I think in our case, that lack of a cohesive and intergenerational narrative was exacerbated by the demands of military life. We moved so frequently that it was difficult to establish any kind of reliable tradition. Ironically, the only thing that stayed the same…was that nothing stayed the same. For most of my childhood, we were a unit of four (a unit of five after my sister came along) and that was it; we began and ended with one another. As a kid, I couldn’t name what I felt, but I remember being angry at times that we didn’t have that narrative and familial structure to anchor us to something. I longed for a place where we belonged, where we could return—a place that we both recognized and would be recognized by, in turn. It was nostalgia at its most literal, that longing or ache for a return home, but it was also the simultaneous recognition of, as Boym puts it in The Future of Nostalgia, “the impossibility of homecoming.” After all, how does one return to something that never existed?

It wasn’t until my mother’s recent illness and death that I really began to contemplate how many gaps filled our family tree—whole histories lost, limbs lopped off by our tradition of reticence. In those last months with my mother, I scrambled to discover some of that history before she took it with her. But as I sat there poised with my pen and paper in hand, I felt how much the radiation had dulled her once razor-sharp mind; I knew that it was already too late. We went through the motions together, anyway, grasping at all the threads and attempting to tie the ties that bound us to each other and to all that which had come before us.

As I’ve tried to make sense of our last months together, I’ve been overcome with a new nostalgia for those six weeks that she spent with us after my son was born. He was a 33-weeker, healthy but small. He spent nearly a month in the Special Care Nursery, and I was exhausted from the worry and work of living in two places. My mother swooped in as she always did, an amalgamation of old wives tales, “better” ways of doing things, tough love, and unsuspecting tidal waves of tenderness that nearly drowned me with their suddenness. She cleaned, put my not-yet-ready-for-baby house in order, and cooked. For weeks after I gave birth, she insisted that I eat the traditional Korean seaweed soup, miyeok guk, prepared for post-partum mothers. After about a week and a half, I begged her to let me eat anything else. She finally relented, but only if I agreed to drink a bowl of the soup first. I watched her make and remake that soup with a kind of ritual care. It was more than soup. It was her offering of peace and love. It was her way of welcoming me to the table of motherhood. So I drank it, dutifully.

As I ate, she would sit next to me in that little dining room of the apartment that we lived in then, made bigger, somehow, by the sunlight streaming in through the two enormous windows, and she would talk, sometimes for more than an hour. I remember being deliriously sleep-deprived, wanting nothing more some days than to tell her to be quiet so that I could lie down, but something made me hold my tongue. Maybe it was that well-worn guilt and obligation that she’d cultivated in me. Or perhaps it was the recognition, however nascent at the moment, that she rarely spoke so freely and that she was offering me something I would later value. So even though my body ached and my brain could barely keep up, I listened. And later, we would gaze at my son through his warm incubator, marveling at his feistiness, tracing its lineage in the small blue veins on his stomach back to the little umbilical stump where my blood and her blood had so recently coursed through him.  When I think of that time now—the warmth of that sun-kissed space that we inhabited together, the love we felt for him knitting new bonds between us—it feels so much like that return home that I’d longed for as a child.

When my mother passed away, I felt momentarily frantic. What would I have to offer my son in terms of some historical trajectory—ours, mine, his? When my partner and I selected his donor, we took some measures to ensure that he could fill in some of those intergenerational gaps when the time was right. But I began to think of all the ways that I had failed to keep track of the day-to-day. I didn’t keep a baby book. I recorded things haphazardly here and there. I saw the same old cycle of silence situating itself in the gaps. So I began a new project. Each night I take a few minutes after he’s in bed, and I write something about the day. Sometimes, it’s just a sentence or a picture depicting the things he’s said or done. Other times, it’s a longer reflection on the memories or stories he’s called up in me. I make sure to include other threads, too: anecdotes about the people who pass through his life and the people who are a constant presence; observations about the ways in which he fits into his world; notes about the things he loves. Maybe I can’t provide him with some “oscillating” narrative about where we came from and how we endured, as that article discussed, but I can weave together these present threads for him, warp and weft, into a lineage of love. For so many of us and for so many different reasons, this is our story. We don’t know who came before us. Or maybe we do know, but would rather forget. We are resilient in the face of difficulty not because we see the long line of history trailing behind us, but because we’ve learned to craft our own stories from the moments around us, gathering together those strands of love, endurance and connection and wrapping ourselves up in them.