June 7, 2019

This is Forty

This morning, in between planks and the Bible and looking up essential oils for anal candida (twins), I Googled, “Can I get ripped doing push-ups?” I thought, maybe if I really felt especially athletic on any given morning,  I’d turn my plank into a thing of kinesthesia and then could embark on my forties “ripped”.

Then I tried a push up because I felt a little bit robust. My hope of transforming the world was gone and forty year old woman problems bobbed uselessly in its wake.

We all start fresh with our fatless bodies and shiny ideals, convinced we’re going to change the world. We tell ourselves we’ll go to this university and rack up student loan debt and blast off into all the people and make a difference. I will innovate. Transform. I will be somebody.

And then we wake up forty.

Lest you misunderstand, I emphatically do not regret my life choices. Believe it or not, I planned ahead for this fiasco. (Minus twin boys) But.

Some days I blink groggily at 4am and think, what might I have done in another life? What could one have accomplished if one wasn’t pregnant, nursing or dragging a pooping, cussing toddler around for the last 16 years? It’s a game I play with myself in the midst of insomnia and migraines. A secret fairy tale of what ifs.

What I Might Have Wanted to be When I Grew Up if Maybe My Parents Named me Jennifer and I was Tall with Glossy Black Hair:

A midwife

A lactation consultant

A writer (one who gets paid but never has to leave her house or wear real pants)

A travel photographer and essayist

A minimalist professional organizer (Cue Marie Kondo and her tiny, adorable Asian voice)

A baby nurse (I am most definitely qualified for this, although I would not have been if I hadn’t spent the last 16 years pregnant, nursing or dragging a pooping, cussing toddler around)

Someone who can do push-ups

One thing I can promise you, in every scenario I fabricate, the man I call “my forever” is always there. Whatever lemon-infused Italian breeze my wanderlust carries me on, he materializes by my side and so, me thinks I did choose the right path.

Occasionally the kids are there, too.

Once upon a time, when my voice rang like a bell instead of the current rusty bucket, a professional musician friend pursed her lips and spouted to me matter of factly, “You could have been a professional singer. Why in the world didn’t you pursue that?”

I shrugged and explained that I like to sing, especially loudly and off-key when in public with my teens, but “professional singer” was never even on my radar. It wasn’t a goal or a priority. I just liked to share whatever God gave me to whomever was standing around. That was like a commandment or something in the Bible, right?

Then she said something that profoundly influenced the movement of the inner cogs of my brain indefinitely.

“Sometimes it’s enough just knowing we could have if we’d wanted to.”

And now whenever I start getting a little shifty because I’ve slathered butt cream on one tiny little a$$ too many, I repeat my friend’s wisdom to myself.

“It’s enough knowing I could have if I’d wanted to.”

I believe it, and so I can live out another day without regrets.

When I tiptoe the abandoned halls of home at midnight, when everyone is quiet and I’ve switched from “I’ll strangle you with my two free toes” day mode into “I love you all so much because you’re sleeping and my heart might implode” night time mode, I float from room to room with a goofy grin on my face.

I feel intense pride and a grand sense of accomplishment in the humans I’ve grown inside my body, pushed or had sawed out and subsequently fed with juices squoze from my own two mammaries. I taught each one of them to read and cuss all by myself. What bigger, more important thing could I have possibly done with my life?

In a women’s conference I attended, the keynote speaker, who had watched her young daughter pass away, ravaged by cancer posed the question; “What’s your greatest accomplishment?”

I kid you not, the first thing out of my mouth was, “I breastfed six babies exclusively. Two of them were at the same time!”

Yeah, I’m proud that I gave birth and that I usually manage to get up every morning and still find joy in watching Cat in the Hat for the 7 millionth time or explaining to my 4 year old twins once again why I don’t have a penis or convincing a kindergartner that we need the number zero even though it’s equal to nothing. I feel good when I cook something everyone likes or sing a song in church or hear my girls playing ukulele and harmonizing to hits of the 90s.

Somewhere in there, I realize amongst all the garbage and orthodontic rubber bands and toddler butthole rashes that flood my life, the silver thread of beauty stitched throughout it all is my family. My sacrifices for them. Their love for me. Our togetherness. Our connection.

I didn’t even have to think. Keeping infants alive with my boobs is my proudest achievement. I have to shrug here because I never knew that could be a thing.

I read this quote once that said something along the lines of, “Your greatest accomplishment may not be something you do, but someone you raise.” The stars of understanding exploded in my head and it was all clear to me.

I never really wanted “to do” anything except be a mom and maybe eat a lot of Lindor Truffles. I don’t recall feeling embarrassed by my low-hanging goals, but I do know my world opened up when I thought of all the possibilities of releasing a whole herd of good, breastfed people into the world.

Now, teetering precariously on the great and yawning precipice of forty; I have a notebook where I write Italian conjugations, I watch travel videos about Brazil and Italy, I’ve read nine books to date on perimenopause and I possess delusions of doing push-ups, but I don’t feel the lull and pull of a midlife crisis. I feel secure in what I’ve done and who I’ve done it with.

Owning six minors, three of whom need regular help with butt wiping, leaves no time for lamentations. I think I’ve probably done what I was sent here to do for the first forty years. And somehow, that feels really good.

As I was driving to bake myself in a metal, lighted box today, I noticed the Mimosa trees are in full pink and frothy bloom. This happens every year in Texas when the earth has shuttled around the sun enough times to make me one year older. I always think of them as Mother Nature’s personalized birthday present to me.

When I die, I want my offspring to plant a Mimosa tree in my honor, affixed with a placard that reads, “This tree is for our Mother. She breastfed every one of us and traveled the world and did push-ups and that was good enough for her.”