Birthday Thoughts: Graced With Another Year...(#GenFab)

The women of Generation Fabulous are out to show that the internet isn't just for kids (and their moms). I've been part of this "voices of midlife" community for a few months, and it's grown too big for Facebook to hold it any more. Founding members Sharon Greenthal, Chloe Jeffreys, and Anne Parris have just built GenFab its own little bit of online real estate, and it's opening the doors to host the group's monthly Blog Hop. This month's theme is "Aging Gracefully(?)." Since this is the time of year when I think about that particular subject anyway, I wasn't about to pass up participating, even though I really shouldn't have stolen the time to write this.

"But I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now"
    --Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"

Tomorrow is my birthday. It's not a "milestone" one, but it is one of those numbers that ends in 9 and comes right before a milestone one. I'm spending the weekend at the pop-culture and comics convention WonderCon, the smaller sibling of San Diego Comic-Con. I'll wear a costume or two, and go to panel discussions and screenings, and probably buy some ridiculous things. Twenty years ago, or even ten, I wouldn't have envisioned myself doing such a thing ever, let alone in my late forties. But after feeling like a misfit among my peers for much of my adult life, I'm feeling like I'm living just about the right life for my age.

My adulthood took off at an accelerated pace--married at 19 and a mother at 20. It wasn't exactly what I'd planned--not so soon, anyway--but with a lot of help, I was able to combine it with things I had planned, like finishing college and starting a career. By the age of 30, I was living in the conservative suburbs of a good-sized Southern city and well established in marriage, motherhood, and work. But much of the time, I felt as if I were play-acting at being a grownup, and that I was too young to have the life I had. My circumstances had more in common with those of women a decade or so older than I was, and I'd missed many of the young-adulthood experiences of other people my own age. On the other hand, my kid would be at least partly out of the house before I turned 40, so there was that.

All of us were out of that house by then, as it turned out. My marriage ended after almost eighteen years, and when my son went away to college, I moved across the country in the opposite direction; I was 38 years old before I ever lived on my own, and spent the first couple of years struggling though a delayed coming-of-age process--and dreading turning 40.

That particular milestone came and went with some mild trauma, but since then, most of the time, it's felt like I'm living the right life at the right time. I've gained and lost and re-gained weight, and I've changed my hair color a few times. I've worked on bettering my mental and emotional health. I've found a surprising new preoccupation to divert me from the tedium of more than 25 years in the same occupation. And for the last six and a half years, I've been married and raising children again (these came as works in progress when I married their dad)...but this time around I've (mostly) felt like I'm not way out of sync with everyone else.

More importantly, though, I've come to feel--more or less--in sync with myself. If I'm going to age with any degree of grace at all, I'm pretty sure that's key. I need to keep hold of it through this birthday, and next year's milestone, and whatever comes after that. Here in midlife, I've grown comfortable accommodating both the younger girl still inside me and the wise-with-experience woman I might become eventually. I don't feel like I'm play-acting at being a grown-up, or at being anyone other than who I mean to be, any more (although you will find me cosplaying this weekend--I'm new at it, but loving it). Happy birthday to me!

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#stopitnow: Bullet Points--or, Me and a Gun, revisited

I originally wrote this after the Tucson shootings in early 2011, and revised it a bit after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut last week. Members of the #GenFab bloggers' group have been sharing their responses to the Sandy Hook School shootings with the hashtag #stopitnow. What follows are my personal opinions on the generalities of a very complex issue, with links to facts on the matter where appropriate. I've linked to others' posts in a Readlist.

Whenever there’s a newsworthy shooting somewhere in this country, the debate about guns and their “control” gets revived. America is a nation born from war; it wouldn’t have come into existence without firearms. Our Constitution’s Second Amendment was meant to ensure our right to bear arms in defense of ourselves, our families, and our country. However, all too often, they’re used for purposes pretty much unrelated to that right, and activities that, being against the law, are technically unprotected by the Constitution.

My parents were both victims of gun violence associated with criminal activity. When I was twelve years old, they were both shot in an attempted robbery at the liquor store they owned at the time; my father’s knee was shattered when he came out from behind the counter, and my mother sustained a flesh wound when she chased the robber out of the store. (By the way, he didn’t get any money--but he did get arrested a few days later.) My sister and I were in the store at the time--a Saturday evening, the night before Easter 1976--and witnessed it all. It’s no overstatement to say it changed our lives; by the end of that year, my parents had sold the store, our house, and most of what we owned, and we moved from Connecticut to Florida to start over. (This happened roughly 30 miles--and 36 years--from the town where Sandy Hook Elementary School is located.)

When I had a child of my own, I was one of those parents who didn’t want him to play with toy firearms, although I did make exceptions for the occasional water pistol. However, I observed what many parents of little boys do; if they want to play “shooting” games, they can pretend anything is a gun. (I don’t mean that as a sexist statement; girls may do it too, but I only know from raising a boy.) My son wasn’t all that interested, fortunately, but he did engage in that pretend play every now and then. And he spent most of his growing-up years in the South, where gun culture is pretty well entrenched, although we really didn’t know anyone who used them.

I have joked occasionally about the irony that I would leave Tennessee and move to California before I lived with a guy who owned a firearm. Early in our acquaintance, and well before we were officially “in a relationship,” the man who would become my second husband told me that one of his favorite hobbies was target shooting and that he had an interest in collecting firearms. He hadn’t wanted to mention it until I’d gotten to know him a bit--and had a good sense of how non-aggressive he was--but he did feel I should know fairly early on, as it was the kind of thing that might affect my feelings about him. He was well aware that people can have some prejudices against gun owners--but since I hadn’t yet told him about the robbery, he didn’t realize that I might be someone with those prejudices. I surprised myself by how calmly I took this revelation; I told him that it was his thing, and as long as he didn’t expect me to participate in it, I wouldn’t bother him about it.

And I really haven’t, although I am the last person I ever thought would live with firearms in the house. But I also live with someone who is is exceedingly responsible about firearm ownership and usage, serious about safety, and fundamentally nonviolent. Because he’s the only firearms owner I’ve had a close relationship with, I can’t say whether my husband is “typical” or not, but I suspect he probably is; we just don’t hear much about the gun owners who don’t fit the “NRA gun nut” image. My husband’s firearms are stored, unloaded, in a locked safe. They’re removed only for his trips to the shooting range (and occasionally for cleaning); he has no interest in hunting or any other uses for them, and no one touches them without his supervision. Not surprisingly, he’s not as averse to toy firearms as I was when my son was little--my stepson owns a few Nerf dart guns, which he’s not permitted to point at any living creature--but he’s never allowed violent video games, particularly those of the “first-person-shooter” variety, and he’s never pushed shooting with his daughter and son; they’ve used air rifles and accompanied him to the target range a few times, but they’re not overly interested.

I have mixed feelings about the worth of “prohibition” laws in general. Outlawing the production and sale of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s not only didn’t stop people from drinking, it was a major factor in the growth of organized crime. The illegality of abortion prior to 1972 didn’t stop it from happening then, and efforts to curtail its legal availability now won’t stop it either. But as you might imagine from my experience in that liquor-store robbery when I was twelve, I’ve been quite strongly in favor of gun control most of my life. On the one hand, I (kind of) get the NRA’s “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” position; on the other hand--yeah, people kill people, but in this country far too many of them have much too easy access to guns to do it. Even where there are restrictions and prohibitions against gun purchases, I suspect that a determined criminal mind--or an unstable one--will find a way around them, but the fact remains that stricter gun laws correlate with less gun-related violence.

In the years since, I’ve thought we were relatively fortunate that my family’s experience with such violence happened when it did, the mid-1970s; now it seems like criminals are more interested in not leaving witnesses, regardless of whether they get what they came for, and my parents might not have made it out with just bullet wounds and broken bones. I don’t blame “the media” for what seems to be a more widespread appetite for carnage, but I do believe that as violence in entertainment--and as entertainment--has become more prevalent and more graphic, it’s come to feel less real, to the extent that some seem to disassociate violent acts from their effects on living human beings. That may point to an issue that needs at least as much attention as gun control, and maybe even more: mental-health care and treatment, starting with a hard look at the attitudes and stigmas surrounding it. There are even bigger questions of ethics and morality connected with all this--Is a criminal act less of a crime if it's committed by someone mentally unstable who may not really understand what they're doing? Is it more of a crime if the person who commits it understands it but is incapable of caring about it?--but since we're already struggling as a society with the more concrete questions, I'm not sure when we'll be prepared to tackle the philosophical ones.

I'm pretty sure of this, though: the “right to bear arms” is a significant American one, but the right to health and safety is a fundamental human one--and personally, that’s the right I’m more interested in defending.

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Love Among the Nerds: The "how we met" story

 Those of you who have been reading here for a while have probably heard this story before, maybe more than once, so you get a pass on reading it again (unless you really want to, of course!). But it’s a story I particularly enjoy telling, so I’m sharing it again as part of the December #GenFab Blog Hop: the theme is “How I Met My Spouse/Husband/(Otherwise) Significant Other.”

There's something in my spam e-mail almost every day from one online dating site or another. I have no interest in or need for dating sites at this point in my life...but there was a time when I did, almost eight years ago. Spam doesn't work for me, but online dating actually did.

It was nearly three years after my divorce before I was ready to try dating again. Those three years had given me ample opportunity to think about what I wanted to find in a partner and what mattered in a relationship. There were the big things, of course: compatible worldviews and values, intelligence, compassion, and, for me, sense of humor. But then there were any number of smaller things I felt would make day-to-day relating more enjoyable, such as similar frames of pop-culture reference and tastes in entertainment.

In order for those secondary attributes to mesh well, a guy would have to be...well, a geek. But how would I find that geeky guy? I was technically a single mom, but my son was in university 2000 miles away, so I wasn’t meeting other parents at kid-related functions, and my dog hadn’t introduced me to much except occasional casual conversations with neighbors. I had an 80-mile round-trip daily work commute--alone, in my car, because I live in the Greater Los Angeles area and that’s pretty much how we get around. And aside from the job and the dog, I didn’t get out much; I was a bookworm who had never been a bar person.

I thought the odds were good that, being a geek, Geeky Guy was probably online--but where should I look for him? The online equivalent of a personal ad made me uncomfortable; I wasn't interested in randomly skimming photos and sketchy profiles. If I was going to try online dating, I wanted to get more out of it than that, so I shelled out the big bucks for eHarmony.com’s “compatibility assessment” and a one-year membership. They promised a method more like that of a matchmaker, making introductions based on analyzing the detailed personality profiles each member submitted. I liked the idea of someone doing that screening for me.

The “introduction” e-mails began coming within a couple of days of my joining. Some didn't go anywhere, but a few moved forward into the next stages of eHarmony's "guided communication" process; by the time I entered the "open communication" stage with one of them, I felt like we were clicking, at least in writing. Less than two weeks after we were introduced, we met in person for a weekend lunch date.

Even though we lived in neighboring towns at the time, chances are that without an online matchmaker, Tall Paul and I wouldn't have met at all. More recently divorced than I was, he'd only joined the site for three months initially, and had extended his membership just a week or two before I signed up; even with eHarmony, we could have missed each other if he hadn't done that!

Paul described himself as a "dork," but other things I knew about him didn't really jibe with my experience of dorks. He was creative--a trained artist/illustrator and developing photographer (no pun intended, although a weakness for them is one of the many things we share), working as a graphic designer--as opposed to scientific, he was into cars and motorcycles, and with his beard and earring, he definitely didn't look the part. He didn't even need glasses, due to having recently had LASIK surgery on his eyes. I questioned his nerd bona-fides, but looked forward to meeting him in person just the same.

Our Sunday lunch date lasted all afternoon, and we talked about all sorts of things, catching each other's references right and left. After a few more dates, I knew for sure--the guy's nerd credibility was established. He wasn't a techie, but he loved his technology, especially if it was made by Apple; he knew his way around a comic-book store; his music and movie libraries were both extensive, and we knew and liked many of the same things in both of those spheres; our senses of humor were warped in the same direction. He may not have looked the part, but he not only affirmed his nerdiness, he fully embraced it. On my second date with Paul, I told him I was "a geek's dream girl" during a conversation about how many seasons' worth of The Simpsons each of us owned on DVD (I had him beat). I may have been overselling a little, but luckily for me, he seemed to be buying it.

I probably shouldn’t assume my experience is universal, but my feeling is that when you’re already past forty when you meet a might-be-special person, the heart and mind come to agreement on things pretty quickly; where you’d caution a younger person to take things slow, the midlifer doesn’t have time to waste. We moved in together after six months, and exactly a year after that--on October 21, 2006--we were married. It’s a second marriage for us both, and our wedding ceremony included our respective children in forging a new family. We hit it off so easily, and so well, that it feels like we've known each other all our lives and sometimes I forget that we met online just seven and a half years ago.

Although I suppose we might have eventually met in Target. I did see him there the day before we went on that lunch date...but he didn’t notice me, so the whole process could have taken a lot longer.

Posted with Blogsy

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Note to Self: Dear Me, Age 20

This post was written for this week’s “Letter to My 20-Year-Old Self” Blog Hop for members of the midlife-bloggers’ group Generation Fabulous (#GenFab), hosted at Chloe of the Mountain. If you’re blogging during your midlife years, regardless of what you’re blogging about, and interested in being part of this group, you’re invited to e-mail Chloe directly.

Hi, me at 20!

NOT me at 20!

Well, there’s no going back now, even though this is probably the last place you expected to see yourself at this point. Barely had a date in high school, and now, not even two years out? Married and pregnant, although those events happened in the opposite order. And honestly, considering that you both took a Catholic-school-kids’ approach to birth control--that is, Catholic enough “be careful” (that is, not to use anything proven effective), but not Catholic enough to avoid doing things that might necessitate using it--you’re probably lucky they didn’t happen sooner.

As far as that goes, though, you’ll come to believe that there’s never an exactly “right” time for anyone to have kids, and that all things considered, this timing wasn’t all that bad. You’re young and healthy yourself, you’re not trying to get a career underway just yet, and you have support around you now.

Your parents, especially your mom, really couldn’t have been better about this unexpected development. There’s room in their house for you, your husband, and the upcoming addition, and they’re letting you stay there rent-free; your mom grew up in a multi-generational, extended-family household, and as far as she’s concerned, that’s just how family works. And she’s said she and your dad will care for the baby while you and B. are in college--because the one non-negotiable is that the two of you will finish your bachelor’s degrees. And although it’ll take an extra year to do it, it’s going to happen--debt-free, too. You’re in college at a time when your combination of high academic achievement and relative poverty will actually work in your favor; you’re both getting through on grants, scholarships, and summer jobs, and your parents’ contribution is keeping your cost of living minimal.

Living in your parents’ home as a married parent yourself won’t always be easy, and by the time you and B. finish university and move out on your own--you’ll work for the Ivy League university where he'll be in grad school--you and your mom will both be ready for some distance. But you’ll always appreciate their help, as well as the fact that your untimely timing allowed your mom three years with the only grandchild she’ll ever know. When the three of you leave, she’ll already be showing symptoms of the early-onset Alzheimer’s disease that will require full-time nursing-home care eight years from now (seven years of it, until she passes away in October 1999). You won't be around for any of that. I'm still not sure whether that made it easier or harder.

If only "getting a clue" were this easy...

You won’t want to hear this part, but I need to put it out there anyway. You and B. don’t feel you “had to” get married; you were already talking about it, although you figured it wouldn’t happen until some time after college. But baby makes three, and now, married you are...although adult enough to know what you’re getting into, you’re not. Early marriage and parenthood will give you a jumpstart on many aspects of adulthood...but in others, they will stall your growth for years to come. You’ll be functioning in a couple before you’ve learned to function as yourself, and you won’t understand where boundaries should be. Neither will he--and since you’re pretty much following his lead in this relationship, that’s going to be a problem. You’re trying to be, and do, and give, what you believe he needs...but neither of you really grasps just how great his needs will be. On top of that, you’re so focused on what he needs that it will be years until you start understanding what you need. Your needs as individuals won’t mesh, and by the time you recognize that, it won’t be worth wondering if they ever did. You’ll always be connected by your shared parenthood of C.--who turns out quite well, for the record--but it will take too many years to accept that you’re not right for each other. Trust me on this, though: that won’t mean you’re not right for anyone...or that there’s no one right for you.

And while I still have you as a captive audience, I have a few more things to tell you:

1. That decision you made, spurred by the baby-and-marriage thing, to switch your college major to Accounting will pay off just as you hope. You’ll always be employable in your field, no matter where you live, and after years of the full-time-parent/full-time-job juggling act, you’ll be glad to have a solid career track record when you have to rely on your own income. You’ll never love the work, but that’s not really one of the payoffs you’re hoping for anyway, so I suspect that’s not a surprise.
2. You’ve been reading since you were four years old, and you’re a chain reader--almost never between books for more than a few hours. What you read will change over time--your tastes will expand, and improve--but reading is fundamentally part of who you are, and from where I sit almost thirty years beyond where you are now, I can assure you it’s staying that way. 
3. There’s not much else I can make that assurance about, other than this: you can’t plan for everything, and all too often, your plans won’t go as you planned. It doesn’t matter. You’ll--eventually, usually--end up pretty much all right anyway.

love,
me at 48

Other posts in the #GenFab "Letter to My 20-Year-Old Self" Blog Hop:

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