My Youth

As old friends, one of the things that JS and I talk about occasionally is the passage of time and our by-now-long-hence youths.  On the whole, I don't think I fear aging much--I feel more satisfied at this stage in my life than when I was younger.  A big part of my 20s was figuring out what I wanted to do and undergoing a fairly grueling, anxiety-producing struggle toward something that would require a great deal of luck to work out.  Because the job market for academics is so cutthroat, grad students are caught in a weird conundrum where you know that in a field of equally qualified candidates (literally hundreds for each job), one of the things that will set you apart is your "passion" and the degree to which you can give everything you have to the job, yet because the likelihood of success is so low, you also need to be prepared for it not to work out.  I don't miss that state of being, even when you figure in the consolations of youthful skin tone, my pre-childbirth body, or the carefree-ness of a life in which I once went to three movies in a single day.

No, overall, when I look back, I wouldn't say that I miss my youth.  But I remember it fondly, and with a nostalgia that sometimes sweeps over me for a few seconds in which, without wishing myself back, I love having the memories of certain . . . activities (for lack of a better word) that were available to me at that time in my life that I will never have again.  I remember that with many of my best friends from high school and college and post-college, a great deal of our time was spent in these long, intense conversations about various things that we believed to be truly significant.  I don't say we "believed" them to be significant because I look back with condescension toward my younger self, but rather to indicate that even at the time, we knew that we were forming and working toward expressing and committing to the values that we wanted to hold as grownup people in the world.  

These conversations were, I'm sure, goofy and probably pretentious and/or ridiculously impractical, but they were also open in a way to possibilities, ideological or spiritual or logistical ("Shall I move to St. Louis, a city in a time zone I've never visited, to go to a church with some people I met last month, with the stuff that's in my car and find a place when I get there?  Hmm, yes, I guess I'll give notice to my landlord and boss.").  Even when occasionally (and embarrassingly, in retrospect) dogmatic or intolerant due to a lack of the kind of broader experiences that shape most of us as we grow older, there was a tender but powerful hopefulness to those conversations, an aspirational optimism and purity, a sense that anything could happen, that was sublime in the Burkean sense--thrilling and terrifying and awe-inspiring.  

My choices at this point in my life are limited in completely different ways.  I'm married with children and with a career; all of these things mean that I have more security, which in many unsung ways gives me more freedom rather than less (something I want to emphasize because I often tire of the narrative that equates domesticity with limitation, settling down with, well, settling) and more resources for certain kinds of choices.  When my grad school friends who were married considered jobs, their searches were often complicated by the possibilities for their partners, but in most cases, their partners (knowing by then what they were in for) were able to find or create opportunities for themselves--and in a certain sense, I felt that they had more flexibility in where they could go because they had the security of taking a buddy along with them.  For me, having a family means having more psychic security to do certain things more courageously. 

And yet at the same time, it of course means that my big decisions need to be built around the needs of four other people.  Small decisions too: "Should I go to the grocery store today or tomorrow? Well, it's pouring outside but we're out of milk and certain small people can hardly live without it . . ."  Strangely, this bothers me very little--sometimes I think that part of me likes the logistical challenges, likes pulling things off in the mommy-competence realm.  I remember my trepidation about taking both girls out together for the first time when Gillian was a newborn and Allison Clare was two, and then the same feeling when I made my first solo outing with all three children, and my first solo road trip.  It was kind of scary (I know, my bourgeois notion of "scary" is a little pathetic) but also deeply satisfying to know that I could do it.  Somehow, maybe it made me feel like my pre-mommy self was intact and functional, that I could still go places and do things, even if most of the things I chose to do were going to be kid-oriented.  Every now and then, though, I do something sans bebe and it feels like I'm flying (imagine going through airport security with three children and a double stroller and an infant carseat and three tiny backpacks and a diaper bag, and then imagine doing it as a solo adult, and you'll know what I mean), and I think, did I used to feel this way all the time?  And the answer is yes, I did.  And while I didn't know enough then to love it at the time, I know enough now to love that I did.