At Fuzzy’s tacos the other day, my bill for lunch came to $10. That’s with an ice tea, mind you, nothing stronger. Confronted with the fact I’d ordered $8 worth of tacos, my mind nevertheless refused to process that I am a taco-gorging pig. No, my conclusion: the prices are too high. I mumbled something about prices not being what they used to be back in the ‘80s, and the cashier informed me he was born in 1994. 1994!
For me, the year I met my husband and developed the world's most secret and ferocious crush on him. There was Seinfeld and movie phone, and Bare Naked Ladies. No Internet to broadcast your stupidity for posterity (at least at my house). No Columbine. No 9/11. The way the world is supposed to be.
Then the cashier went on to tell me how he graduated a year late from high school because he repeated kindergarten. It was one of those moments a random stranger is telling you random stuff about his life, information I never know what to do with. I assured him he had just been fashionably late, but in my heart, I wanted to scream you can't repeat kindergarten -- you can only start it too early. Moms and teachers understand these things; I didn't before I had kids.
That afternoon, I met one of my oldest daughter’s friends from school. This particular friend doesn’t watch TV because she is too busy practicing piano and violin, acing her advanced coursework and taking math classes on Saturday. I saw another acquaintance of hers later on in the evening. She was wearing a very grown up, very tight mini skirt. The kind I would let my 12 year old wear only with an oversized sweater, à la Candace Cameron, the Full House years.
It all makes me a little sad, that I’m so old I’m literally twice as old as other ADULTS running around out there. And I wonder about these three I met that day – if they appreciate themselves for who they are, for all of who they are? Do they only see themselves as a late bloomer, a brain or a body? Or is it, perhaps, that those labels are all they are comfortable letting others see?
One of the bright sides of being twice as old as other adults, of no longer having the nerve for a figure-hugging mini, of breathing a sigh of relief no one makes us go to tutoring on Saturday, is that we, as adults, can see ourselves as more than one thing. Not just a mom. Not just a wife, daughter, volunteer or employee.
Sometimes, in a moment of sugar-fueled confidence, I’m even comfortable showing more of myself than I intend. More than my usual “I don’t want to try hard, fail and look bad” Gen X slacker persona. Creeping toward 40, life is too short to spend labeling yourself, or believing the labels others put on you. Even when those labels are really, really comfortable. And definitely if they include the moniker taco-gorging pig.
for he [the Lord] knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
As for man, his days are like grass,
he flourished like the flower of the field;
the blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.
Psalm 103:14-16
