Navel Gazing

More on that funk I have been experiencing. I’m a bit sheepish to admit, but it started around my birthday last month. It isn’t the specific number or even that I am growing older really. I think it is this prevailing feeling of being stuck. All at once I seem to be absorbing the shock of the many life changes and challenges I am facing.

I have always been a goal-oriented person who kept her eye on the prize. I have been a single parent for the past 15 years and the goal has always been to raise two relatively functioning young adults. They don't smoke crack and neither has robbed a bank. I'm thinking I'm two for two here. The “kids” have moved out and moved in several times, but it is different. I no longer find my purpose in them and I feel set adrift in more ways than one. 

I have worked a job for the past 10 years that does not make use of any of my God-given talents just to pay my bills and complete this goal. Task accomplished. Only now I am in an empty house, working a job I am unfulfilled at, and for the very first time in my adult life, I don’t know what to do next. 

I want to go back to working in publishing because it is what I have always loved, and frankly, I'm good at it. But I have found that, while I was out of this sandbox, I am now expected to have a top secret clearance, a masters degree, and know HTML, CSS, Wordpress, and Java--good luck finding that person for $30,000 a year! Never mind that I have always learned all of my job skills on the fly and then excelled head and shoulders above the rest. I think it has something to do with the underdog equation. When no one else believes in you, you have something to prove.

Having to put my life on the back burner for 10 years has left me in a career I don’t see going anywhere and one I don’t enjoy. Go back to school you say? Having raised the kids on my own meager salary, the money tree is, well, dry. I am in a quandary as to what to do to get out of this quicksand. Should I buy a “new” used vehicle or try to get a loan for school or maybe some technical training? Take a job earning $10 an hour to learn these new skills on the job? I think not. My none-existent significant other is not here to pick up the slack for a year or two or three. What if I get sick? Or, what if I don’t want $50,000 in educational debt hanging over my graying head at night?

Lest you think I am complaining or throwing myself one helluva pity party, I’m not. It’s more of a heart lament. Again, it’s like being 13 and not knowing what you’re going to look like in a few years, how high school will be, and if anyone will ask you to the dance. I don’t think I can get through this unless I speak it through and own how I am feeling now. Please don't take this wrong. I know I am blessed. For all of the hardships I have endured, I have two wonderful young adult children I can take credit for raising, both of who I believe have bright futures and will add to humanity here on earth and in God’s kingdom to come.  I am also still healthy. Yet, I feel stuck. 

Gee, I know this all sounds depressing, but let’s get real. It is depressing. Life is unfair, children grow up, death and divorce happen, parents age or die, bad things happen to good people, and no matter what, time marches on. I’m not ready to give up by any stretch of the imagination. God forbid! But with all of the single women out there, I find it disappointing that there is not much written about these devastating life changes I am facing as a single person. 

Let’s face it, there is no blue ribbon prize for the job I did or the sacrifices I made and no husband to rebuild my relationship with now that the nest is empty.  Still, in my heart I know my married sisters are feeling this same sting. So maybe the single part is me indulging just a wee bit in self-pity and navel gazing.

I am in that thankless place where my grown children are not really old enough to appreciate the sacrifices that I made and my parents too old to remember I wasn’t always acting as their parent. It is rather a lonely feeling when you realize for the first time that your mother may be your biggest cheerleader, but she can no longer get off the bench. I miss the woman who soothed my wounded days and wounded soul with her own special salve. 

So I am learning to carry on alone and become the pillar of the community my mother raised me to be. I just have to know and believe that God does see me and that He has not forgotten the loneliness, financial desperation, or the desires of my heart. And though I know He cares, it is tough that on top of all of these bewildering changes, that I am feeling so invisible. I spoke about this in a previous post, but it is such a strange, vaporous state. I have never been someone who enjoyed the spotlight, even for a minute. I think what strikes me the most about this "disappearing" phenomena is that I didn’t know I was always in the limelight until someone hit the switch. I guess it is a little like the saying, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

The movies or books directed to the single women my age who are suffering this same malady either advise them overtly or outright to “reinvent” themselves. And if that fails, travel ladies! You can’t reinvent yourself on a budget. It’s like there is this big media presupposition that all middle-aged, single women have a well hidden bankroll.  

I really am not a whiner. Really. I’m actually pretty tough, but I must say I have been completely ambushed and woefully unprepared for this time in my life. I will bounce back. That is just what I do. And, more than likely, I’ll “reinvent” myself. In the meantime, please don’t send me any travel brochures.

Birthday Nostalgia

So I had a birthday this week and it got me thinking about where my life is going and where I have been. A messy, howling, crooked journey filled with love, loss, life, motherhood, careers, and friends who have come and gone.

It also got me thinking about how design and fashion play such a large role in our memories. I consider myself a child of the seventies, a generation so overshadowed by the baby boomers who where coming of age in the 60s as to be almost forgotten. I am technically considered a boomer because I was born in 1962, but I was a one-year old in diapers when Kennedy was shot and I was a seven-year-old watching cartoons during Woodstock and the hippy movement. Still, I do remember the clothes of my early childhood. They went from these peter pan and bib collars that look like a page ripped straight out of my old Sears catalog:

to this:

I tell you ladies, foxy brown in the bell bottom jeans was rocking it! I so remember those suede fringe purses and huge hoop earrings. Maybe it was junior high. I actually get nostalgic for maxi coats and seeing fros on black people. I know, I called them fros and I did not call this model "African American." And no matter how "they" try to sanitize and scrub our language (I was an editor for a major book publisher. I know), I don't feel any culpability in this vernacular. We were white, they were black. I lived it and I was there. Just saying.

Like all of my prepubescent friends, I was fascinated with "Charlie's Angels." It wasn't just that Kate and company were beautiful, this was the very first prime-time show that portrayed women in a role other than wife or mother except, of course, Angie Dickinson's "Police Woman" and Hot Lips Houlihan in "Mash." It was progress, but not much. The sexism of these old shows makes me cringe in embarrassment so I am not proud that people of my age are nostalgic for a TV series like Pan Am.

All the girls in my high school had "feathered" hair like Farrah. God, I hate that she is gone! Life is so fleeting, but so, alas, is youth. As I walk through these "middle" years, I am learning a lot about myself, including what it is like to be invisible. No one ever shared this little secret about middle-age. It goes something like this: no matter how you dress or how much "help" you get with your skin and your clothes, you will still be a middle-aged woman with good makeup and a great bag and hair.

Unless you are extraordinary in the hotness department like Demi Moore, you will become invisible. Gone are the days of a full nest, admiring glances from men, cat calls, or just plain animal attraction. And it isn't just the men.Young women ignore me, too. They glance over me and within seconds I am deemed a non-threat and a loser in the fashion department like their own mothers. Dang, I am not even thought of as interesting. I am not in the PTA but I don't qualify for a seniors discount yet. WTF? Who am I? It's like being 13 years old again. I understand that I have left behind the years of procreation, but I am not dead yet! Heck, I think I am still a bit sexy, just not as sexy as Angie.

As I have walked these last few years in my forties, I often find myself in this strange place of reflecting on the past and mulling over who is inside this physical body I always took for granted. I am no one's lover, mommy, or "hot" girlfriend, yet I am a mother, someone's daughter, best friend, and a woman who has gone 10 rounds with the world and life has not grown bitter or given up but has gotten smarter, more humble, more patient, wiser, and kinder.

Rest assured, I will paint on my face every morning before leaving the house because it doesn't matter if I am invisible to other people. I have reached that happy place of self-acceptance that I never had as a younger women. And guess what? I kinda like me!

Okay, enough of the whining on my lack of hotness, let's talk design! Now this is some far out, groovy decor:

 

But I must admit that most of my girlfriend's homes looked a lot more like this little gem:

 

Yes, Virginia, there was a wallpaper monster with a penchant for colonial and DayGlo orange Formica.

While we were practicing applying just the right amount of blue eyeshadow to our lids and rolling our hair in hot rollers, one of our parents thought this looked good:

And if by chance any of my childhood girlfriends are reading this and remembering when, life IS a celebration, only now we are just mature enough to appreciate it. Let's have cake!