Aging, Acceptance, and a Word About Our Presidential Candidates

 This is hard for me to say, but I must say it. I’m not the person I was. And despite all my efforts to hold onto the person I was, I need to accept that I’ve become someone else. For me, this acceptance is the primary task of aging. I say “for me” because I know that aging is not the same for everyone. I don’t assume that what is true for me is true for others, but at the same time, I also can safely say that I’m not alone in my experience.

I remember how I found old people amusing when I was young. There was a woman in our neighborhood who drove her car down the street at about 10 mph. Every time my friends and I saw her peering over the steering wheel we would howl with laughter. I’m beginning to understand why she was so fearful, and it’s not so funny anymore. (The fact is, she should not have been driving.) I often rolled my eyes when old people told the same stories repeatedly without realizing it. Now I can see how I too have the potential to become one of those storytellers on a loop. I used to wonder how an old woman could go out in public with long whiskers all over her chin. Why didn’t she take care of that? I understand now that she probably couldn’t see them. No, I’m not there yet. But I am aware of the direction my life is going, and I can see it coming if I live long enough. That’s just the way it is.

I felt this happening before I retired at the age of 70. Yes, I could continue functioning in my job. Yes, I had acquired wisdom from the experience of serving for over forty years in my field. Yes, I was still enjoying my work. But I was not the person I once was. Not as quick, not as creative, not as energetic. That wasn’t going to change; it was only going to get worse.

Not very long ago, I was in the thick of things. I was a vital part of important decisions. I had amazing moments of triumph. I felt powerful. I could change the world around me in significant ways. It was my time. That is no longer the case. I’ve moved from being an active player in the game to becoming a spectator on the side-lines. It’s a weird feeling.

Because I am a Baby-Boomer, I know that, along with me, a whole lot of other people are coming to terms with their aging status these days. We are learning firsthand about the indignity of agism in our culture. But a greater challenge seems to be the inability we Boomers have accepting that our lives have changed. Most notable are the two likely presidential candidates for 2024. Why are they hanging on for dear life as if the future of the world depends upon them? The truth is, it doesn’t. It’s time to step aside and trust that the next generation is capable. And, I dare to say for all of the above reasons, more capable. It's their time. I’d like to see what they can do.

I’m not who I was. That part of my life is over. But that’s not to say that my life is over. I have a future, and I have some control over how I will live it. I look forward to spending more time with the people I love and new adventures yet to unfold. I long to savor good food, music, theatre.  I continue to be curious about the things I've yet to learn. I believe I still have a contribution to make to the world around me. I’m interested to see what comes next for our country and the planet we share. All of that is true. And yet, in order to live fully in my present reality, I need to accept the fact that the past is in the past. 

 

Who's going to clean up this mess?!

 I’m growing to love my little neighborhood in Queens. It’s close to everything, so I can walk to the grocery, the butcher, the dentist, the pharmacy, and my favorite bodega selling homemade honey-ginger tea with lemon. Apart from the occasional parking space altercation, people look out for one another. But there’s one thing I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, and that’s all the trash on the sidewalks. I see it everywhere and want to shout, “All the world is not your trash bin, people!”

It seems that once a person litters, it gives lots of others permission to dump in the same spot. Every crumpled-up McDonald’s bag, candy wrapper, snotty Kleenex or used condom tossed on the ground is like an afront to me.

I often see baggies of dog poop, all tied up, just left on the sidewalk, and that really puzzles me. Kudos to those who go to all the trouble of bagging their dog’s mess. But then, why do they just leave the bag for someone else to dispose of? I can’t even…!

I’ve been wondering why this bothers me so much. It’s deeper than an esthetic gripe I have. Yes, I’d rather not see ugly trash while I’m walking around in my neighborhood. But the sight of it actually pokes at one of my pet peeves. It really grinds me when people leave a mess for other people to clean up. Is there anything more self-centered and inconsiderate than that?  It goes way beyond trashing the sidewalk. It can also mean irreparably harming a child or bombing the homes of innocent people or destroying an ecosystem. Who’s going to clean up this mess?!

None of this is to say that I haven’t been known to create messes of my own because I certainly have. I suspect we all do, from time to time. But I’d like to believe I don’t leave my messes for someone else to clean up if I can at all help it. When I finish a drink, I don’t throw the paper cup on the ground for someone else to pick up; I carry it home and throw it in the trash. If I use the toilet and the toilet paper runs out, I don’t leave the empty core for the next person; I replace the toilet paper. In the same way, if I have hurt you with my careless words, I will do what I can to make things right with you. If I find out that I can change a simple behavior to make the earth a healthier place for people I will never know, I do it. I try to show consideration for the people who will come after me.

As a woman, a mother, and a pastor, I’ve spent a lot of my life cleaning up other’s people’s messes and I’ve reached an age where it’s all I can do to keep up with my own messes. I can’t be responsible for yours. Is it asking too much to expect people to clean up their own messes?

*Deep breath*

Okay. I’m done. I’m better now. (Until I go outside and look at the sidewalk.)

The Amazing Guy Upstairs

The guy upstairs often amazes me. No, I’m not talking about God here. I’m talking about the man who dwells in the top two stories of the house where I live, above the lower level where I am. His name is Jon, and he’s married to my daughter, Gretchen. He’s also the father of my grandsons, Nick and Justin. In addition to being the kind of dad who tosses a football with his sons, patiently helps them with their homework, and prepares their favorite mac-n-cheese for dinner, he has a special dad-gift that never ceases to amaze me.

With a background in screenwriting, Jon is a true cinephile. I’d bet on him every time in a movie trivia contest. He has instilled this same passion in his sons from birth. Their vacation itinerary is often designed around visiting places where films were shot as the boys re-enact the scenes. Nine-year-old Nick has learned to write screenplays, and he’s always working on one at the computer. When the Academy Awards are on, it’s his favorite night of the year. He’s becoming a cinephile in his own right.

The age gap between Nick and Justin, age 5, presents a challenge to the movie-viewing in our family. This is most evident on Friday night, our movie night, when it sometimes takes us as long to decide what movie we’ll watch as it does to actually watch it.

We adults can only watch so many PG movies before we need something more.  R rated movies, of course, are off limits for family viewing right now. And that leaves us with the wide-open category of PG-13 movies to choose from.

PG-13 movies cover a wide range of sex, violence, language issues that leave most parents struggling to decide whether their kids can appropriately watch them. But this is no challenge for Jon; he’s something of a movie-rating savant. He can tell us exactly why each movie is rated as it is and if Nick or both boys can handle it. And then, his magical movie powers go way beyond that. Not only does he know which movies are inappropriate and which pass the test, but if the movie is just a tad inappropriate, he also knows exactly when the bad parts occur so he can censor the movie while we’re watching it. He knows just when to cover Justin’s face, or cough loudly to bleep out the sound. And he can do this for hundreds of movies! (Occasionally, a movie will come up that he hasn’t seen and he’ll preview it, but that’s rarely necessary.)

How does he do this?! I’m a movie fan, too, but I’m at the age now when I can scarcely recall what a movie is about. I’m often half-way through it before I realize I’ve already seen it. So I couldn’t begin to remember if an F-bomb occurs in the dialogue and exactly when so that I can bleep over it before it happens. I am continuously amazed by Jon’s ability to do this. You wouldn’t think this uncanny ability to recall sex, violence, and swearing would be all that useful, as information goes, but as a father who likes to watch movies with his sons, it’s invaluable.

I’ve told him that he needs to make a podcast or write a blog for other parents to help them through this minefield, but don’t look for that anytime soon. He’s too busy watching movies with his boys.

From Trauma to Triumph on the Track

When Nick was in second grade, some of his close friends were running track with the CYO and he decided to give it a try. It’s a program that is open to kids age five through grade eight. They compete against teams from all around the area, and track meets are a big deal, often lasting 3 hours or more. Nick has faithfully attended practices and done his part for the fall cross-country and winter/spring track meets over the past two years. His name is on the banner with the rest of the boys’ team from last year as first place winners for the season.

Justin had been tagging along with Nick to track practice, and when he turned five in December, he said he wanted to join, too. This made him the youngest person on the team, and it was a struggle. Sometimes he was into it and sometimes he wasn't. No one knew how he would handle an actual race. 

At Justin’s first track meet he ran a 50-yard dash. Even within his peewee age-group, he was the smallest one. He was so anxious and distraught about running that I thought he was going to back out. It didn’t help that his race was the very last one of the day so he had hours to get himself all worked up. But when the time came, he did it! He ran his little heart out, finished third out of four for his heat and proudly wore his medal. His parents and I breathed a sigh of relief; it looked like he was going to be okay.

The next track meet didn’t go as well. Justin started the race, saw the other kids running past him and stopped running, in tears. The meet after that, he finished the race, but with tears streaming down his cheeks. What happened between his first meet and the second one? No one knows, but now it had become a thing. And when something becomes a thing for a five-year-old, the chance of recovery is slim to none. 

This week they had the last meet of the season. Justin wasn’t happy when he got there and learned that he would be running in a relay. He started freaking out. His teammates and Nick did everything they could to convince him he could do it, but he wasn’t having it. Nick came to the stands where his parents and I were sitting and said that the coach asked for one of Justin’s parents to come and talk to him. So Jon went to him, and Justin had a melt down. Clearly, it wasn’t going to happen.

The coach was understanding. She found another boy to fill in on Justin’s leg of the relay and Justin would run in the 100-yard dash at the end of the meet. No other peewees were running in that race. (They were all in the relay.) Justin was a leftover and they put him in a race with an older age-group so he could run. He was up against five boys who were three to four years older than him. So there was Justin at the starting line, waiting for the pistol to go off, standing next to boys who were a foot or two taller than him. This wasn’t going to go well. His competitors were going to leave him in the dust, and God knows how he was going to handle it. We were holding our breath.

Now, it just so happens that one of his competitors in that race ended up being his almost nine-year-old brother Nick. As soon as the race started, Justin fell behind, just as I expected he would. But what I hadn’t expected was how Nick would run. Forgetting about the other competitors in his race, Nick fell back to run beside Justin and stayed with him all the way to the finish line, both of them smiling and laughing all the way.

This time, the tears weren’t coming from Justin, but from his mom, his dad and me. We all lost it. And I have to say that no matter what Nick may go on to accomplish in his lifetime, I will never be prouder of him than I was in that moment.

Justin was over-the-moon happy as he announced to me, “Nick and I tied!”

Confession of an Extremely White Woman

I was a freckly kid. When a neighbor boy poked fun at me because I had a “dirty face”, my mom explained to me that I had fair skin. She said it in such a way that it was like she was letting me in on a secret, and our stupid neighbor boy had no idea that I came from royalty.

As I grew into a teenager, I realized having fair skin mainly meant that if I wanted to get even the slightest color on my ghastly, ghostly whiteness, I would have to endure a sunburn first. So every summer, I baked in the sun until I resembled a lobster and screamed in pain from the touch of the clothes on my back. After a couple of weeks, the burn turned into a tan. It was ever so slight. Unless I pulled my clothing back to where the sun never shone, you wouldn’t realize the tan existed.

This was a never ending process for me. I would lay out in the backyard until I was so hot you might as well have thrown me onto a charcoal grill. It was grueling. But I was determined.

During the spring of my senior year, I was looking forward to prom. My mom sewed my dress--a pale pink, dotted Swiss, empire-waisted dress with puff sleeves. It had a scoop neckline edged in a white ruffle. I loved the dress but knew exactly what I had to do if I didn’t want to look like Casper’s sister.

About a month before prom I started working on it. I baked in the sun to get good and burnt. And I did. I was so burnt that it made me physically sick. It took a while to recover, but that was a small price to pay for how I was going to look in my pale pink prom dress with the white ruffle around the neckline. 

Once the pain from my sunburn subsided, my skin peeled, mostly on my chest—right where the white ruffle was to show off my tan. When the skin peel came off, so did my tan! 

It was only a week until prom and I was undeterred in my quest to look fabulous. So I laid out again to burn again. And this time everywhere I peeled, I blistered. It was a mess.

Now, days before prom, I obsessed about drying up the blisters. But then, as the ooze was disappearing, a scabbiness took over, and I had a chest of crackling pork rinds framed with a white ruffle. I tried to mask it with make-up, which only made it worse. And that’s the way I went to my senior prom.

I’m thinking about this incident today, not because it’s prom time, but because this morning I went for my six-month exam with the dermatologist. About five years ago I had a melanoma removed and, since then, little chunks have been harvested from my flesh on a regular basis. So many places on my skin worry me that, before I go to the doctor, I circle them all with a pen to make sure none are missed. Invariably, the ones that concern the doctor are the ones I completely ignore; I have no idea what I’m looking for. 

If I could do a “Back to the Future” trip to visit my teenage self, I would warn her. I’d tell her to wear sunblock, cover herself, and avoid U-V rays, even if it means living like a vampire. I’d tell her that fair skin is better than skin with chunks removed, and it’s a helluva a lot better than cancer. Of course, there are many other things I’d like to tell her, too. Things that would have changed the course of her life. But that only works for Marty McFly. The rest of us are victims of our own ignorance. It’s too late to change some of our choices. That's why it’s so important that we learn to do better with the choices we make moving forward. These days, sunblock is my friend.

O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

 

 

When Parents Are Human

As another Mother’s Day passes, I have been thinking a lot about the reality of parenthood. Not the stuff of Hallmark cards or unconditional love that is glorified and projected onto mere mortals. I’m talking about the reality that parents are human; there is no such thing as a perfect parent.

When we're kids, we tend to idolize our parents. They are the superheroes of our lives. It’s not until we're becoming adults that we begin to see their shortcomings. While they may have done their best at raising us from day-to-day, they also were people who had their own issues to work through. They couldn’t wait until their deepest wounds were healed before they became parents. (If that were the case, humans would have become extinct long ago.)

I know that some parents are absolute monsters to their children. But even parents who devote themselves to creating a loving environment for their kids to thrive mess up from time to time. Sometimes it’s so obvious that they may ask for forgiveness as soon as they realize what they’ve done. “I’m so sorry I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have done that. I love you.”

Those times when our parents have no awareness of how they have chipped away at our souls may be the most difficult to forgive: a word spoken in anger, treating our pleas for attention as an annoyance, a harsh punishment. What is long forgotten as a parent may remain seared on the brain of a child for a lifetime. Our parents may never see the ways they have passed their own brokenness onto us.

We can blame our parents for the ways they have harmed us and remain children, or we can forgive them for being human and grow up. Accepting this has been one of the most difficult tasks of my life and I’m thankful that I’ve been able to work my way through it.

Now, in the later part of my life, I’m experiencing a variation on this theme. I can’t stop thinking about my own parenting while my kids were young. I have so many regrets, so many things I wish I had done differently. I know I was not a monster, but I made enough mistakes that I’m sure my two adult children have plenty to discuss with a therapist.

I struggle a lot with my negative bias when I look back on my life. It’s much easier for me to focus on the ugly parts of my past than it is the beautiful ones. I need to give myself the same grace I grew to extend to my own parents. While I was figuring out how to be a parent, I never stopped being a human being, and I had more than a few issues to work through. I can beat myself up over the mistakes I made, or I can forgive myself for being human. Of course, that's easier said that done. But I’m working on it. This growing up stuff never ends, does it?

Bad Decisions and Alligators

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 4-foot-long alligator they found in Brooklyn this week. Most likely, it was someone’s pet and the owner decided to rehome it in the wild. (If you can consider Prospect Park wild.) Whoever the pet owner might have been, I’m reserving judgment. 

When I was growing up, we took all kinds of strange animals into our small, urban home in addition to the usual cats, dogs and fish. I don’t know what our mother was thinking. She either had a soft spot for animals or a soft spot for my sister and me, but if we wanted an animal, it was ours. (As long as we could afford it. No pony ever materialized, despite our pleas.)

Often at Easter time, in particular, we ended up with animals we had no business taking into our home. A few times, we had baby rabbits. Another year, baby ducks. And then there were the cute little peeps that were dyed pink. I can’t recall exactly how they came to live with us, but they did. 

Of course, the problem came after Easter had passed and the cute little babies grew into adults. We built a hutch for the rabbits, and a pen for the chickens. I recall the ducks swimming in our one and only bathtub. I think about all of this now and it seems bizarre to me, but at the time, it felt perfectly normal. 

At the end of the summer, the ducks were rehomed at a private pond. I have no idea what ever became of the chickens. But my point is, what may have seemed like a sweet gesture at the time always led to the difficult decision about what to do with these animals when they became adults. I remember crying each time they had to leave us. 

My mom isn’t around for me to find out how she dealt with this. I would love to ask, Mom, what were you thinking? How could you have done this again and again? Did it bother you when the animals grew up and you had to figure out how to move them out?

And then there was the alligator. I was in third grade and my sister Lorena took me to Florida with her. I had $5 for souvenirs. After spending $2 on a shell decoration with a lightbulb inside as a gift to my mom, with the remaining $3 I bought a baby alligator. I thought it was the cutest little thing, and I couldn’t resist. (Now, I think, EEK!) It was about 6 inches long and harmless. In true Kraft fashion, I didn’t think through the repercussions of this decision. I also didn’t tell my mom about it; I wanted to surprise her.

On the drive back to Ohio, I kept “Allie” by my feet in the backseat in a cardboard box  that was poked with lots of breath holes and lined with wet newspaper. I threw in a little ball of raw hamburger for him to nibble on. (How did I know it was a he? I must confess that it never occurred to me that such a hideous creature might possibly be female.)

Allie died before we made it through Georgia. I don’t recall being terribly upset over it; we hadn’t bonded. But I do remember some serious buyer’s remorse. I had spent most of my money on an animal that didn’t even make it home so I could show my mom. What a waste!

I still wonder how Mom would have reacted to my purchase. After all the other animals we had taken into our home -- turtles, salamanders, frogs, horned toads, hamsters, about a million prolific guinea pigs – I couldn’t imagine that she would have a problem with an alligator. But perhaps that would have been where she drew the line. It certainly SHOULD have been where she drew the line. It never got that far, so I never knew how she would have received the little beast into our home. Thankfully, we also never had to deal with an alligator that outgrew our ability to care for it. It wouldn’t have been pretty. 

So when I hear about the gator in Prospect Park, I don’t wonder so much about how anyone could take such an animal as a pet. And it’s hard for me to condemn them for dumping it at a public park. Bad decisions and alligators are a part of my story, too.