Middle Years

~Note to self: always be ready to say goodbye

Life. It pulls you in some directions you don’t expect, ruins your hair, frames you into pictures with vague people who’ve disappeared since, whose names you barely remember; hunches your back, ever so slightly, and makes you fold into yourself even before your 40^th birthday. Even pushes you into the background of what should be your story.

I have been a mother for only a handful of years, but it suddenly feels like the only reality I’ve known. My daughter is not my only child any more; I now have a son too. They are small, and I am still young, but it sometimes doesn’t feel like it. It sometimes feels like days are being wrenched away from me, and I’m a little too slow, and a little too dazed to follow them, to rein them in, to make them go where I want. Like the girl-me did, when the sun gleamed back from my teeth, the night sky sparkled from the brown of my eyes, and I carried the weight of a hard life easily, proudly on my delicate and elegant ankles.

At around 40 you begin to feel it, mortality. It whispers to you from time to time, from your tired joints, or shallow breath, or the uneasy fidgeting in the chest when you feel you can’t sit still or if you do, something in there will come out. These are minute moments, fractions of your time otherwise spent in taking care of things for others, for yourself, for others. You still have no real cause to wonder and worry about these moments and their meaning; but you begin to notice them. You begin to notice that they are not irregularities striking accidentally and uniquely, but a slowly thickening matrix of how it is going to go, from now until the end.

Sometimes you are caught in it, this matrix. There was that time when I took my daughter, who had just started Grade 1, to the big arena for the pioneer-inauguration ceremony which all first graders had to attend. I took time off from work because this was taking place in the morning; the arena was not far from our neighbourhood and a little bit before the event was supposed to start, we set out across the boulevard, cut across the cemetery, passed by the tennis courts, and approached the big, modernly concrete arena complex, with four or five tall and straight pine trees next to it. A crowd had already gathered there: kids with their parents, many with just their mothers or fathers, or an odd grandparent. The entrance doors hadn’t been opened yet and the mass of people was thickening with each passing minute, trapping us somewhere in the middle. I felt right away that this will cause trouble: it was just a matter of time when I’d start feeling palpitations or breathing problems. But there was nothing to do; I was like a lamb to the slaughter, and my daughter clung to me, her clammy little hand holding mine. She could probably sense that I was beginning to feel unwell; she had seen it happen before.

It was the end of November – around the Day of the Republic – but the weather was humid and heavy, and with these hundreds of people tightly knit into a human knob, I felt overheated and a little dizzy. We were close to the entrance doors, still not opening, pressed by the expanding masses, and I knew that if I wanted to get out of there, I couldn’t. This thought made me break out in cold sweat, and I tried to concentrate on something else: words and phrases torn out of dialogues buzzing and multiplying all around, clouds darkening behind the arrow-straight pines above, birds bursting out from somewhere and flying away from this commotion. Just as I was beginning to feel it rising from inside – a gathering wave of panic and anxiety, an expanding worry about what will happen to my daughter if I am suddenly taken ill – a few people showed up behind the glass doors on the inside, and started opening them. Immediately, there was some movement of air above our heads, and those of us who were in the first ranks were able to walk in right away, and I was instantly better. The ushers quickly separated the children from the adults: the adults were sent to the stands on the sides, while the children were lined up on the ground floor in the middle, since they had to go through the whole ceremony, and take the pioneer oath. Once I was seated, I strained my eyes and scanned line after line of kids below, trying to spot the top of her head.

And I wondered: did she have friends at school? They were all so small, it was their third month in school – but by now it was probably possible to tell what their social tendencies were. My daughter was a quiet child who loved pen and paper and who could be on her own for quite a while; she hadn’t gone to daycare before starting school since my mother-in-law spent a few years with us while the kids were very small and took care of them. Would she be like me? And what was I like? When I was a young girl, I had a solid social life partly because I was such a golden child and everyone loved me, and partly because I lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and all my family were around. But now, here, displaced hundreds of kilometers from my own family and those friends, in the part of the country which didn’t feel like home, I had become different. More closed in, self-aware, uncertain. Without the wide web of extended family and life-long friends from the school days, who all lived around the corner in any direction, I was lost, displaced. When we moved to this part of the country, it was for a job, and a better future – but now, almost 10 years later, I am not sure that was a good decision. It isn’t about the people – there are good people here like everywhere; it’s about no roots, no anchor in this soil, where my dialect is out of place, where I have no history, where a street is just a street and has no organic thickness of a lived experience, framed into memories of distinct moments in my past. This city, although beautiful and green with plenty of trees, is not the city where I had dreams, where I knew who I wanted to be, where I lived in and for my music, imagining a career of a concert pianist... In this city, I am just someone who had renounced her dreams and who had become something she never imagined she would be: a pharmacist. An honest and useful job, but one that I haven’t managed to like so far, and probably never will.

Meanwhile, singing and dancing was taking place on an improvised stage below, as part of the ceremony. I myself became a pioneer some 30-odd years before, but did it look like this? I couldn’t quite remember. It was time for the main part of the ceremony: the new pioneers-to-be were handed red scarves, and blue hats with a red star in the middle. They were helped by older pioneers to put those on correctly, and then they were ready for the high-point of the event: taking the oath. Silence fell on everyone, and the kids piped up the chant, in their high-pitched childish voices, repeating after the leader the words they had been rehearsing for days leading up to this moment: “Today, as I become a Pioneer, I give my Pioneer’s word of honour...” I looked around: parents or grandparents sat and watched, many with a smile or tears on their faces, proud of their children, taking this moment to heart and letting themselves be enchanted for a little while, and spirited away from the daily toils. “... That I shall study and work diligently...” I didn’t know any of the people immediately around me; I had seen a few parents in my daughter’s class a couple of times previously during the school meetings, but I couldn’t spot them now. “... respect parents and my seniors...”  How lonesome it all was, and how I wished at least my mother was there. “You will understand,” she said one summer as we were leaving and saying goodbye at the end of our holidays, “how I feel when your daughter leaves and goes far away.” I didn’t want to go. But it was life, and I had to. “... And that I shall value all peoples of the world...” They were nearing the end of the oath, and their intonation was rising, following that of the leader, until hundreds of little voices burst into a triumph of “freedom and peace!” and a thunderous applause exploded in the arena. I felt a light flutter of anxiety arising somewhere inside my chest and I knew I had to make my way out before the masses thronged at the exits. And just then I saw her, in the sea of other hats and scarves underneath. Keeping my eye on that spot on the ground floor where she was, I inched my way towards the stairs in one of the aisles and carefully walked down, making sure I didn’t twist my ankle, something that had recently started happening a little too often for some reason. When I was close enough, I called her name, and she turned, then flashed me a front-milk-tooth-missing smile in that unselfaware way only young children are good at. I gave her a hug, one of those tight ones which both of my children will soon get to be too big for but which momentarily binds us inseparably again, and even more, cradles us together in my mother’s arms, and under those clear stars in the night skies of my childhood.

We had a minute or two for a brief chatter, and then the ushers showed up and started lining up the new pioneers so they could take them to school. Things happened fast: music blasted out from the speakers, some employees were taking down the stage, parents were taking photos of their kids, and it all flew by, to be diminished in time, lost and forgotten perhaps, like an anonymous day, somewhere or other, with vaguely familiar faces posing, and life going in some other direction, yanked by this or that, backturned, already and always aimed at the distant point in the future we dread.

I had to rush to work; exiting the arena, I turned and saw her with the other kids, and when she looked up, I waved goodbye and she smiled. In the madness which was life and which was about to suck me back in, I felt a closeness and a solid ground, and knew I could never ask for more. Let it always be there; and may there always be time for proper goodbyes.