I did not have enough time to finish my original thoughts... about time.
I had to get this one out of me for the sake of the greater blog. I thusly reserve the right to revisit and edit, in perpetuity. Maybe I will merge it with the other one about time, some day!
The other night, after my child dumped 3 full glasses of water onto the floor and probably also did some other weird stuff, he was enjoying the sensation of what it feels like to flap a wet towel against the ground. This led him to discover he could sort of buck, like a baby bull, on his knees, crashing down onto them over and over again, against the wooden floor.
I think it’s fair to say that if any one of you who might be reading this did that, you would die. Or your kneecaps would shatter. YOUR PATELLAS. At the very least, you would howl in pain. Maybe you would cry. When was the last time you cried from a physical injury? I think adults should do this more. Anyways, it would be very painful. It is painful for me to even do a yoga pose on a yoga mat where I slowly and with ample anticipation place some of the weight of my body upon a bended knee.
Lately, I find myself in constant lament of my age, mainly socially, but also in the shower. It feels like an effort to understand if the passage of time, or “aging,” as some might call it, happened quickly or slowly, suddenly or over time. Let’s see. I graduated college, I lived in Chicago. I had about 57 jobs, and I was in about 57 plays. At this point, I could drink very heavily and be completely fine the next day. It was in this state of endurance that I moved to New York, then went back to Chicago to do one play, and then went to grad school in London. This all happened in rather strangely rapid succession. I think London is when I might have peaked, as a person in a body, but hindsight is 20/20. I know that I required much less sleep than I do now, and I was tireless during the day, and I could drink a lot on the weekend. Okay so then I moved back to New York, got married (this was deeply premeditated, though I can see why it may seem sudden), was a (part-time) actor, (part-time) leasing agent, and a (part-time) babysitter, and then after 5 months there was—and I know you see it coming, ye olde knee-capped fellows—a global pandemic. This caused most of my activities to short-circuit, one might say, and so when I then emerged, the years passed had totalled into 12, I had turned 33, and I was a full-time babysitter.
If you know me you know that’s when I got pregnant! I stand by that choice, thankfully so it was. There’s lots of thanks here. We can call them Ryann, Ali, and the absolute absurdity of tech startup culture, which had just prior to my impregnation provided actual employment at an actual corporation in actual America. Thank you all, amen.
This is when things went absolutely bananas. There are now several long paragraphs in the google doc where I go to birth my blogs that detail almost everything, but I think I will save those for when I finally go to the Mayo Clinic (Partiful to come). For the purposes of our journey here, I will say that I can’t hear out of my right ear, I am one adrenal gland down, I have to take hydrocortisone pills each morning and afternoon in order to continue my journey on this mortal coil, I tripped and developed a very irritating bunion during a time when my body had an impaired ability to heal, and I can’t feel my thumbs. I am also always exhausted, achey, and vaguely swollen. These are all things that make some amount of sense, given the prognosis detailed in the google doc, but doctors also can’t explain them or make them go away.
And then I think, wow. Okay, I’m 36 now, I’m part of a COMMUNITY of people who have joint pain anyways, at the very least. Even the sexiest of us have begun to decline. Even if I come back from the parts I can’t control, it will surely take a montage to rebuild my body into the durable thing that it used to be. And I don’t have time for a montage, which, if we really interrogate the concept of a montage, is why it is a montage.
And then I think, oh my god—I’m a MOM. Of course I’m old! Why bother being so confused about it!? I have a child! I am the woman I see walking down the street with her kid! I am the woman on the train with the gray streak in her hair. I am the person at work with the bags under her eyes. I am the lady at the grocery store in her pajamas who has had enough! I am the place where a toddler, a little human who lives in my house, makes home in my skin.
And wow, I’m so sorry to bring you all the way back here just to be a broken record, but here we are, back at my famous invention - Functional Time! That’s really the only way to make sense of this. The years since college are becoming smaller and smaller proportionately as they go on, and faster and faster, and so they all piled up when I was just trying to get through them. And now that I have a baby and a body that doesn’t quite do everything it is supposed to, those are two rather red flags screaming for me to stop and take note that life has, in its way, moved stages. And so I am. In fact, I shall consider these my notes.
At the very least, I think this is a great way to justify finally getting rid of some old clothes. At the very most, it is quite something to have a life.