I'm not normally
someone who suffers from age-related anxiety, but after
attending a month's worth of holiday cocktail parties at which I
reconnected with many of my younger, childless friends, I realize just how far
away I have traveled from the person I was just a few short years ago. As a 39 1/2-year-old freshly minted wife and mother, I am undeniably in New Territory. Suddenly I feel like the old girl at the party taking up valuable couch real estate. How did this happen? One day I was a young, reasonably
attractive, urban publishing professional with Purpose and Something To Say,
the next I fear I more closely resemble the downstairs neighbor the host has invited
so she doesn't call in a noise complaint--or maybe someone's 'cool aunt'
visiting from out of town. I don't have as much to contribute to the
conversation as I used to, and to be completely honest, I'm usually just too tired to care.
Before you start
arranging my mommy makeover, let me be clear: I'm very happy with the "wife and mother" part of my life. In fact, I've been known to be quite
smug about it. I have an amazing, supportive husband; a sweet, hilarious
daughter; and two gigantic, affectionate cats (aka "the
buddies"). We live in a cute apartment in what has become one of the
most sought-after neighborhoods in Brooklyn, overflowing with beautiful brownstones and creative people. Since the birth of my daughter I have made many new friends (most of them also young parents), and I have a stronger sense of community than I have ever had at any point in my life. It's just that amidst this domestic bounty, I seem to have lost sight of who I am as an individual. I have no desire to return to my tumultuous 20s, those manic days spent working in the theater, studying hard, and drinking all of that booze, and I'm equally happy to have strived in, survived, then escaped, Big Publishing in my early 30s. Still, on the eve of 40 I'm forced to consider, where is the "me" in this equation? Exactly who am I Now, and how is it that at 40 I feel just as adrift at my core as I did at 20 or 30?
Of course, I'm loaded
with excuses and very well-thought-out ways to blame this state of being on
social and societal forces outside of my control. As a GenXer living in NYC in the
late 80s and early 90s I was afforded a prolonged adolescence, further
encouraged by our increased life expectancy and general slacker reputation.
Then the urban zeitgeist as represented by the popular media of the late 90s to
early 00s granted me a generational pardon on most of my 30s, which I was hilariously
allowed to view as "the new 20s."
The unforeseen outcome
of this extended youth is that most of my major life-altering "adult"
events such as my marriage and the birth of my daughter have been compressed
into a few short years, a dense footnote at the end of my decade. These
have been quickly followed by the cold comfort that comes with the onset of,
shall we say, "less joyful" adult preoccupations such as debt, the
elusiveness of urban property ownership, and retirement and college savings
plans...and so somewhere between deciding another tequila shot really wasn't a
good idea, stubbing out my last cigarette ever, and birthing my child, I've become that old girl at the party.
Yes, I know, 39 ISN'T THAT
OLD, but there's no denying a new plan is needed. So here I sit with my
family at the end of the first day of Another Year in my third-floor walk-up
apartment in Brooklyn surrounded by all of our
earthly belongings, and again, I ask myself, how did this happen?
I'd like to go out on a limb and blame it on garbage.
Garbage? Yes, garbage.
I am a life-long collector.
Things most people would toss away without a thought I tuck deep into my pocket
for safe keeping, and the total sum of these things both defines me to myself
and keeps me grounded. Letters, books, photographs, cassette tapes,
matchbooks, vintage clothes, and emotionally loaded swizzle sticks from
long-ago escapades. Greeting cards, business cards, reams of
e-mails. Programs from the ballet, creased ribbons from packages, bottle
caps, brittle articles torn from magazines, notes scribbled on napkins, years
of journals and unfinished short stories. Certificates of one kind of achievement
or another, checks from restaurants, bark from a tree, one broken earring...the
perimeter of our bedroom (not to mention the storage space my husband
gently arranged shortly before the birth of my daughter) is stacked with boxes
and boxes of little objects that together tell my story. I save them as a
way to keep the past as present. If I pick up one of them and hold it for
a few minutes, I am usually able to relive a moment of my life that would
otherwise be lost to me. So it is with more than a little surprise--and
sadness--that I realize these objects have begun to feel like more of a burden
than a comfort.
As a result of my
near-compulsive need to collect, my very tolerant family now coexisting
with all of my Stuff in a barely manageable state of chaos; the piles of things
have outpaced my ability to organize them. I am overwhelmed, and forced
to consider: maybe these things are not the core of my personal history or the
raw material for my as-yet-unrealized, groundbreaking performance-art piece,
but a stifling pile of garbage that I need to release in order to find my way
back to...well back to what, or who, I don't know. Whoever I am apart
from a wife and a mother...as a maker of things and a contributor of ideas.
It is time to clean
house.
So I arrive here, at
the genesis of this blog; a place to chronicle my attempt to transform from
collector to contributor, to eulogize once-treasured objects, and to try to distill
them into something of real value by replacing their physical presence with a
record of their metaphysical significance. I steel myself for the process with the knowledge that by breaking down
my old world order I will, paradoxically, be creating a new one that works for who I am now at this point in my life. The only way out is through, one emotionally
loaded swizzle stick and one painful garbage bag at a time...
and I will try to tell a few good stories along the way, too.
