Hurtling Towards 6 Months (and 45)

The big six-month birthday is fast approaching--I won't say exactly when it is, in order once again to preserve anonymity. But it's close enough that I'm getting excited.

On the other hand--a little disturbing to contemplate how rapidly those six months came and went. The velocity of time, as I posted about earlier, has to do with the blending-together of day and night that has occurred since his birth.

No doubt every mother feels like time has wings, especially in the first part of her baby's life. Is it worse for an older mother? I couldn't say.

What's probably worse is when you're caring for your own child (or children) and your elderly, ailing parent (or parents). There's a book about this experience, written by a woman, newly separated from her husband, who took care of her baby and her dad with Alzheimer's and moved to a rural part of the Northeast, all virtually at the same time. (An interesting thing I just discovered: the original title of the book, "The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting" (Elizabeth Cohen, 2003, Random House) was changed, for the trade paperback edition, to "The Family on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Love and Courage." Says something about the commercialism of our times that such a banal title won out in the end.) It's an excellent, honest, funny book, about a woman taking an impossible situation and finding the absurd humor in it, as well as surprising moments of grace. She writes, for instance, about her father dropping language behind him as he walked, and her baby stopping to pick it up.

I miss my parents terribly--most terribly, perhaps, when things aren't going well with the baby. (Does one ever really stop depending on one's parents, for moral support at least? I mean, if one was blessed with having good parents, on whom one could invariably rely for some sort of moral support.) But I'm not sorry that I don't have to care for this baby and a sick parent at the same time. My heart goes out to those who are grappling with such a difficult situation. May they find some measure of grace and comfort in spite of the whole grueling experience.

Okay--so I'm suddenly not so concerned about approaching 45 years of age. Let the gray hairs fall where they may.