Survival

Today was a rough day--the little guy has a mild fever and is teething like crazy, and he also has an ear infection, and he lodged a very vocal protest about all these conditions all morning and most of the afternoon. But I don't want to dwell on all that.

It's not that I'm trying to avoid the rough parts of being a parent. I just have this feeling that to experience a rough day, then spend my writing time describing just how rough it was, in all its gory details, is to become mired in the motherhood role to such an extent that I will become a miserable wretch, half-insane, a dreadful bore, or all three of those at once.

The original intent of this blog was to write about (1) the specifics of being an older (mid-forties) new mother; and (2) those moments of the day when I actually manage to wander some short distance from the intensive, baby-centered reality that makes up the average day of a stay-at-home mother. I've not really succeeded at either goal...I keep getting sucked back into the vortex of motherhood, to put it melodramatically.

But then again. Why should I dwell on my sense of failure where this blog is concerned, either?

At the party yesterday--another mother and I talked about the possibility of having another child. I said it was entirely out of the picture for me; she expressed a desire for a sister or brother for her son. My situation is a bit more complicated; I do have a stepdaughter, the half-sister of my son. But the main reason that we're not going to have another child is, I can't imagine expending more energy on another human being than I'm already expending. When I said this to the other mother, she said, "I actually could imagine doing that...I just can't imagine being even older when the second child turned eighteen. I'm already going to be sixty-five or thereabouts when _____ turns eighteen."

So she's probably a bit older than I am; but just a tiny bit. I'll be sixty-three when my son turns eighteen. It's hard for me to imagine being sixty-three; I can't even imagine turning fifty, and that will happen in four and a half years. And yes, it's hard to think about how old I'll be when my son hits the first milestones on the path to adulthood.

But it's even a bit harder to imagine my son realizing, sometime when he's around seven or eight years old, perhaps, just how old his parents are, compared to how old other kids' parents are.

But the hardest part of this is imagining myself growing feeble and dim-witted as my son enters the prime of his life--or being struck down by one disease or another before my son turns forty, which could well happen, in spite of the miracles of modern medicine.

I suppose that I mustn't dwell on all of these gloomy prospects, either.