The sun comes up.
I make coffee. I make lunches. I add an ice pack. And love. I hope they feel it like the November chill that spreads through the open window. Invisible and undeniable.
My kids bike to school. “Be safe,” I tell them and watch their helmets disappear up the hill. Worries of scraped knees are replaced with worries of broken bones. Or worse. I don’t drive them anymore so I don’t make small talk with other moms at the gate. I don’t slowly forge new friendships. I don’t see them solidify their new friendships. Their growing independence pushes me back inside.
I inhale gratitude. I exhale thoughts of mangled bikes.
I sit at my desk and log into Slack. I open spreadsheets and documents. I type words. Through a camera screen my colleagues and I convince ourselves of our importance. But it doesn’t last. The call ends. My to-dos lay limp. Necessary and unimportant.
Still, my shoulders tense, my mind races with tasks still incomplete, with the feedback my boss gave, with the groceries I need to buy for dinner. I procrastinate with a quick Instagram scroll. An algorithm corroding my psyche. Beautiful people doing beautiful things. Ugly people doing ugly things. I tense some more.
I go to the store. The wind blows. My husband stands next to me, unwavering. “Santa Ana’s,” we say, like we’re natives of Southern California not seeds sewn from somewhere else. I buy the pasta sauce I forgot to buy on Sunday. Empty thoughts stuff my mind.
I call my parents. “Can you believe it?” My mom says and we talk through all the Its. Today: cabinet confirmation hearings, Israel, Palestine, wild fires, grocery prices, my sister’s Easter menu.
The phone is shaking in my dad’s hand. “I feel good,” he says and I want to ask more. When was the last time my mother fell? Are there more scratches on their car? What are they eating for dinner? Their independence shriveling in the silence. We hang up. Frustrated and reassured.
I think about a recent conversation with a friend. She lost both parents last year. “Now is the time for difficult conversations,” she said. Logistics, like buried or cremated? Where? Wake and/or funeral? But also, “I wish we just talked more about their lives and memories. There’s so much I want to know now.” My stomach turns.
My kids come home from school. English was boring. They both have math homework. Lunch was ok. I want to ask more. What did you talk about between classes? Who do you get excited to see? Can you record your whole day for me? There was a time when I was the recorder, watching them nap, listening to them sing Paw Patrol, smelling them after a bath. Yesterday and a lifetime ago.
I make dinner and don’t turn on the news. I stir concerns about microplastics, stew on the price of organic vegetables, and try to shake my confusion about whether my compostable bags are getting composted. Still, I know it’s a privilege. A dinner, a home, people to cook for.
We sit together and even when no one says much, I start to relax. What luck. To be here with my three. Healthy and flawed.
I drive to practice. When did it get hard to see in the dark. When did the seasons change? When did seven o’clock become the start of our nights and not the end?
Big changes creep and creep and creep then startle.
I have more work to do. I open my laptop and try not to tense my shoulders. I glance at job openings but see no opening for Middle Aged Mom of Cranky Bones and Mind. I want to work less and make more. College tuition is an albatross circling.
There was a time when ambition was the antidote for feeling stuck. But lately my ambition is to stay stuck. To stay in this moment when my kids still sleep down the hall, my parents are still a phone call away, my husband and I can take walks together. The abundance of it all hangs precariously.
The big changes creep.
Practice is over. Time for second dinner. I test his appetite for conversation with a benign question. He speaks. I make tea. Teenage boy of erratic hormones and growing limbs. He talks about his bio test and kids caught cheating and how uncomfortable health class is.
All the worries I’ve held and released remain tucked away on a shelf. Should I start solid foods? Why is he crying? Should he be able to sound out these words? Does he share well? I hear an echo from the abyss of space and time: “Little kids, little problems.”
In bed, I nostalgia scroll. 1980s toys, commercials, clothes. I see my Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox. I hear Casey Kasem. I smell the Scratch ‘N Sniff stickers. The clips of old McDonalds commercials are a warm hug. I travel back letting my middle-aged fears—that AI will take my job, that my kids will face some tragedy, my luck will run out—shrink in the distance.
I lay in bed flat like the horizon feeling the pull of youth and age. The sun rises. The sun sets. I lay still. Breathing.
Kathleen Siddell is a writer who wishes she had more time to work on creative projects. Instead, she finds her time consumed by content marketing and growing kids and aging parents and her own aging body and addictive word games and a running faucet of worries about the state of the world.
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