A couple of my co-workers and I break up the day sometimes by playing the Top Three game. Or sometimes it’s the Name Your Favorite game. Name your all-time favorite author. Name the top three bands whose catalog you’d take with you if you were stranded on a deserted island. My response is almost always, But what mood am I in? I’m not very good at the game. I don’t like feeling boxed in. Don’t try to define me. Or make me define me. I’m complex. Or indecisive. Whichever. Depending.
Recently, though, the question was, If you could go back to any point in your life, what would it be?
This is different than what would you do differently, or happiest moments or most important days. This isn’t changing the past, but reliving it. Having just revisted my college days, it felt particularly apt to wax nostalgic.
I wouldn’t go back to high school. I hadn’t figured much out at that point. I don’t have any angst about high school, but they weren’t my best years. I made a mess of my early twenties and it took me years to recover financially and in self-confidence. No need to relive that.
And as much as I love looking back at photos of my children as babies and toddlers, I would not live those days over again. They’re miraculous years, full of wonder and discovery, but they’re incredibly hard. There’s little sleep and a lot of doubt. You’re catapulted from one lifestyle to another one that’s diametrically opposed. Babies have those big eyes and adorable wrist rolls, no doubt about it. But there’s beauty to having children to whom bath time is just a routine morning shower and who can do whatever dark magic it takes to make the tv work on Blu-ray.
My early thirties were reactionary. My youngest didn’t sleep through the night until she was 18 months old. Since she’s only 19 months younger than her sister, I basically didn’t sleep for 3 years. It takes a toll. Even to this day, I haven’t relearned how to get a full 8 hours. Specifically, 2009 was a tough year for a lot of people, and both my husband and I found ourselves laid off and struggling with how to communicate with each other in our new set of fears. We had just figured out the daily grind of parenting, how not to break these children that we’d been entrusted with. We had two children under 2 and now we had to figure out how to parent without a net, dancing on a thin financial tightrope. We coped by turning all that angst inward rather than meeting it as a team. Angry, disappointed, so awful tired. It wasn’t a good time. We made it through, grew the tightrope into a solid plank, and then rebuilt the foundation. But I’d never want to go back there.
If I could go back to any age, I might visit me at 19 or 20. I was studying abroad, traveling, learning about cheap wine and good friends. It was an extraordinary time. Maybe it was all the cheap wine, but it has that sort of soft focus vignette feel. The sort of spell you can never weave again because there are so many different and such very specific ingredients. Even looking back, I know it wasn’t all foreign capitals and sleeping til noon. I was really poor, but so was everyone around me. I didn’t have any money, but I also had next to no responsibility, other than getting myself to class often enough to be counted as a participant in the process. My heart tumbled a few times, sometimes more seriously than others. It was the time for it. And maybe that’s part of the answer to the question. Maybe the times we would go back to are simply the ones we see in the best filter, the softest light.
Those college years had a lot of merit, but meandering through my timeline I realized that if I could go back to any point in my life, I wouldn’t. I’d choose now. In contrast to 19-year-old me, there is very little soft focus in the present. It’s stark sometimes, actually. It’s constant dirty dishes and constant laundry, and neither ever get completely put away. It’s rewashing that load of clothes that never got put away, because now it’s covered in cat hair because the ungrateful cats are anti-team players. This phase is about still having a pile of end-of-school folders and papers sitting in the living room, even though school begins again in three weeks. It’s me texting my husband at 7:30 on a Friday morning after multiple temper tantrums, “I don’t think I have it in me to capably parent the little one. I feel like every morning I wake up and I fail at this.”
And then at the end of the day, picking up with, “You don’t even want to see my magic trick (/song/play/dance/explication of the history of man),” my youngest hurls at me, “You just want to read.” And God help me, she’s exactly right, and the honesty of it cuts to the bone. I. Just. Want. Quiet.
Doesn’t really sound like the best of times, does it? But it is. I wouldn’t take back high school’s neutrality, or even the aching feet of 19-year-old me trekking up one more winding cupola in Rome. I might get a little misty at the thought of once tiny hands growing far too quickly to capture again in plaster and handprint art. But I am raising two daughters who are fierce and opinionated and not just head strong, but strong. I have a partner to whom I can text my worst weekday morning fears, and know I’m not dancing on that tightrope alone. “I know,” he replied. “It’s hard.”
“I know. It’s hard.”
Those four words are everything, aren’t they? Those words get it. We’re building something, and it’s messy and it’s sometimes stark and sometimes has jagged edges. We’re figuring out families and careers and mortgages and 401ks and 529s and IRAs and acronyms we haven’t even discovered yet. We’ve had our plans fall apart, and we’ve rebuilt.
This isn’t the age I’d relive because it’s easy. I’d choose it because we’re sometimes a mess, but I’m proud of this family. I’d choose it because at bedtime, after a day of fearsome valleys and intimidating peaks, my youngest sneaks downstairs one last time, wraps her arms tight around my waist and says, “My life would never be better without you in it.” It’s an apology and a promise and a confusing double negative. But back at you, chica. To the moon and back.
For so much of our lives, we’re living in four, maybe five, year increments. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college. You get used to the idea that life stages are short-lived. You make amazing friends, have wonderful experiences, or terrible experiences, but there’s a sense that this too shall pass. Four, three, two, one…
I’ve lived with my husband for 13 years now. That’s longer than anyone else in the world except my mother, father and brothers and in a handful of years, it will be longer than each of them, too. Just like with parenting, we’ve had peaks and valleys. We’ve haven’t always liked each other every moment of every day. Our house is messier than we’d like. Our tempers sometimes shorter. But we’ve created a little island of experience. Our island. We can share our worst days and our worst fears. Spoken out loud, they aren’t quite so scary. Every day, there are little things. The way when I hold them close, my daughters’ hair smells like the fruity pomegranate shampoo they love and how it changes color in the summer sun. Red for the older, blonde for the younger. And how they fall over each other, trying to tell the most details about their day. They won’t always, I know. Watching thunderstorms roll in, and the complicated dance of coordinating packed lunches and pool day bags and water bottles… stand on the front steps, arms out, sunscreen on. Such little things, but it’s our island.
For me, instead of counting down to the next, this stage is about counting up. Counting up anniversaries and birthdays and new backpacks and stories told and books read. And even as I’m counting up, my children are counting down. Two more years in her current school for my oldest, she reminded us at dinner. And she got up to put her plate away, and her legs were childhood tan from summer days at the pool and evening bike rides, but already nearly as long as mine. Counting up inches, counting up years.
I can’t bottle them up, these days flying by. But when it’s hard and messy and has jagged edges, as it is and does and will from time to time, I can remind myself that I wouldn’t go back. I’d choose now.
