Lily is Six

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.

Forty, Day One

My graduate school thesis, which led to the writing of two books I wish I hadn't written, was a collection of essays written during the year I was twenty-five, which somehow seems like it happened about seventy-five years ago. I remember one line from the introduction of this thesis, or at least part of it, that described twenty-five as "the year I decided to document." This is not entirely true, however it is true that I did, actually document that year almost inadvertently, due to the requirement of writing the thesis. I can decide, purposefully, to document forty, and maybe because I have had an extra glass of wine tonight, I think that I will. So here I go. Night one. I have the venue. I have a goal. Let's see what happens from now until forty-one.

Work In Progress

Ugh. Last time was so bad I think I scared myself off. Remind me never to write a bad second novel if I ever actually publish a first one; I"m not sure I can tolerate the self-loathing. But now, now--I begin again, feeling like a Democratic president trying valiantly to pass a health care bill or get Israel and Palestine to sit down to a nice brisket, or falafel, and just talk it out. Actually, I feel a lot better than that, for no good reason. Have I mentioned I'm about to turn forty? Yes. And although I'm not exactly doing back flips on mattresses like the cast of Glee (a reference only 1% of you, if you still exist, will actually get), I'm not dreading it in quite the way I expected to.

I will admit that back in the day, those days when I could drink more than a glass-and-a-half of wine without falling asleep mid-conversation, those days when I occasionally went for a run, those days when I knew--and not in a purely nostalgic way--that movies were also shown in real theaters on big screens with surround sound, I used to think forty sounded impossibly old. And then everyone else around me either was forty or almost there, like me, and it suddenly seemed still kind of like the beginning of things--the beginning of the middle of things, anyway, and I didn't mind the thought so much, not the way I had hysterically met the age of ten: that fateful move to two-digit numbers.

I think it must be said, and if you are reading this it is pretty likely you have at the very least met me and more likely know me well, that thirty-nine has been, in so many ways, one of the more challenging years of my life. Although the particulars of everyone's thirty-nine are unique, I suspect that when viewed through a long lens, perhaps from the sager (oh, I hold out hope) vantage point of fifty, mine will seem part and parcel of what happens to many of us at around this age, or rather stage in life, when suddenly the opening credits are firmly behind us, the characters have for the most part been established, and the plot is in motion, for better or worse. What then? we say, or I do. What now?

But this isn't what I thought it would be like, I sometimes find myself whimpering to myself (not in a crazy out-of-body way but in a pathetic, feeling-sorry-for-myself way), and I'm not even really sure what "it" is, although I guess in a vague way it means my entire existence. And it's not that the particulars of my thirty-nine are even that distinctive or necessarily bad--in fact many of them, such as my children, are in so many ways even better than I ever could have imagined, but that is such a simplistic thing to say when of course their sheer existence is a piece of what I mean: my life, the whole, messy, disobedient, unraveling but only within the confines, hilarious, exhausting, frustrating, incomprehensible, slippery, elusive, did I say messy?, whole of it.

What did I think it would be like? I'm not sure I ever thought much about it, although in fifth grade my best friend and I had an elaborate vision of our adult lives that involved pink taffeta dresses and Mercedes sedans, which I think says vastly more about our upper middle class suburban surroundings and the very early eighties than it does about my vision for my life.

I guess I am thinking now, right now, in this instant, as I sit at my computer at almost midnight on the Monday before I turn forty, on an evening before I will get up at 6:30 with my two little girls to give them breakfast (ponytails made while seated on stools at the counter, please finish your milk, Annika turning on the same CD over and over to hear the "Mama song," where's the backpack? where's the permission slip? downstairs with my splashing cup of coffee to put Lily on the bus), that what needs to happen for me to meet forty with any sense of equanimity, is for me to tell myself, and to believe it, that the story is not yet written, that what matters is to keep writing it, that often the best writing happens when you don't know just exactly what you are going to say.

So here I go, with forty in mind. Let me keep writing. I must.