Maybe some of you can relate to this. I'm mired in a stage of self-reflection. The pandemic has temporarily halted my frenetic pace. I'm not trying to get here nor there, and my mind seems to have both slowed down and opened up, blinking. Wait a minute. Where am I?
I'm almost fifty. I've been calling myself 50 for the last year, so when the birthday happens it will feel seamless--or even like a gift. I will be turning 50, but I've already been 50 for the last year. I even say to others, "When I turned 50..." It's a bit unhinged.
I live with my father-in-law, Jack. As I write I am watching him act out a dream. He might be eating. He just made the motion of cutting with a knife, and then put something invisible into his mouth, which he opened wide. Now he's chewing. I wish I could post a video, but that would be rather horrible of me, wouldn't it? Now he's dipping something, and has just put it into his mouth. He is asleep, I think, but he has his eyes open. He acts his dreams out like he's a mime.
I've read this might be dementia with Lewy bodies.
When he wakes he will reveal something of the dream; he always does.
"Where is Joe?" (I have no idea who Joe is.) "He was just here. I need to get home."
"Where are you, Dad?"
"I need to get home. I need to pick up Carol. I'm late."
Carol is his wife, my mother in law, who died six years ago. Yesterday he was convinced she had been with him in his bedroom, which wasn't his bedroom in his dream. They had been meeting with Joe, and now they were gone. He said, "I smell a rat." It took me a few moments to understand he was worried that Joe had abducted Carol.
Watching this is fascinating is sad. It makes me contemplate my own mortality every day. How will I go? Who will take care of me? Will I be a burden? There is an answer to that final question: I will be. To someone. My children? My children-in-law? How can I stop this? Can I insist I'm taken to Europe and be allowed to die? Will I have the capability of doing this?
*******
More self-indulgent self-reflection:
I am passionate and obsessive, and I always go big when I select a project to pursue. My way of pursuing a project doggedly and with singular focus is more a personality trait than a conscience life philosophy. One thing that has puzzled others about me, and also puzzled me about me, is how I can be so completely absorbed with something for years, and then one day the passion for that particular pursuit dries up, and it moves to the back recesses of my mind. Sometimes the pursuit is picked up again, but just as often it's not.
A recounting of passions.
I will bullet my 20s. My passions in this decade overlapped one another and some continued through the entire decade.
Ordered early to late:
- Teaching history and English to middle schoolers (the whole decade)
- The identification of trees, then wildflowers, then birds (ongoing).
- Andy... my now husband. I spent a lot of obsession and passion on him in this decade. And yes, that was a project of sorts. Just ask him.
- 1997. Trained for and ran the Boston Marathon as a bandit. (1 year)
- Lindy Hop (late twenties). I got quite good. (2 years)
- Children's Literature. At 29 I started working toward a Masters degree at Simmons.
- Vegetable gardening.
In my thirties. The first half of this decade was spent pregnant, nursing, and taking care of infants. Between August 2001 and June 2005 I had three children. During that time I didn't really have projects. Or I did, but my memory of this time is a bit blurred, and I can't completely recapture them. I know I became obsessed with gardening and the identification of all annuals and perennials at some point...
Anyway, before having my first child in 2001, I decided to do a Master's in Children's Literature. About the time of my second class at Simmons I decided I wanted to become a professor of English Literature. At 30, I was accepted to doctoral work in English at BC--and then got pregnant with my first child. Or actually, I got pregnant, then got accepted weeks later. That obsession, that of becoming the English professor, dwindled as I became more and more pregnant. Despite having arrived--eg being accepted to do doctoral work at a respectable school--a larger than life feat I didn't think possible for me after my B+ collegiate experience--I declined entrance into the BC program and went back to teaching.
In my late thirties, after having three children, I became obsessed with fitness--and with running and triathlon in particular. This makes sense, actually. My mid-thirties were spent becoming pregnant, trying to get back my "old body" and then when getting close to that, getting pregnant again. By the time Lara was born I desperately wanted to feel fit again. Those were the years during which I wrote the Iron Matron blog. You can access the archives of that blog here. In it I rant and blather about my training and racing from 2006-2014. hose were great years for both writing and fitness. Much like getting accepted to do doctoral work in English, I never dreamed I could conquer long course triathlon like I did.
My obsession with triathlon ended in 2016--although I continued to race until the summer of 2017. In October of 2016 I qualified for the Ironman World Championship at Ironman Maryland. It was my very best Ironman--mostly because I took the bike so slowly due to borderline hypothermia and then then was able to truly execute the IM marathon in a way I had never done before. Unfortunately, in preparing for it I used up every last ounce of my desire to train. That winter I was diagnosed with quite pronounced anemia, which surely contributed to my lack of desire to train, but even after receiving several intravenous infusions of iron--meant to bring back the Fe in my Iron Matron self-- I lacked any desire to train and race. In June of 2017, after racing in Mont Tremblant, Canada in the 70.3, I retired. No Kona--even though I had qualified for the 2017 WC. I just did not want to continue.
There is a trend here. I finally get what I "want" -- acceptance to a doctoral program -- a bonafide, clear-cut qualification for Kona-- and my obsession and passion... Poof! On to the next thing. What do they say about the chase? Could it be that my actual obsession and passion only have to do with the chase?
Transitions are never easy for me. I'm left empty and bereft when one passion leaves me and a direct replacement isn't immediately obvious. As my triathlon obsession waned I tried returning to school. I entered an MA program in English, became obsessed with Henry James and Edith Wharton, and once again, applied to do doctoral work. That passion was just fleeting, though. Even as I prepared my applications I knew I didn't want to commit to a doctoral program. Instead, I decided to return to teaching. I secured a job in Westborough and taught 8th grade English for a year. That passion was fleeting too, though. Really, I was just grasping to find myself again--looking to old passions and trying to get one to stick.
Currently I am obsessed with daylilies: collecting them, cataloguing them, hybridizing them.
My garden self has been my most constant obsession over the years. It is rooted in a love of identification. I like to be able to name types of things: trees, birds, wildflowers, dogs, garden plants, bees, books. I like to catalog and I like to collect. (I forgot to mention my three year stint as a librarian...)
This isn't a small obsession. I currently grow more than 1,500 registered cultivars and I have about 1400 of my own hybridized cultivars. This spring I've ordered many, many more cultivars, mainly because the obsession has been left to grow undisturbed by other life interventions--driving my kids all over the universe, traveling here and there, appointments now all canceled, coaching put on hold.
I've also been obsessed with writing short stories. My aim is to having something published--somewhere--some small journal that no one will ever read.
These two things have this in common: they are both ways of escaping mortality.
I followed the blog of a man named Lee Pickles for many years. He died in 2018 of heart failure, but before then he was a hybridizer. When he died I made it a point to buy all of his cultivars--or many of them, any way. I look at them with their little labels: Pickles, 2016, Tet, SE. I can no longer read his blog, of course, but I can look at his daylilies--imagine him dabbing pollen from one stigma to the next in his beautiful greenhouse that he was so proud of.
Just to be clear I never met this man. I never even spoke to him. I only know him through his blog.
Someday, I imagine my own name on a label. I want to make beautiful cultivars that will outlive me. I want something of myself, of my work, my effort, my interests, to linger in this world after I am gone.
That is the same with writing. Maybe it's even why I keep returning to keeping a blog.
This is a double-flowering daffodil named Tahiti. Before becoming obsessed with dayliles I was quite obsessed with daffodils.
Here are split-cup daffodil called Pink Wonder, a few pansies and some bleeding heart. One of my daylilies is coming up, though--right by the label. :)
A robin chose to nest in a little tree close to the house. I took this picture, but now I will stay clear of the nest. I don't want bluejays or squirrels figuring out it's there. They are egg robbers.
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