Exit, and lose that frickin bear

Okay. I’m going to admit it. The approach of age 35 is starting to wear on my optimism. I’ve stood by and celebrated as friends have crossed the threshold into the second half of three score and ten, urging that they are still young – that there is so much more life to live, with the wisdom of mistakes to avoid and… well, a little more money. But I don’t know… it’s a benchmark. And at this benchmark, I’m finding myself staring into a big mirror.

There are a lot of dimensions to this reflection. One is aided significantly by the ticking of one’s biological clock. A clock I thought wouldn’t really alarm me… and even as it does… I’m not sure it’s a motivating factor.

When I was a teenager, I loved kids. Funny, really, because now I think of myself then as still a kid. But I had a relatively successful babysitting business and worked for the town’s only preschool. I was on my way to college where I was going to make myself into an elementary school teacher. After that, I decided that I was going to find myself a husband and have five kids. Then, somewhere between classroom observations and spending a summer in charge of 30 5 year-olds at a theater camp, I decided the whole kid thing could be put on hold.

Well, I never stopped being around children. The start to my museum career was a daily lesson in all sorts of personalities and curiosities. I still picked up nanny jobs here and there to supplement that museum income. And then… when my professional life took me out of the world of kids, I found ways to mentor. So… whilst plans for having my own went on the back burner, I never really stopped hanging around little ones.

But I’m not a mom. In the past five, six, seven years, I’ve observed many good friends create their own little families. I commiserate with the trials of pregnancy, the lack of sleep, and the absolute joy of having a child. I don’t want to say I know… how can anyone ever really know without living it… but I get it. 

I get that pang and feel the reverberations of that clock tick. It doesn’t talk me into it so that I will go out and pursue the opportunity (marriage or no) with any driven ferocity. I said it was lots of needy little ones wanting my attention that turned me off… but really, it was my own fractured relationship with my parents. My recognition that I hadn’t dealt with all my demons… and wasn’t ready to bring someone else into my life to have to deal with them. And… well… come on, let’s face it… there’s even just a little bit of despair about the state of the world.

But anyway, I know all of that could change within a milli-second. I can’t speak for the unknown possibility of the future, no matter how dreary the prospect of a birthday seems right now. And yet… the absence of the identity as a mother… doesn’t make my life anything less. It doesn’t make me less of a person.

I would probably keep this hysterical lament to myself but for the fact that Sarah Palin is out there on the sound waves again, promoting her ‘Mama Grizzlies’ routine. Nothing about actual policy. Nothing about what they are supposed to stand for. Just the idea that a Mama Grizzly will protect her child… and is somehow morally superior.

Fuck that. Seriously. One of the frustrating things about being single and childless is getting amongst a group of friends or family with children who look at me like… I don’t get it. Like I just don’t have the same capacity of love because I don’t have a kid. That I am a more selfish being because I don’t have a baby to structure my day and make sacrifices for. Yes, I know a few people who became better humans as a consequence to their parenthood. But I know just as many who proved their innate irresponsibility and selfishness with how they mistreat and ignore their children. 

I shouldn’t be surprised that anything Palin does or says is going to make the muscles in my stomach tie into knots. Except, this time, she isn’t appealing to a political thought. And that is deliberate. It is an appeal to something baser… something rooted in all of humanity. The idea that a mother is a mighty force. I’ll agree with that, having never been able to win an argument with my mater. But, it doesn’t make her right. Nor does it make the rest of us who aren’t parental wrong.