Aging

I started typing this almost two weeks ago - but it's still on my mind. 

Today, I am celebrating being a mother of 2 for half of my life - my second son is turning 25.  I have two 25 year olds for a month. My daughter told me that Rihanna, who performed the halftime show of the Superbowl the other night, is pregnant for the second time in a year - she can call me if she wants advice about having Irish twins!  When we were watching her performance (the only part of the event that I watched), I was critical of her dancing that seemed unenergetic - she seemed to just stroll around. The kids had said she had a baby who was 4 or 5 months old (internet says born in May 2022, so 8 or 9 months or so), so I thought that she was just struggling with post-partum weight, but low and behold, she is already several months pregnant! So now I feel guilty for being critical.

It is an interesting commentary on pregnancy in our culture that the announcers didn't say anything about this. Apparently, she had not announced she was pregnant before the show - but surely the broadcasters/producers/choreographers/whoever is in charge knew. I missed the introduction, so maybe they said something then, but the banter after the performance before the game started up again was inane and boring - 5 or 6 middle to old age guys in suits talking about how danceable her music is. Nothing about Rihanna being pregnant and having just had a baby in her mid thirties; she is almost a geriatric pregnancy, as they say when you pass 35. Or slightly kinder: Advanced maternal age. My daughter thought she was 36, but a quick internet search reveals she's only 34. 

Would it be more socially acceptable to talk about Rihanna having a baby or not to talk about it? Pregnancy used to be something to hide, and my daughter commented how you don't see pictures of pregnant movie stars very often. I think this is primarily to protect the privacy of their children (for instance, I saw an article about the dictator of North Korea that mentioned he had children but the age and even sex of the youngest is unconfirmable). But there is also a long history of not mentioning the ways that women are affected by their reproductive system. I had no understanding of how fertility cycles worked until I was preparing for marriage and learned about NFP. I thought I had a yeast infection the first time I had a fertile cycle in my teens.

Now I am entering that stage of life when my reproductive years are limited. I still have signs of fertility and fear getting pregnant, even though the chances of a 49 year old getting pregnant are about 1%. (I've looked it up. My cousin just had a baby at 47.) I don't have major symptoms of perimenopause other than I have trouble falling asleep and then wake up with night sweats, even though I am usually freezing when I lie down. My husband has mentioned shopping for a king sized bed because I'm like a unregulated space heater. And perhaps he would suggest that I'm moodier and more forgetful than usual. Perhaps I should say I'm seeing signs, but not suffering.

The other day I engaged in a conversation with an acquaintance that turned from elementary school news to supplements for perimenopausal women, and she filled my ears with the battery of pharmaceuticals she was taking - overwhelming! I feel like I need to do some extensive research. An recent article in the New York Times about "The Change" has widened the public conversation, also. I caught the end of an interview with the author on public radio the other night.  When the next generation of women, who were raised on the internet, go through this, it will be all over social media, but my generation is still whispering about it - or maybe I am just not in the right circles. 

The hypothesis to research is whether hormone replacement therapy has great enough benefits to justify the risks. I love being able to write "none" in the space for medications (although I admit, I take ibuprofen not irregularly), so I hesitate to take synthetic hormones after all these years of NFP.  On the other hand, heart disease runs in my family, and estrogen is supposed to protect against it.  I may look more into homeopathic supplements, although there's a part of me that is suspicious of any supplements - as well as lotions and creams.  For that matter, I am suspicious of the medical industry in general.

Not to mention the beauty industry - an article in the WSJ a few weeks ago was about how celebrities are choosing to age naturally. This is not the same naturally that I think of. They are still using creams and lotions and doing micro-needling and blading, and other procedures. They just aren't having surgery.

I am having surgery on Monday if the authorization from my insurance goes through. I broke my wrist roller skating last weekend, and it needs to be reset. I promise I didn't fall from clumsiness, although I was that - a big teen skating fast knocked me down.  Did my wrist break because I am middle aged or just because I fooshed? (fall on out stretched hand - I learned a new medical term!) Seeing as the little girl sitting on the bench next to me where I was catching my breath after vagelling also had a brace on her arm for a broken wrist, I think it would've broken if I were 29 or 19 or 9. That kid was skating hard!

More to come...

Art and Architecture

With another child reaching the second semester of her junior year in high school, talk in our house has turned yet again to college applications.  Like many people this age, this child has mixed feelings about what kind of school she wants to attend and what she wants to study. I have mixed feelings about where she should go as well, since this is our home body child who has travel anxiety. She doesn't like to fly. I could see her staying close to home -- but I'm not sure I want to call this area home for the next five years from now until she finishes college... 

We have some college visits predetermined for us by her participation in track. The past couple of weekends have been spent at indoor track meets, which are mostly at universities because they are the only ones with indoor tracks. It's possible she might get recruited to run track in college - she is running well, but has hit a plateau in improving.  I have all kinds of thoughts about what she should do to run faster, but she doesn't want to hear them.  She doesn't trust that I have some experience of being in her position - which is both true and not true. I don't know her inner resources, her motivation, her anxieties - although I can guess at them. But I do know what it is like to be a runner, to feel stuck, to both hate and love running, to feel performance anxiety, and to feel the exhilaration of winning as well as the intense frustration of not doing as well as you think you could, even if you won the race or came in a close second or third, which to most people is doing well - just not as well as you wanted to run. I know what it is like to have coaches watching your performance, to have your future partially determined by what those coaches decide you are worth to them. To have to decide to make the commitment to run in college begins early - improvement doesn't happen without pain and sacrifice.

My collegiate running career was all a long time ago, and yet it was so consuming, it formed indelible memories. I have hesitated to push her more because I know how obsessive the sport is, and she has to be willing to make sacrifices to continue to do well.  She has hit the point where hard work has to supplement natural talent to a greater extent. I always struggled with this question of whether the hard work is worth it, if you don't have the natural talent to be really great, only pretty good. It is a question any athlete or artist must ask at some point - am I good enough?  It's a perennial human question. 

These meets have given us the opportunity to visit some college campuses, not perhaps ones she is interested in attending, but places that provide an example of what a college in an urban area might look like (University of Houston last weekend), or what a large university in a rural area is like (Texas Tech the weekend prior). During the meets at Texas Tech, I took advantage of the long wait between the time between check in and when she was actually going to run to check out the campus. Texas Tech is located in Lubbock, which is a four to six hour drive from the other big Texas cities - we drove from Ft. Worth after my aunt and uncle's celebration of life, which was a five hour trip and returned to Austin, which took six hours.  It's not a drive with much variation in the scenery - farm land and small towns - but it is a pleasant drive, restful to the eyes and the soul after driving in city traffic, the kind of drive you can get lost in your thoughts on, instead of feeling tense about traffic or road hazards. 

Despite its reputation for being in the middle of nowhere, the campus has appeal. There is a walkable residential/restaurant area just off campus, and the campus itself, although it is so sprawling to barely be walkable, has beautiful architecture and some campus art that is more attractive than a lot of the abstract, discordant art at some other campuses we have visited.  For instance, there is a statue of a man made of books reading a book - perfect for a space in front of a library! - appealing, funny, and a perhaps a commentary on the anxiety of influence - or the comforts of being part of a reading community. I want one! Another statue was of hands cupped as if to gather water for a thirst quenching sip, only instead of water in the hands, you see letters spilling over - language, knowledge! Surrounding these hands at the four compass points are pedestals made of stone books topped with symbols of knowledge - a keyhole, a nest with an egg, a canoe, and I forget the fourth... This arrangement is located in a tree-lined quadrangle of classroom buildings; benches surround the sculpture so students can gather to share ideas, lunch, or some shade.  Also around the campus - a mobile statue of birds flying, a cowboy representing their mascot, the Red Riders - maybe culturally questionable at this moment in political history? - and, my favorite, a sculpture outside the track of a female runner that when viewed at the right angle, looks like she is a flash - see the photo since I'm not describing it well.

There is also a small museum on campus, which houses a mix of art, natural history, and Texas Tech history - sports hall of fame, a timeline of campus, a display of student fashions over the last hundred years.  Next door to that is the Ranching Heritage Center, where you can see how ranch houses have evolved over the years. They have recreated a stick house, a sod house, a wooden house, a stone house, a house that looks like a fortress tower, a house that looks like a barn. You can spend a pleasant hour winding along the path and peeking into these reproductions and imagining what it might have been like to be a pioneer, to live in one of these small homes, to have everything you need in a small space - and they seem more spacious than the tiny homes people design on TV because they don't need a bunch of cabinetry to hide utensils and stuff or big comfy beds - just a corner for a ticking mattress! I thought about Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa here - each new destination brought a different kind of house. 

I was grateful to find someplace to wander and inspire curiosity, although I don't mind watching races for a few hours either, which I still had time to do - this meet lasted ten or twelve hours.  In contrast, the meet this weekend at University of Houston wasn't as long, but the campus isn't as pretty and the architecture is unremarkable, as well as ununified, while the buildings at Texas Tech belong to the same family of architecture, like the buildings at older universities. It's an urban campus, still sprawling for an urban campus since it's Texas,  My daughter has no interest in either school, and in comparison, she is more interested in a campus like the schools we visited in the fall in Boston - Harvard and Boston College - and the campus where we stayed last summer in North Carolina - Elon. She likes campuses that are contained, as opposed to sprawling, and although she says she thinks she wants to go to a big school, I think she would be happier at a school that is medium to small, so that she feels connected both to the place and to the people. Maybe that's me putting my spin on it. And of course, our first choice is for her to attend a Catholic University, or at least a religiously affiliated school. 

And maybe if she doesn't go to a school close to home, I'll just go to school with her... I always love being on a campus...

 

From a textiles art exhibit at TTU

 

A favorite image from the museum

Student fashion through the ages

Texas mastodon

From the Ranching Heritage Center - the milk house. I wonder how cold it really kept milk in the Texas summer heat.

Everything you need in one room ranch house

A reproduction of a table for a larger ranch with many ranchhands

 

Woman/en running statue in front of the track building at TTU in the day and at night

An attractive doorway on a new building

My dream man

 

The egg of intellect? A statue for eggheads? 

Fulfilling the thirst for knowledge

While we were in Lubbock, they were going to the Father Daughter dance

Birthdays and blessings

 This week the kids have been home from school three days in a row because of an ice storm. All over the community, trees are down, and power is out. The kids won't go back to school again tomorrow because of power outages and road hazards, even though the rain is over and the temps are warming.  The ice did quite a bit of damage to trees and power lines.  I'm pretty sure some of my landscaping plants won't recover. Goodbye, lavender and rosemary! Goodbye, salvia and Sago palm! And good-bye to some rather large branches from our spreading live oak tree in the front yard.

Today was our first day to venture out after two cozy days in relaxing in our pajamas most of the day. At noon youngest and I went to Mass for the Feast of the Presentation - forgot to bring candles. Then we stopped at the grocery store and picked up a birthday present for her friend.

The days off of school were welcome opportunites to spend time together, and the second day happened to be our third son's 23rd birthday. His gifts were not exciting, but we had a delicious Italian dinner to celebrate. He is the one who spent the summer with the Benedictine nuns in the Pacific Northwest, and then decided not to go to Spain and teach English and live on peanuts. He's still looking for full time work, although he did have a seasonal part time gig. I love having him home because he likes to experiment in the kitchen and helps with errands. Yesterday he made bread and butter (by overwhipping whipping cream), and concocted a ragu sauce with roasted tomatoes and peppers that simmered all day into deliciousness. 

When I was looking through pictures for some baby photos for the yearly birthday social media post, I was reminded of how much I used to do with the kids - there were the fancy birthday cakes (for example, a cake shaped like a guinea pig for the 23 yr old's 7th birthday, when his present was his first guinea pig. Actually, we just bought him the cage; we made him save up for the purchase, which we told him was $100 to postpone buying the rodent. The party was taking him and 4 or 5 of his friends to the fun pet store that had all kinds of animals that customers were allowed to pet, like a large tortoise and a parakeet room, The kids think they had small monkeys, but I think this must be wrong. Probably sugar gliders? Although there was a pet shop in Norfolk that sold wolf hybrid puppies behind the counter...) We also did things to celebrate the liturgical year - All Saints day costumes, special dinners for the kids' patron saints days, crepes for Candlemas, throats blessed on the Feast of St. Blaise, which we always thought would be a cool name for a boy, but too cool for us. 

Of course, it is natural that as the kids have grown up, we set aside some of these traditions, although I am sad for our youngest that she didn't experience them, and the older kids seemed to have forgotten - I myself had forgotten many of the memories captured in these photos. A good reminder that I need to print some more photos from the last eight years! 

I have been grateful, though, for the days at home with my two girls who got to stay home from school and with the 23 yr old.  We made crepes today for Candlemas and enjoyed the left over eclair dessert that served as a birthday cake and made bracelets and Valentines and walked around the neighborhood to look at the ice damage and pretend for awhile that we live in a crystal palace. Tonight the ice is almost gone - melted away by warming temperatures, although the sun is still in hiding. 

We also read and loved Kate DiCamillo's Beatryce Prophecy, the story of a young girl in a long ago and far away place who is destined to unseat the king and cause great changes in the kingdom. With the help of a vision impaired monk, an orphan boy, a demon goat, and a mad runaway king, she makes her way to the palace to right wrongs and fulfill the prophecy. It was a fun book to read aloud while wrapped in blankets on the couch with tea and cocoa.  My reading has been spotty lately, mostly books for class, although I have to reread the Odyssey for a training at the community college where I am teaching one day a week in hopes of getting a humanities class next fall, although I'm still not sure if I should seek out some other career rather than continue adjunct teaching for little pay and irregular hours.  At any rate, all I seem to be able to finish are books for young people - this book, the March books about John Lewis, the book for book club West with Giraffes, a book about the cross country travel of a pair of giraffes destined for the San Diego Zoo and the young man who drives them, which is in the adult section but seemed appropriate and of interest to middle grade readers.

Time for bed now before the day is officially over. More time to catch up on life tomorrow.