Second Act

 
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Cat’s Pajamas, 2019

I am forty-five years old, but most days, I feel like I’m eighty. I attribute this premature aging to having two kids in college and two in high school. When my kids were small, I used to dream about the day I could finally sleep through the night without someone waking me up, but parenting teenagers serves up a different kind of exhaustion, one that keeps me up at night for entirely different reasons.

I worry about my kids’ grades, their health, their friends, their whereabouts on a Saturday night, but mostly I worry about how well this grand experiment of parenting will turn out ten or twenty years from now.

If I’ve done my job, they won’t be living in my basement when they are thirty, but perhaps also they won’t move across the country and forget to call me on my birthday.

Headaches and sleep deprivation aside, I have really loved being a mom— more so when my kids still thought I was cool, but even now when it feels comforting just to know they’re in the next room texting their friends about how annoying I am.

With less than two years left before my youngest graduates from high school, I find myself fighting off a nagging pang of existential dread.

Visiting Megan at college.

Visiting Megan at college.

I have been a teacher for twenty years. I have great friends and a sweet husband to hang out with in old age, but I can’t help but wonder, once my kids are grown —what’s next for me? Who am I, if not their mother? Obviously, I won’t miss nagging everyone to put their f*$%king cereal bowls in the dishwasher instead of leaving them on the counter to rot.

I won’t miss lying in bed waiting for the garage door to open before midnight, and I sure as hell won’t miss trying to help my kids with Common Core math. And yet—I will very much miss being needed, if only because doing all the things for all my people has allowed me to feel less guilty about not doing them for myself.

As my parenting to do lists dwindle, I am left with large swaths of time to myself, time that I’ve mostly wasted binge-watching Game of Thrones and looking for the next best eye cream. The only excuse I can come up with for not pursuing more worthy pastimes as of late is that after all these years, I can’t remember what the hell it was I used to like to do!

It’s like I’m sliding into old age with a Starbucks cup in one hand and that twenty-pound Restoration Hardware catalogue in the other.

And while at least one of those items offers a small opportunity for fitness, I sort of feel like if my life were a novel, this would be the last chapter.

I have decided to start now in writing the sequel. For the next year or two or ten, I am committed to doing one thing each month that puts me out of my comfort zone. Considering I’m an introvert, directionally challenged, and afraid of most physical activities, I won’t have to look too far to find things that scare me. I am definitely too old for the Peace Corps, and I’m too afraid of bed bugs to have any interest in backpacking through Europe, but I haven’t given up on writing a new chapter in my post parenting years.

What are you doing for a second act?

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