Midnight thoughts

It's 1:40 and I can't sleep, I ate chocolate and had some wine, and lets not forget the brownies! I am sensitive to chocolate, caffeine and alcohol, somehow these substances seem to activate my thought process, and the more I think the more awake I get. Usually, I stay in bed hoping I will dose off, and this can go on for hours. However, tonight I decided to share my thoughts on aging.

Some kids are eager to turn eighteen, I wasn't one of them. It actually scared me, it meant that I had to become responsible and enter the adult world. The only cool aspect was that I could drink without worrying about being carded. Then the twenties have come and gone, I fell in love, got married, had kids and got a divorce. A few relationships later and I am in my forties. Still I think I can do it all, and yes, the forties is the best sex phase of your adult life and you do hope it will last forever. However, it doesn't.

You cross over the fifty yard line, and you feel these little changes happening, sometimes they are so subtle that you forget about them, but they are persistent and manifest themselves in the form of aches and pains that get to scream louder as the years pass by. So you start wondering if it is your diet, must of had too much sugar, or maybe the food was too greasy...should of taken my calcium and glucosamine!

You start reviewing your life and sometimes you don't like what you see, some say we should not have regrets, I don't know why they say that because I regret a lot of things, sure everything I did up until now has shaped who I am today, but still I regret not knowing who I truly was. And, because of that identity crisis I regret some of the crazy choices I made. However, I do have a bag full of stories. Maybe my stories are a bit crazier then some, a bit weird and unusual, sometimes even funny but, I can't say they are worth the "no regret" saying.

My biggest regret is not asking more questions about my family's history or maybe I should say my family's stories. Now I would like to know how my aunt Nora met uncle Jedeon, and why I never new she was an alcoholic until my uncle got sick and died. Why she felt she had to lie to him every time she bought a new piece of clothing, she would say "That old dress, it's been in my closet for years, don't you remember it, I wore it to so and so's wedding" or "I borrowed it from my sister", she had an open account at the New York Fashion store and she sold fishing worms to pay it, she would take off to the fields with her shovel and bucket and turn cow dungs over to rake the harvest. I can still see her in her black skirt with her sun hat and her rain boots digging for those wiggly worms...what a sight! I wonder why no one took a picture of her that way.

I wish I had asked more questions about my great-grandmother, about how it was for my grand-mother to be a single mom in the nineteen thirties. I did ask a lot of questions, however, they were not the questions I would of ask today, and back then adults did not answer all.

I wish I had taken more interest in my mother's family and visited them more than once a year, I wish they had taken more interest in me.

I wish they hadn't been so wrapped up in their secrets and shared their real emotions, their fears, their anger and their love. I feel that most of my life I was missing pieces of information that would have explain their behaviors, I am sure this would have calmed some of my anxieties. Instead, I wondered what was wrong with me.

They all died, my mom, my dad, both my grandmothers, my grandfather, my great uncles and great aunts and my aunt...and most of them died with their secrets.

So what does it all have to do with aging? Well I guess it is about knowing you won't live forever and wondering if you did anything that anyone will remember after your dead. It's about going through an identity crisis at fifty five because you still don't know what you want to do with the rest of your life.

It is about watching older people waiting their turn to die while they lose one more friend or family member in the waiting process. It is about choice, choosing to age miserably or gracefully. It's about knowing that the clock always goes forward and that somehow you have to eat more vegetables and less sugary stuff. It is about relationships, about loving and being love, about listening and sharing your stories. It is about being afraid of illnesses, about fear of needing help, fear of dependency.

While I was growing up I thought my grandmother was the strongest women on the planet, then one day she was eighty and she seemed weak, fragile and needy, and that scared me. In my defense, I was young and did not yet understand the cycle of life.

Birth, growing pains, bliss, aging pains, death. It is as simple as that.