Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  Sixty is the new forty, as I’m sure you’ve heard. And you’re only as young as you feel, and everyone feels—surprise!—younger than they actually happen to be. My hairdresser has this theory about what she calls “resting hair rate.” It’s similar to your resting heart rate, except it means that no matter what you do to your hair, it will resolve itself into some general style that is its natural fallback position. I personally believe in a resting weight rate: that is, if you’re exercising pretty regularly and eating like a normal person (as opposed to those times when your girlfriends have taken you to Vegas for the weekend and you’re consuming ten thousand calories a day, most of them in bread, butter, alcohol, and chocolate), there is some weight that your body will naturally adopt.

  So maybe there’s a resting age rate—that is, the age you naturally feel. According to the Pew study, most adults over fifty feel at least ten years younger than their actual age. A third of those between sixty-five and seventy-four said they felt between one and two decades younger. On his seventieth birthday, Ringo Starr, still drumming, told an interviewer, “As far as I’m concerned, in my head I’m twenty-four.” If you woke me from a sound sleep and shouted, “How old are you?” I suspect I’d mutter, “Forty-one.”

  It’s interesting for me to consider that that’s my resting age rate, and then to compare that moment in my life to this one. My life was fine at forty-one. I had published a novel, was writing a newspaper column, had three children in all-day school for the first time. (Every mother will understand that that last clause should come first in the sentence.) I had just started to work out for the first time in my life, which turned out to be good, and I occasionally found myself squinting at my needlepoint or my book, which turned out to be not so good. (The actor Kevin Bacon says the good news is that the eyes and the face go at the same time, so you can’t see how you look.) I had most of the friends I have today and the same husband. My life was a bit crazy, it’s true: sometimes I had to edit a column while the kids were having dinner, which meant there were too many slapdash meals and run-on sentences. Sometimes I had to interrupt dinner to take calls. I remember the day our son Christopher came downstairs and said, “Some man just called on your office phone, but I told him you couldn’t talk because you were making dinner.” That man was Jesse Jackson. Isn’t working at home great?

  Nearly two decades later, I still work at home, but the children no longer live here, although their rooms are preserved as shrines, complete with old posters and artwork and high school course notes crammed in the desk drawers. I’ve published a number of novels, had another column but gave it up, have added a few friends despite my insistence that I don’t have room in my life for more friends. If you woke me up from a sound sleep and shouted, “How’s sixty looking?” I would murmur, “Good. Really good.” Better, in many ways, than forty-one.

  The natural world, and the modern one, tell us a different story, a story about women who are past it because they are no longer fecund, no longer fertile, no longer alluring to men in the way they were when they were twenty-two. My friend Marc told me that his beehives were failing because he’d gotten too attached to the queen, who was past her prime: that is, she was four. In The Hive and the Honey Bee, a kind of bible of beekeeping he lent me, it couldn’t be clearer: “Aging queens are superseded, swarm queens are replaced with young ones.” (Just to be clear, queens are replaced by killing them. Beekeeping is a little like presiding over the court of Henry VIII, only with honey.) In Hollywood they are sometimes similarly blunt. As the actress Lillian Gish once said, “You know, when I first went into the movies, Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father, and finally he played my husband. If he had lived, I’m sure I would have played his mother. That’s the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.”

  But sometimes I think of that wonderful novel for young readers Tuck Everlasting, the story of a family whose members have drunk the waters of a stream that keep them forever frozen in time, and their insistence that immortality is a pestilence, that it interferes with the natural cycles of life, aging, and death. Kids who read the book always wind up arguing about whether they would take a drink despite the warnings of the Tuck family, and usually the younger they are, the more enamored they are of the notion of being young forever. But older children begin to understand the obvious peril: your friends, your parents, your siblings, your pets, will age and die and you will be left behind. In some inchoate way they begin to understand what their parents know and their grandparents understand deep down: that there is this rhythm to things, and that it is based in part on the young becoming older and giving way to the new young.

  Most of us don’t have tornadoes in our lives. Our disasters are manageable and predictable, the losses systematic and expected. The car conks out, a younger man is promoted in our stead, our incomes shrink, the heart goes haywire. Our grandparents die, then our mothers and fathers, then some of our friends. People manage to rebound from great devastation; we read about them every day, the parents who survive the death of a child (though we know we couldn’t), the workers who lose lifelong jobs (a turn of affairs we’re certain we wouldn’t survive), the patients whose bodies are racked by terrible disease (which we wouldn’t want to live with). And then sometimes we become one of those people and are amazed, not by our own strength but by that indomitable ability to slog through adversity, which looks like strength from the outside and just feels like every day when it’s happening to you.

  The older we get, the better we get at this. The older we get, the better we get at being ourselves. We’re not busy being born, but busy being born again. My knee makes this noise like Rice Krispies when I do squats and lunges, and my dermatologist likes to joke that she has to clear her schedule when she checks my skin for age spots. But as my friend Robin Morgan, the writer and activist, said as she was approaching seventy, “Parts of me I never even knew I had sometimes ache—but parts of me I never knew I had in my brain sing.”

  So much of our knee-jerk negative response to aging is a societal construct. It’s yet another version of the conflict that shapes, sometimes deforms, our lives, the conflict between what we really want and what we’re told we ought to desire. We are supposed to think that young is better. But we know deep inside, in the ways that count, that better is now. On the day my friend Lesley’s first grandchild was born, she sent out a message that ended, “You’re never too old to have the best day of your life.”

  I opened the screen door tentatively after the tornado was done, took the dogs, and went outside to relearn my immediate world. There were trees and branches everywhere and a wicker rocker from the front porch flung into the back field and beneath it two squirrels, unmarked as though they’d died as we all say we want to die, lapsed into a good night’s sleep that never ends. And I thought, How in the world will we ever come back from this? How in the world will this place ever look the same? And a year went by, and then two, and it doesn’t look the same, any more than I do. In two places on the banks of the pond, I found large pointed rocks slammed several inches into the dirt, rocks the wind turned into missiles, or weapons. And for a moment I considered that if the dogs and I had been walking around the pond as we often do, one of those rocks could have hurtled toward me and done the kind of damage my daughter so feared.

  But, for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. It’s not because there’s any grand plan to the universe, it’s just that life is various, millions of moving parts, dogs, stones, high winds, sandwiches, squirrels, tornadoes. There was a time when I behaved as though I was the center of that universe. It was a good time, when I was young, and arrogant, and foolish, and eager, and terribly insecure and horribly insensible to others and not beholden to anyone else, without responsibility for houses or children or dogs or the cleanup after a disaster. I just like this time better.

  Push

  My friends and I gave birth to our children at the dawn of an unfortunate era of übermomism
unknown to past generations, or, as my mother-in-law once said, “If no one was bleeding, things were fine.” This was more or less the standard of my own childhood, too, which was careless and carefree. If you had asked my mother at any given time where I was, she would likely have paused from spooning Gerber’s peas into a baby’s mouth and replied, “She’s around here somewhere.” In other words, by modern standards of mothering, that dictate that she ought to have known precisely where I was, perhaps because I was taking mini-Mandarin or having a playdate, my mother was a bust. (She also predated the term “playdate.”) There’s one problem with that conclusion. It’s dead wrong. My mother was great at what she did; most of what I’ve brought to the table of motherhood she set out first. She didn’t help us build with our Erector sets, didn’t haul us to piano lessons. She couldn’t even drive. But where she was always felt like a safe place.

  I knew, without really thinking, that if I had kids I was going to get out of bed each day (or often, it turned out, in the middle of the night) and try to be as much like my own mother as possible. Kind and loving and always available with pepper-onion-and-egg sandwiches with melted mozzarella cheese. Who could ask for more?

  The idea that kind and loving is enough is a tough sell in our current culture, and not simply because if one of my kids had wandered from home there would have been a caseworker and a cop at the door. We live in a perfection society now, and nowhere has that become more powerful—and more pernicious—than in the phenomenon of manic motherhood. What the child-care guru D. W. Winnicott once called “the ordinary devoted mother” is no longer enough. Instead there is the over-scheduled mom who bounces from soccer field to school fair to music lessons until she falls into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, her life somewhere between the Stations of the Cross and a decathlon.

  A perfect storm of trends and events contributed to this. One was the teeter-totter scientific argument of nature versus nurture. When my mother was raising kids, there was a subrosa assumption that they were what they were. The smart one. The sweet one. Even the bad one. There was only so much a mother could do to mold the clay she’d been given. But as I became a mother myself, all that was changing. Little minds, we learned from researchers, were infinitely malleable, even before birth. Don’t get tense: tense moms make tense infants. (That news’ll make you tense!) I remember lying on the mat in a prenatal exercise class, working on what was left of my stomach muscles, listening to the instructor repeating, “Now hug your baby.” If I had weak abs, did that mean my baby went unhugged?

  Keeping up with the Joneses turned into keeping up with the Joneses’ kids. Whose mothers, by the way, all lied. I now refuse to believe in nine-month-olds who speak in full sentences. But I was more credulous then, and more vulnerable, when I had a nine-month-old myself. Never mind that twenty-month-old who wasn’t ambulatory. If I unearthed the purse I carried then, which was huge, since it had to hold the diapers and the Wet Wipes and the Peas-and-Carrots food mill, because, ambulatory or not, the boy had to have fresh-milled food, I know I would find inside the scrawled names of pediatric neurologists given to me by several helpful women on the playground, where my son just sat and smiled and stared at his own hands while the other kids whirled around him.

  How better to circumvent the power of the new women of our generation than with all this nonsense that made it seem that every moment was a teachable moment—and every teachable moment missed a measure of a lousy mom. We were part of the first generation of women who took it for granted that we would work not only throughout our lifetimes but throughout our children’s childhoods as well. In 1976, Dr. Spock revised his bible of child care to say that this was fine, but he didn’t explain how it would be possible, and there was a slapdash approach to melding our disparate roles. My first sitter was the erstwhile manager of a cult punk band. She was a good sitter, too.

  But quicker than you could say nanny cam, books appeared, seminars were held, and modern motherhood was codified as a profession. Professionalized for women who didn’t work outside the home: if they were giving up such supposedly great opportunities, then the tending of kids needed to be made into an all-encompassing job. Professionalized for women who had paying jobs out in the world: to show that their work was not bad for their kids, they just had to take childrearing as seriously as they did dealmaking.

  It turned out that this was not such a good thing. It wasn’t only that baking for the bake sale, meeting with the teachers, calling the other mothers about the sleepover, and scoping out the summer camp made women of all sorts crazy, turning stress from an occasional noun into an omnipresent verb and adverb. A lot of this oversight was not particularly good for kids, either. If your mother has been micromanaging your homework since you were six, it’s hard to feel any pride of ownership when you do well. You can’t learn from mistakes and disappointments if your childhood is engineered so there aren’t any.

  And much of this didn’t end with childhood anyhow. What came to be called helicopter parenting extended into adolescence, so that colleges looked at some admissions essays with skepticism, wondering how much they’d been massaged into shape by anxious parents, or by professionals the anxious parents hired. College deans reported that it was commonplace to hear directly from parents unhappy with a grade or a roommate assignment; on moving-in day a dean at our daughter’s college handed out cards that read “How are you going to deal with that problem?” and suggested that we read the sentence, exactly as written, when we got telephone calls with complaints from our kids.

  I mark my years of parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children’s father, who sat me down and told me in year two that I was going to create a little monster if I continued to act as though “no” and “I don’t love you” were synonymous. Also on my list is the high school college counselor who told the junior class parents, to the sound of strangled gasping, that they were forbidden to go on college visits with their sons. I thought of him again when I read a newspaper story about boomer parents who were actually accompanying their children—who by then were not children but adults—to job interviews.

  I processed this remarkable and deeply troubling phenomenon in two ways. As someone who once did hiring, I would have rejected immediately and out of hand any young person whose mother or father was waiting for them in reception. But as someone who had to keep herself from sneaking into her kids’ rooms to read their college essays and to do some judicious editing—oh, come on, they’ll never notice that unfamiliar metaphor in the middle of their own prose—I understood the impulse. I just vowed not to give in to it. How could they be excited about their jobs, their opinions, their lives, if they felt that they were secondhand, jerry-built, not truly their own, if they weren’t discovering the world anew?

  Oh, sure, there’s something a tiny bit wearing about that, about their idealism, their illusions, the intense vagaries of sensation and emotion. I have to remind myself of the time when I was young and seeing a man who was nearly twenty years my senior. He was a wonderful person in almost every way, except that everything I wanted to do, he’d already done. Douglas Sirk movies, Positano, truffles, Italian tailoring: he knew, and I was learning, and it made for an unbreachable disconnect. Each time I’ve been tempted to tell one of the kids they’ll get over it, whatever it is—love affair, crippled friendship, failure at school—I would remember this. I couldn’t afford to be world-weary. One study found that nearly all of those in their twenties, asked if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” say yes. That should be cause for celebration, not pursed lips and a cynical ha! They will get to that place soon enough.

  Besides, what kind of fool would I be to miss the opportunity to feel the sharp elbows of sensation again, to reexperience life vicariously, armed with the long view? Because naturally at some level this is all about us. Our relationships with our kids epitomize
that old joke: Enough about me. What about you? What do you think about me? It places each of us squarely in the center of one of the great tugs-of-war of human existence, between connection and independence.

  The thirst for novelty versus the hunger for security explains why some marriages blow up and others endure, why some people have spectacular careers and others just ricochet from passing interest to passing interest. There’s the yen to contract, to draw in and have and do less, and the spur to spread out, to travel and explore. There’s the tension between emotion and thought, between even temper and high anxiety. When we’re young, many of us, there’s a constant pendulum moving between the two, too high one way, too high another. But there comes that moment when we settle down, or settle in, or just settle.

  There comes that moment when we give our children custody of their own selves or blight their lives forever, when we understand that being a parent is not transactional, that we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us. Modern mythology has it that this happens suddenly, overnight, with something called the empty nest. But that wasn’t the case in this household. There are three of them, so when one, even two went to college there was still one left at home. Ah, how foolish she was: after years of having her brothers lord it over her, smack her down, infantilize her, she thought being the only child would be fantastic, when it turned out to be mainly lonely. “And the two of you are so focused on me!” she told her father and me more than once. Once she went off, her brothers began to circle back, until finally all three wound up in New York City, available for emergency dogsitting and Sunday evening pizza and TV sporting events. Occasionally I come home and find a cereal bowl in the sink with a slick of milk in the bottom, and I know I should think, Why can’t they wash their own dishes; they’re grown now, what am I, the maid? Our children are occasional visitors with all the rights and privileges of full-time residents, which is an uncomfortable combination. But still I smile, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. The nest has been visited.