I Want To Be An Old Woman by Maureen Eich VanWalleghan

Do you ever wake up and just feel old? Could be hormones, or I’m just tired or who knows what, but I think it’s just the waning of my youth seeping ever so slowly out of me. Aging is mostly attitude, right? If I feel young, I am young. Maybe...

In my mind, aging is understanding how helpless and inconsequential one really is and not caring. The warrior self of my youth is giving way to a sense that I have little impact in the world beyond my family and even then I am but fleeting.

Oh to wax so poetically when really I am just feeling pissy. Right now, I am reading Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. It’s the third book of really profound, life-changing books I have recently read and I’m feeling depressed, sad, helpless and finally wondering how to make the world a less nutty place. The other two books I finished include The Mask of Motherhood by Susan Maushart and The Price of Motherhood by Ann Crittenden.

I know that I am sensitive person and others might read these books and not feel as deeply or as emotionally impacted as I do. My guess is that society has always asked the question “What are we coming to...” But, when one starts asking the question and feeling powerless to change things then there is that feeling of being “old.” Now maybe if becoming old wasn’t such a horror than I might feel differently. I remember telling an older friend—a woman who was 35 years older than myself—that her time for being a “warrior” was over, but remembering and educating and sharing her wisdom was of great importance and equally as valuable.

We had been talking about Bella Abzug, who was this woman’s personal friend and who knew that Bella died feeling she was a failure. My friend was explaining that feeling and I—in my youthful exuberance—was trying to console her. Now I am beginning to understand what my friend was talking about. The wisdom of age is not valued and when the warrior self is too tired to carry on the fight (of anything that we believe in) then the feeling of hopelessness can harden in the heart like a bitter lump.

So maybe this pissiness is just mid-life angst. Angst from the German meaning a great abiding fear. Do I feel fear? I do. I am reading Skenaky’s book and feeling it deeply. Not even the reflection of seeing all that I am doing right with my daughter can remove the underlying fear I feel about everything. Fear of aging, fear of not being successful, fear of being a bad parent, fear of isolation, fear of waking up wondering how did I end up...where ever. Fear is a great motivator, but one can choke on too much of it.

When I see an old woman wearing shorts with spider vein legs, baggy knees, no makeup, gray hair and her oldness hanging all about her and she is just having fun out in the world, I know that she is not afraid. She just doesn’t care anymore. I would like to have that freedom too. It looks a lot more appealing than the old woman who is trying to be youthful in clothes, hair, makeup etc. Right now I am in the in-between stage. I sometimes feel old, but I don’t really look it and I am still very invested in maintaining a youthfulish appearance because of fear. Oldness has not fully settled on me. I am walking a fine line. I have a sense of my mortality, my smallness and a part of me still wants to fight...the warrior that is down, but struggles to their feet...a hero's journey. Yeah right, this is just life, not a movie with a three act structure and dramatic arc. Oh well...

As I often say about my daughter, she is just going through a development phase...she’ll get beyond this (whatever this is). You know, she’ll grow out of it—hopefully sooner rather than later. I think I am going through a phase and I hope I grow out of it sooner rather than later.

Becoming A Free-Range Parent by Maureen Eich VanWalleghan

I am follower of Lenore Skenazy’s blog Free-Range Kids. She has a book out by the same name, which I would very much like to buy. I bring this up because often to do the kinds of activities she promotes for Free-Range kids, activities that were once the norm, partly out of necessity and partly the world functioned differently, a parent needs to practice.

Letting kids have independence and freedom in today’s culture takes conscience effort and work, but the rewards are worth it. I have been practicing and I can tell you that at times it is a terrifying process to let my child move in greater and greater spheres beyond me—“out of my sight.” When she was little, two to three, I would let my daughter often walk a block or more in front of me in instances where there were no cars, but I could still see her. Now that she’s five years old, I am working on letting her out of my sight. When I do this in controlled environments, I still get huge knot in my stomach. I fight to overcome the urge to run after her yelling “you are too far from me.

Quick rewind to a blog I posted for Mother’s Day that included my mom’s fears that when she called me at night and I wasn’t home—when I lived in NYC—she told me she couldn’t sleep. Now as a review I was in my 30’s when I lived in NYC. So here’s my mom dealing with the same huge knot in her stomach. She couldn’t see me. Being a mom is living with this knot...and letting this human being you bore become the independent person they were meant to be.

The process of raising independent children is a difficult one. No matter the dictates of any culture, releasing a child into the world begins at birth. What’s sad is that our society has succumbed to our interior fears to the detriment of raising healthy, independent children.

Now I am starting to sound like a professor giving a lecture...easy to do since I am a professor. But let me move into a recent little moment I had with my daughter. She takes swimming lessons at the college where I work and last week she wanted to go for a walk. I responded by asking her where did she wanted to go and she said “I want to go by myself, Mom.” In my mind I was screaming to myself “You’re too little, you’re my baby, no, no, no!!!” I took a deep breath and instead decided that the campus side walk was a good controlled environment and that I could follow her in the car.

We got to the check point and she wanted to go farther. She had a sense of pride in herself. She was really happy that she was being independent. She wanted to go farther. We went farther. We did three legs of the walk and at the last leg she rounded the corner onto the main street. At that point, I had to go with traffic and so pulled out onto the main road. My daughter stayed walking along the sidewalk. I turned at the first block and pulled over. For me, this was the hardest part. She was out of my sight as she walked down the block and I pulled over. She knew this. There were no streets to cross just this stretch along the main road. It was too much for me to wait in the car even though I could see her after I stopped. I had to get out and meet her part way.

When I got to her dealing with my stomach knot was all the more poignant. She said “Mom I am so big I can really do this myself.” Ouch, I just wanted to cry and I was proud of her all at the same time. This to me is the hard work of parenting: owning the fear and walking into it anyway. This is also a definition of courage. Free-Range parenting takes courage and but the rewards are so worth it.