At the Halfway

from my Art Journal today

I found a mirror the other day that had something peculiar about it.

It had my mother's face in it.

It was strange because it had always been an ordinary mirror, and puzzled, I stared back at my mom.

There's a part of growing up no one ever tells you about. Of course we hear, "I'm turning into my parents!" (said with shock and awe by adults somewhere along in their lifelines), but nobody ever says what this means, or how it feels.  They never say just who their parents are, other than insinuating what their parents are. "Dad is so stubborn!" Or, "Mom was always complaining," or whatever, but there is no distinct acknowledgement of how that became so. Who did your parents THINK they were? Better yet, how did you become them? That's the question that needled me when I stared with surprise at my mother's face in the ordinary bathroom mirror. Not "Who am I?" but "Who am I supposed to be?" But maybe "supposed to" are the wrong words for this.

I'm talking about an identity, and a rather fragile one (how could I know it would be that adjective in particular?) that glances in a mirror to find someone older, wiser, and not exactly familiar. Because identities are shapeshifters, emotional lycanthropes.

When I was young, I spent years building myself like a pack of cards: Queens up top, near the head; spades for hands; hearts for blood; diamonds for eyes; clubs (of course!) for feet; and jokers--garish and raw--for the middle. I schooled myself to wear them out, like a good pair of boots. I stuffed their faces into the cul-de-sac of my psychology. I practiced well.

When you're young, there are plenty of people to worship. "That's who I want to be," you'll say. "That's who I'd be if I was clever enough to think of it myself." Role models, I guess you'd call them. There's nothing wrong with them. They help you out, as though they are the expectant fire you are going to cook the clay of yourself in. As though when it is finished you'd be hardened into yourself, unequivocally and decidedly A Person.

This was all fine for me. I had a rag tag team of Personalities to choose from, and they cruised past my eyes every so often with the word "cool" drying on their lips. But it took forever for them to come and I thought it would take the same forever to sail away from me.

Then I became, somehow and inexplicably, Older. I solidified (just as I thought I would, though unexpectedly and without the urgency) into an Adult. When I looked over my years, fingering them like pearls from the deep sea of my experience, they had smoothed out and glided on-- not past me, but back in that other direction I no longer had access to. They were full of movement back to Youth, and it was like a betrayal. I was a jilted lover, helpless among a mountain of paper cards that were defaced and undignified. They covered my feet in the snow of themselves, the powdered somnambulism of Age.

Now directionless, I'm faced with the silence (deep and brooding) of middle age. There are no unworried role models for this phase. All the likely candidates are concerned about Grown Up Things that seem to spread out from them like a stain. They have families and children and responsibilities and houses and house payments and PTA meetings and AA meetings and a whole host of things that just generally distract them from who they've become...until their parents appear in the bathroom mirror. These whirlpools of worries jack knife the vessel of time, sending us Adults askew from the wonder we once licked from our fingers with the greed for adventure we were tacitly taught to follow.

No one in their right thinking says, "It begins again right here, in your fifth decade," but when that ugly halfway place rises up to meet your eyes, it strikes you hard (and so quickly you almost miss it). It leaves marks and lines that always seem to gather around your mouth and under your chin, puckering your skin as if age were a lemon.
The opened up feeling leaves you.
The tight pull of the future slackens and holding its rope is harder;
the coils of it are heavier;
the braid frays out into greyish uncertainty.
Your grip becomes merely a doubt.

It's not that wonder dies. You still have that inside you, but you lose a sense of who you are "supposed to" be. (There's those words again.) People congratulate you on your passage through The Worst of It, but their words seem petty and lackluster. Words like "responsible" crinkle like parchment, as though their venerable secrets wither up under the thumbprint of time. And words like that pop up like weeds, without permission. How did you come by them? And how can you hope to undo their finality?

If you're reading this and you're younger than say, 40, I'm giving you a head's up here. You have plenty of role models and guide posts around you to instruct you on how to perform your role in society, even if it's a role of revolt or dissent. For those of us in our middle age and onward, there are very few. Part of it is this culture that insists on worshiping youth and beauty and the pursuits of happiness therein. After the mid-line, we are a generation of mid-life crises. And it's no wonder. Where we were going when we were young is where we are now. There's no signpost up ahead with a gnarled wooden finger to show you what's next.

All you'll get is your mother's face in the mirror.

The Movie That Weighed a Ton

Tonight Mom and I watched "Montage of Heck", a documentary about Kurt Cobain.

They did a good job of capturing the hopelessness of Generation X. It is a time period I remember all too well. It is the generation I am a part of. 

And Kurt Cobain was a good example of how fed up we were, and for some unknowable reason I want to talk about it. Maybe because I see young hipsters trying to recreate a scene they know very little--if anything--about. (Worse, globbing on to music they know nothing about.) I want to talk about how it felt back then, which is different than it feels now. Frustration is typical for any generation of teenagers, but the vibe I get from the emerging "Millennials" is of a different sort. I'd like to put Gen X's particular frustration into words, if only to define it for myself. 

The problem I'm running into is that my view might be skewed by my own mental illness, which was diagnosed around the same time Cobain ate a bullet: 1994. So, maybe all of what follows is being said because just *I* felt that way. I've never had the occasion to be anyone else, though, so just bear with me. Hear me out. 

I was not the only kid I knew in the 90's to land in a mental hospital, and what I'm talking about has nothing to do with schizophrenia. Kids in the 90's were sent to mental hospitals (though we weren't institutionalized in any sense) the way kids before us were sent to summer camp. We were not kids, we were "problems." [I see loads of youngsters today with a myriad diagnoses and frustrations, but we were the first generation to be treated that way. The difference was we weren't coddled over it; we weren't even told certain meds would make us better. We were left on the doorstep of disappointments and left there. We were dismissed.] 

The way I remember it, we were all seen as delinquents. We were told we would never amount to much and most of us didn't give enough of a crap over it to prove anyone wrong. But (in the grand tradition of adolescence), we were angry. We were a disenfranchised generation. We had nothing to rally behind. We didn't have the Vietnam War, or the Great War, or the "silent majority" to topple. We were (or at least we felt) INVISIBLE. We were forgotten too easily, our struggles overlooked.

So our music got loud. And it got raw. And it got lazy, too. Cobain often went out on stage in his pajamas (I believe he was married in them too). [Oh gawd, and look how all the kids today have taken this on!] But it wasn't just that we were lazy, we were in protest: we stopped dressing up; we stopped showing up; out of rebellion, we gave up. We all felt like nobodies, so we acted like nobodies. (Maybe that's the reason for all those "beautiful loser" songs that came out of that era.)

[See: "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. See: "The Nobodies" by Marilyn Manson. See: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by (you guessed it) Nirvana.]

And I had forgotten all of this until I watched Montage of Heck. If you're old enough to remember news footage of Cobain's coma in Rome, if you're old enough to remember playing The Cure's "Disintegration" on the auto-reverse option on your Walkman, if you're old enough to remember Perry Ferrell's humanitarian awards, if you're old enough to have cared about ANY of this, please give the film a watch. I'll warn you, though: it's a trip down a rough memory road, and it weighs a ton.