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.