Abstract
When we were young parents, and anticipated freedom from all the chores, time moved slowly, and middle age was decades away. But it has a way of sneaking up, and suddenly we found ourselves saying, “Where did it all go?” Louisa Marshan shares her thoughts…
“I don’t know how I managed….it’s all a haze now. With a demanding job, nomadic husband and boisterous kids, I wonder how I kept my sanity. Now that my babies are well-settled, maybe it was not a bad call, after all! Looking back, I admit my craving for freedom at the time. But now there’s an emptiness in my life which makes me nostalgic, wishing for a re-run…”
Shanti Nagpal
There were times when my three children were growing up and I was tired, that I’d dream of the day my husband and I could be alone again, just as we were before they were born. I suppose it’s only natural to feel that way once in a while, but I have to confess I now feel pretty guilty for ever having that thought. Is it because of my age that I look backward through rose-coloured glasses? Why, it only seems like yesterday that we were constantly wiping finger marks off the fridge; taking school books off the table and removing dozens of records from the floor; bandaging skinned knees; carpooling Brownies and Cub Scouts; falling over toys and dolls and nearly breaking a leg on marbles; cleaning messy bathrooms several times a day; shopping for shoes every few months; being exposed to smelly sneakers on a regular basis; making appointments with the orthodontist for braces for the teenaged daughter; always getting gum on our shoes and sandals; mending a broken heart after a lost cricket game; teaching our offspring to swim so they wouldn’t drown; cursing the toy manufacturers whose easy-to-put-together playthings kept us up till 4 am on birthday mornings.
Have so many years really gone by since the little ones grew up and left the nest? Now we’re able to: use the bathroom whenever we want and the telephone without standing in line; turn on the car radio and not have rock and rap nearly fracture our eardrums, not to mention being able to use the car; leave a book on the coffee table and find it in the same place when we want to pick it up again; experience a quiet moment without the thunder of a teenager descending the stairs with all the grace of a stampeding elephant; and finally, what a bliss! We can watch what we want on TV.
What a relief to find civilised staples in the refrigerator like eggs, fish, salad greens, and vegetables instead of Twinkies, Cokes and Sprites, chocolate bars, and dozens of other cavity causers. (It has always amazed me that eating what they do, youngsters survive their youth and reach adulthood.) Not to wonder anymore where they disappeared to when there were dishes to wash and clothes to be dried! Now we can go to bed and not worry until the last one was home and safe.
Yes, life now truly is as envisioned several decades ago, but tell me, why do we fall over each other when the phone rings in our hurry to see which one of them is calling? Is it because all the things we remember are gone and will never come back?