Recently I was in a meeting that I wish had been an email. Tensions were running high and I sat there on Zoom–my video turned off because it was after sunset at which point I lose all makeup and manners–listening to the tension erupt in frustration directed…where, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I just felt it like it was directed at me because that’s what I do (thank you, Inner Child): become Teflon with positive moments and a sponge to negative ones.
Once it was over, the business of bedtime began–itself not the most fun part of the day–and I mentioned to The Husband that I felt like I was in trouble for not meeting expectations that I never assented to, but there was also the possibility that I was misinterpreting everything, and the whole episode was just a steaming pile of shit that would definitely keep me from falling asleep. He dutifully supported me while undoubtedly wondering for the millionth time why I let things get to me so much even though I have explained to him at least a million times that I’m super-sensitive and also lovably insane, and he signed up for this.
Every time I think I’ve grown beyond my younger self, beyond my fears and misapprehensions (for God’s sake, I’ll be 45 tomorrow), beyond the ickiness of feeling misunderstood and caring about that at all, I bump up against the boundaries of myself and realise I maybe haven’t grown as much as I thought. I am always, still, often annoyingly, me, with the same tendencies and flaws as ever–sure, fewer fucks are mixed in to be given, but that doesn’t overhaul the structure entirely. I’ve learned to deal with these tendencies, to breathe and pray and meditate through them, and, perhaps most importantly, to recognise them, but as for making them disappear? No such luck.
Yet along with fewer fucks comes more: more to mix in, to dilute the fears and flaws, or even change the way I see them. The stretching of our physical boundaries, finally after a two-year wait, on a return to the Blue Mountains and Christmas in July (August, actually–thanks, Covid), this time with friends, and we share life together at indoor pools and on basketball courts and over dinner tables and bottles of wine, and I see myself in a place I never knew existed not that long ago, among people I’d never met who are now like family, and I know that boundaries–of place and self, often simultaneously–they do grow.
I get an email–“this made me think of you” in the subject line–from a friend, a fellow writer who has shared a treatise on storytelling that somehow paints in words something I’ve been thinking on exactly for weeks now, and I think of how some of the fears and flaws themselves are what led me to thinking, to writing–to growing–and that this alchemy, this chemistry of change, is less straightforward and black-and-white than I still give it credit for.
One day last week the kids were encouraged to dress as their future selves at school, and TK threw on his Pelicans jersey because he plans–as a white male of average height with coordination issues–to be an NBA player. When we arrived to the schoolyard, he expressed his outrage to me at a fellow student’s Spider-Man costume.
Too unrealistic.
I couldn’t help but laugh, at his blind spots and mine, how we grow aware of some of them as we age and how some will always escape our recognition. At how today he sees himself as a worthy contender for the NBA, and I still sometimes see myself as some version of myself I am currently not–a go-getter, a big-picture person, a multitasker, a relaxed hostess–until I realise, bumping up against the edges of myself, that I am so not that. Which doesn’t mean I, or he, is less than that. Maybe it means we’re just having to grow into the more that we actually are.