Laundry List

In 1999, I went through a phase during which my singular goal in life was to look like Mariah Carey in the music video Honey.

I spent my free periods that summer in camp sprinting around the soccer field trying to melt my belly dimples into Mariah’s caramel-smooth torso. My going-out shirts were replaced with a drawer full of white and black bandeaus, which my friends and I wore while practicing the dance that Mariah performs on the yacht with Puffy and Mase in the bad boy remix of the Honey music video.  But the crowning feature of the transformation – Mariah’s golden locks – were unattainable no matter how much lemon juice I squeezed into my hair. I remember my sister constantly picking lemon seeds out of the top of my head that summer. How the ends of my hair stiffened into crackling ropes as opposed to spun gold.

As a child, my hair shimmered like a goldfinch’s wing. I thought the lemon juice would coax the honey hue back out from the mousey brown coat that now encapsulated it. Two months of vigilant lemon shampoos instead turned my hair into a brown helmet. I needed help. I called for my mom, and asked her if I could dye my hair, pointing matter-of-factly to the poster of Mariah scotch-taped over my bed. My mom generally trusted my judgment, which is why I was rather incredulous when she immediately, definitively, no-questions-asked, answered “No.”   

It was one of the few things I remember being told I equivocally not do, and I remember the distinct reason why.

“One day you will go gray and have to color your hair for the rest of your life. So you should enjoy the years that you don’t have to do it.” It was not the answer I was expecting.

“When did you go gray?” I asked, concerned.  

“The day I turned 40.”

Through the balance of my young adult years, not only did I have a very real fear of graying at 12:01 am on February 2, 2024, but also constructed a truth that what defined being older was having a fully built out list of things that I had to do: Coloring my hair. Paying taxes. Getting mammograms. Stretching.

Many of my friends longed to be older and go to college, unbound from the shackles of their parents’ hawk eyes and early curfews. I quietly feared growing up, my mom’s accidental epithet of youth ringing in my head: you’ll have to do it forever.

Lately, Remi is also exhibiting signs that she is adverse to the aging process. I am not a child psychologist, but I have inferred her desire to reverse time based on her favorite game: “baby.”

“Mommy! Play BABY with me!!!” she shrieks as I walk in the door.  

Baby is a game where she pretends to be a baby and I pretend to be a mommy. (I know, hard to imagine how I delve into the character of this one.) “GOO GOO GAGA!” she squeals, as I cradle her (not so easily anymore) in my arms. “I went pee pee poo poo change my diaper!” she yells hysterically as I pretend put her on a changing table. “Time to go to sleep in your crib!” I chant as I lay her on the couch and wrap her in a blanket.

“Mommy, pretend I climbed out of the crib and you found me running around,” she giggles.

“Oh no, you are just a little baby, you can’t climb out of your crib yet,” I respond.

 “Mommy, pretend I jumped up on the table and you have to get me down.”

“No no, you couldn’t do that either if you were just a little baby,” I remind her, simultaneously reassuring myself that aging had upsides. Was it possible that Remi was already grappling with the distressing loss for a time she could never return to? Or did she simply want to be a baby - a stage whose lines are clearly defined and understood? I got that. I, too, yearned for the comfort and security of a known era.

That said, I was happy for us both to be out of the baby stage. I looked into Remi’s big blue eyes, and saw her 4-year face filling in as she transformed into chubby cheeked 4-month old Remi, her wide smile poking out from the endless rotation of zip top onesies. The monotony of the feed/poop/sleep stage. We always knew what was coming next, which made the days mentally and physically manageable, but the boredom almost broke me.

Remi forgot about the baby game and squirmed out of my arms. She ran over to see what Sy was playing. I noticed how long her legs were getting as she strode like a gazelle across the room – her leggings more like capris only a month after purchasing them. She was capable of so much these days. Playing pretend. Preferring a flavor of ice cream. Making a joke that sent our house into eruptions of laughter. I was so happy for her that she had so much ahead of her even as she was experiencing incredible change on a daily basis. Why couldn’t I apply that same mentality to my own aging?

Part of the reason was my persistent fear of the impending onslaught of age-related chores that my mother had foreshadowed would sprout the day I turned 40, alongside my gray hairs. I imagined my already overwhelming to-do list: reams of paper that steadily churned out of the printer, generating new items faster than I could check off the old ones. Where in the nearly non-existent corners of the day when I wasn’t working or with the kids would I find time to color my hair? Get my blurry vision addressed? Unironically purchase that pair of orthotic sneakers?

I was dizzy thinking about my to-do list, the small remaining scrap of blank space at the bottom of the page now filling with tiny scribbles of specialist exams, pre-screening appointments, and more stretching.

Up until this point, while my to-do list was overwhelming, it was one that I had defined with an incredible amount of agency, the items accrued resulting from the independence I accreted over decades of growth. I organized today’s register under headlines of accomplishments: signing Remi for ballet fell under “having children”. Calculating tile quantities was categorized under “Build dream home”. Catching up on work over the weekend was what a career in real estate finance at a company I cared about looked like.

But even positive-mindset me couldn’t figure out how to catalogue “go to ophthalmologist to screen for cataracts” under a catchy pursuit. It was simply something I had to do for my aging eyes. Not only was it something I had to do that wasn’t a function of choice, but it edged out the hour that would have been mine - to either work on my list or even add to it. On the precipice of being “old”, easily demarcated by this 40-mile mark, I was entering uncharted waters of new physical changes that were already limiting my ability to add anything else to the ream without the rest of the list falling apart.

I sandwiched the eye appointment between Remi’s ballet and Sy’s basketball on a recent Saturday morning, scheduling it a place that conveniently was located near both Dance Adventure and the YMCA, as well as carried some expensive frames that I had been ogling but previously did not have the justification to purchase. The ophthalmologist (or really decent salesman, not sure) walked me through my worsened astigmatism that in my youth didn’t need to be corrected but now did.

When we began trying on frames, we discussed features I had never previously considered – for example, a subtle cat eye would provide some lift to my face. I was slightly horrified when I looked in the mirror and realized it actually made a difference. I looked so sophisticated and mature I barely recognized myself. Maybe my expanding list wasn’t going to be so bad I thought, smiling at this version of Jenna that suddenly looked like a real grown up.

With the chore completed, I thought about the items that remained on the list for the weekend. Most of them were things that in the larger scheme brought me fulfillment and joy. And at least now, on the verge of turning 40, I knew what they were. While I longed for the time in my life when the list was empty and I was virtually carefree, especially on these kinds of Saturdays that were more scheduled than Tuesdays at the office, there were downsides to those decades.

In my 20’s the to-do list was totally blank. A six-foot long ticker tape of empty lines with open checkboxes. I was terrified that I had no idea how the boxes would be checked nor what the lines were going to say to begin with. The ripples of blank paper snaked around the room, circling my ankles, squeezing the breath out of my lungs as the unknown consumed me. In my 30’s, I wrangled the tape and entered records. I wrote things down. My fingers cramped from holding the pen as the list grew and grew. But then, I began checking items off. Slow, measured, X’s marked by my steady hand. Today, I could consider what sometimes felt like burdens as blessings: the to-do’s were testaments to my hard work, the outcome of methodical and decisive action.

Blessings or burdens, however, there were too many of them to keep up. I wasn’t getting all of them done to begin with, and what scared me about the next chapter was the onslaught of new items that were about to get added. Hair colorist appointments and my calendar filling up aside, the physical act of simply existing in the life I had built is getting more exhausting and harder to sustain. I don’t know how long I will be able to maintain pace, and what life looks like when age truly stops me in my tracks.

What Remi and I both feared, and what has continually been terrifying whether I was 22 or 39, was simply the unknown. Not knowing how to get from that blank list to a fully built one. Not knowing how to manage that which is already untenable with even less energy and more at stake.  

“Baby” Remi greeted me at the door when I came home from the glasses appointment. She catapulted into my arms and asked me to feed her a bottle. There was no room yet for a lack of energy. I scooped her up and nestled my nose into the crown of her soft hair. Remi has beautifully blond curls, which one day I’m sure she’ll ask me to dye her hair back to. When that moment arrives, like my mom, I am going to say no, but I’ll give her a different reason.

First I will remind that she’s as beautiful a brunette as she was a golden-haired baby. Then I’ll explain that hair changes over time; the same hormones that are helping her grow also change the color of her hair. Lastly I’ll remind her how much she fussed when she was 4 and I tugged her hair into braids. Although her hair was blond, she didn’t get to choose what she did with it. She was too young. As she got older, I’ll tell her finally, she could decide exactly how she wanted to style it.

Maybe she’ll look at me then, and not see my distinctively gray hair that needed to be touched up, but rather, a woman who has created a life filled with lists of exactly what she wants to do.

I may be on the verge of having to dye to my hair forever. A few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of a strand as I was in the car and couldn’t tell if it was blond or gray. The sun was shining so galactically bright through the sunroof of my car, that all of the colors my hair had ever been, and would ever be, were refracted into my rearview mirror. I squinted, overanalyzing, trying to get a better look through my elasticizing retinas. I realized that it didn’t matter what hue that piece of hair was. It was sparkling the color of the sun.