Looking back
I spent the majority of my childhood and young adult life aspiring to the next step. Each milestone brought me one rung closer to the mundane yet storybook future I dreamed of - happily married, two kids, power career, house, surrounded by friends, family, and a strong sense of fulfillment.
The other night, as I sat in that dream realized, it occurred to me that since I got here, all I did was look back.
There had been a turning point in cresting this dream (kid #2) at which I started yearning for the past instead of the future.
Perhaps it was Remi (15 months) screaming for 45 minutes in her crib that woke me to this realization. She was febrile, congested and inconsolable. It was 8 pm and she had only napped for 45 minutes that day. I ran to her room as I watched her incredible-hulk-like performance on the monitor of tearing off her sleep sack and positioning her leg to scale her crib. After squirming and crying in my arms for 20 minutes she finally dozed off sitting next to me on her rocking chair.
I closed my eyes as her breathing steadied, and opened the floodgates to my mind’s iphoto library. I escaped to high school basketball games and college fraternity parties. The images inundated me and I allowed tears to roll down my face as I traveled out of the rocking chair and back to moments of inconsequence.
There I was, cheering, dancing, drinking, holding my friends’ hands, hugging my crush, experiencing out of body bliss. I cried, silently, for the loss of that feeling as Remi fell asleep against my chest. That feeling of not knowing where a night might go, and knowing that where it went wouldn’t matter. The feeling of potential, of everything lying ahead amorphously and romantically. The unknown, the newness, the ability to map it all out, the thrill of the chase of catching it.
As these images continued to reel, it dawned on me that perhaps the turning point of becoming an adult is when you spend more time looking back rather than forward.
It is not lost on me that this pandemic is largely a contributing factor to my voracious nostalgia. It is unfair for me to compare this year to year’s past, when so many aspects of the life we are living today are temporarily awful. Not only is living in a pandemic miserable, but this specific pandemic, where we know now that the risk is likely not of our own demise but that of someone seven degrees of separation away from us, has forced us to live with acute awareness of the consequence of our actions on others. If I get on a train will someone else die. I literally can’t move without having to think through the steps of what doing so might result in. While it was true before COVID-19, I am hyper-aware of it now.
Because even pre-pandemic, which is around when Remi evolved from blob to baby lightning bomb, it became much more clear to me that all of my daily choices are now, in the end, high stakes. Messing up as a partner in a marriage, a mother of two children, an adult daughter and friend or colleague upon which a constellation of people rely, is so different than making self-centered choices ten years ago (let alone as compared to a 20-something), where the consequences only affected me.
My desire to live in my lower-stakes past is getting the better of me. The grief over losing that existence is blinding me from appreciating all that exists in front of me that I worked so hard for.
Michael astutely commented, on my recent malaise, that there is a point at which not being able to be satisfied becomes pathological. I asked what he meant by a “pathology” and he replied, “I mean it can be a sickness.”
His comment shook me.
I’ve often felt that writing comes naturally to me as a result of having a 3-Dimensional memory. I don’t just remember former moments or events with nostalgia – I nearly experience them over, and over, and over again. The small details of the way one’s eyes sparkled when they smiled, or the threatening tone of their voice when they spoke, the humidity of the air or the chill in my bones, the pace I was walking, the way I felt out of breath or that my heart dropped into my stomach, the adrenalin rush or the wash of calm, the buttery taste of the frosting or the burn of the whiskey – my memories physically engulf me, and I ache to transport into them, to the point that may actually define my yearning for them as pathological.
The unwritten contract that you sign when you decide to have children states very explicitly that upon bringing a child into your world, you no longer come first. I don’t remember this feeling meaningful until our second was born. The first few years, as the three of us, felt like playing house. Granted, Sy was (and remains) an easygoing, mature soul, and that no doubt made it easier. But I still felt like me, just with a baby. I still had stretches of time to myself. Michael and I had energy to go out. I could wake up early and work - an act that made me feel productive and calm.
With Remi on board, life felt in a constant state of motion, wobbling so much that it’s impossible to steady myself and find my center of gravity, i.e., find me. No wonder when I close my eyes, all I see are flashbacks to a former life where I was both director and lead actress. The problem is they are so visceral and close that I live in them in parallel.
The other night I wasn’t sure if the moment I was in was one of my dreams of the future or if I was traveling back. What is really real after all when your dreams come true but you are lost in the place of looking towards them?
I fear this is what makes my looking backwards sickness as opposed to sentimentalism.
How do I start looking forward again?
I’m reminding myself that one day I will reflect on tonight with that same longing that I feel for all of these moments in which my strength and tenacity surprised me, and resulted in growth that ultimately altered my life in a positive way. One day.
