Marking Time

It happened again this week. A 30-something former student came to see me on Wednesday to see if I knew of any job leads for him. Jerry is a slender young man who looked at me so hopefully. I gave him two contacts and he thanked me profusely. As he got ready to leave, I asked if I could pray for him.
After my prayer, Jerry thanked me profusely. Then as he was leaving he said, "The good Lord knew what I needed. Thank you. You are like a mother to me."
You might be thinking, How lovely! What a sweet exchange! But all I could think was, Am I that old?

I well remember the first time I realized that I wasn't as young as I felt. I was running a counseling center at a university when I was 36 or 37 years old and it seemed that I was finally getting to do what I'd gone to school to do. It was a real pleasure to decorate my first office: a couple chairs that I salvaged and reupholstered, a couch from the warehouse, pictures that I bought and framed, and a huge quilt hanging on the wall at the end of the room. This was both to make it more cozy in theire but also to mute our voices and enhance confidentiality.
One day I stepped into the waiting area to call the next client in. She was a youngish looking 18-year old and her intake form said that she was homesick--a typical complaint of the young girls that I saw. Rebecca walked into my office and looked up at the quilt. Turning to me with quiverling lips, she cried out in a trembling voice, "Ohhh! You remind me of my mom! Can I hug you?" and she burst into tears as she reached for me.
I could have collapsed. I had no sense of being old enough to be her mother, but I suppose it could have been possible if I'd had her at age 18. I don't remember much about that therapy session, but the idea stuck with me that I had aged to the point of being old enough to be someone's mother. A teenager's mother. Whew...

It is part of my experience as a childless woman. Having children seems to mark the time in a way that few other things do. Women often mark off time according to the age of their children at a certain time. I have no such internal timing system. There have been no "diaper years" or "terrible two" years, or schoolage years. Paul Rosenblatt, one of my professors at the University of Minnesota, used to mark time by the age of his last daughter. She was a love child of sorts--a second marriage for him, and his other children were much older. He was the primary caretaker for his daughter, Emily. He used to take her to work with him and his graduate assistant would watch her while he taught his classes. Then he'd return to the little cottage where his office was, and Emily would toddle around the place while he worked. It was like that every day for many years, I'm told. So when I asked Paul a question about what year something or another happened, he stood still and stroked his chin, looking into the distance. "Hmmmm. Let's see...Emily would have been about three at the time...and we would have just started swim lessons." I had never heard a man talk like that. There is a reason he was called a feminist, and I liked hearing a man being so unashamedly mindful of his fatherhood in this way.

Mothers can look at young adults and say to themselves, "He's young enough to be my son--the upstart!" I look at the same person and am more likely to see a peer. I can be easily intimidated by much younger people simply because I've never had the experience of having to take a child in hand--be they 7, 12, or 18--and set them straight. I am therefore, easily intimidated by "bad" behavior in younger people, even though by virtue of my education and clinical experience, I have knowledge of why they do what they do, how they are probably thinking, how they got that way, or what their behavior is attempting to accomplish.

I suppose I do have an internal time marking system of sorts. I reckon time according to the places I've lived, and as a single woman, there have been numerous apartments, rental homes, and condos. My home defined me, I think. So did my job.
One of my always single friends lamented after her hysterectomy that she no longer could mark time by her menstrual cycles. (What a loss...)


I mark time by the pets I have had: Barclay during my early 20s, that miserable little Luigi pit bull-terrier mix puppy (whom I was told was a Great Dane!) for one awful week when I turned 29, Tiersa during my Master's program, Zita from 30 - 46, Otis in my late 40s.

My walk with God has also changed according to decade: my teen years were spent yearning and longing after God, reading every religoius book I could get my hands on. 25- 35 were the most painful and tumultuous years for me. During that time my reaching out for God was more for survival than a wish for spiritual growth. My 40s brought a time of learning spiritual discipline and maturity--going back to many of the ideas and practices I embraced as a young person.

Now I am 51 years old. My knees ache sometimes, and I get out of breath when I try to climb hills. My health might be the new marker of time. My 20s saw me climing all the major peaks in Southern California. My 30s saw me through two stints in graduate school. My 40s were when I married and started a new career. And now...I'm not sure what my 50s hold. But I'm walking with God daily, believing that what I'm doing now was worth all the upheaval and questioning of my younger years.
It will be interesting to see how I define my 50s from the vantage point of being an 80-year old.