Chicken Soup to Inspire a Woman's Soul by Jack Canfield

Author:Jack Canfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.

Middle-Aged Mommy

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

Muriel Spark

Being middle-aged is like being the middle child. You’re not the oldest so the expectations aren’t as high. You’re not the baby, so you don’t get spoiled. The middle child is the independent one. The one left to find her own way, to decide for herself what she wants to do, how she wants to do it and where she wants to do it. So it is with the middle ages.

That’s my theory.

For me, it can only be a theory because no matter how many times I chant my mantra, “I’m an independent woman,” there’s always a four-year-old child who will interrupt me to say, “Mommy, will you draw me a picture of Captain Hook?” Yes, I said four-year-old. There’s a six-year-old, too. It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part, but I defied middle age by having children just moments before menopausal symptoms set in. Giving birth and the onset of menopause were spaced so closely together that I was practically having hot flashes during labor.

The challenge for me isn’t to nurture my spirit by taking yoga classes and redecorating my living room. The challenge is to make this midforties, overweight, dimpled body run after little boys. You try climbing inside one of those tunneled mazes at a fast-food restaurant to retrieve a stubborn child; experience the challenge of finding all thirty-six pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that are now scattered between the garage and the laundry room; and learn to listen to your body when you step on a Lego in the middle of the night and suppress a howl because you don’t want to wake anyone.

I chose the road less traveled by midlifers. I met the man I love when I was thirty-seven. We married when I was thirty-eight and knowing that my biological clock’s alarm was sounding the final charge, we immediately set about making a baby. We did, I might add, send the wedding guests home first. Five months later, I was “with child” and six weeks shy of my fortieth birthday, our son was born. We tempted fate by trying for another right away, and boy number two was born nineteen months after the first.

When my middle-aged friends ranted on about the terrible teenage years with their own broods, I would simply have to say, “I was in the middle of the supermarket when Casey’s diaper exploded,” to bring dead silence to the conversation. My peers would stare at me, their mouths agape, and their eyes would roll upward as their minds took them back to their “baby” days. Their own recollections were all it took for waves of sympathy to come my way. “How do you do it?” “I could never go back to those days.” “I wouldn’t have the stamina!”

I never admitted that I didn’t think I had the stamina, either, but miraculously when I need some, it’s there.

Many of my middle-aged colleagues are rediscovering themselves or weighing their priorities in life.

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