Thoughts at Thirty-One

I thought I was finally in for a non-interesting birthday. Twenty-nine was “Almost Thirty” and thirty was “The End of My Youth.” Two BIG birthdays in a row. I just wanted to quietly slip into my next decade and be boring, especially since I can’t even eat cake.

Thirty-one became significant when Jdoc and I went to get facials at the hoity-toity school of beauty and I had to choose the “31 – 40” box. Why they need to know one’s age is beyond me, unless it is to caution them so that they don’t “compliment” me by mentioning how few age spots I have despite my “advanced” age.

I am relieved to be thirty-one, actually. It’s thirty-two that has me thinking. My mother died a few months after turning thirty-two and, coincidentally, Mom2 was 32 when she met my father. I remember sitting in the kitchen with her one evening early on in their courtship. It was the eighties and she had the perfect blonde, eighties hair and eye-shadow applied in 3 different colors. She could wear her 9 year-old daughter’s jean skirt. She was beautiful. What does the jealous daughter say to her father’s beautiful date? “How old are you, anyway, like, forty?”

What did I get in return? A set of oil paints and canvases, an excellent education and almost 25 years of mentoring.

As I contemplate my last year with a mother who is older than I, I realize how lucky I am to have Mom2 as an example of how to live the rest of my life. Here is a woman who has every reason to be bitter and angry. She could have chosen to be a victim. Instead, she chose to be in control of her life, her family, her money, her career and her happiness and she finds humor in the things she can’t control.

Up to this point I have been hesitant to embrace her example, often doing the opposite – just because. I repeated the childish mantra to myself, “You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.” My mother gave me life, two brothers and a genetic predisposition to auto-immune disease and breast cancer, not to mention an odd sense of humor and an addiction to Coke – real Coke, not diet – but I only had her for 7 years.

Mom2, however, had the pleasure of mothering me through adolescence, not my most lovely 5 years, and enduring my “opinions,” such as the time I returned from college and found her waiting for me at the airport in a white down coat with a fur-like substance on the hood. “Is that REAL fur?” I asked disdainfully, before saying so much as hello.

I always said that one of the best things my mother ever did for me was to choose my father. Deep down I knew what a gift my father gave me when he chose Mom2. Now as I teeter on the verge of out-aging my mother, I realize that Mom2 chose to make her life what she wanted it to be; she chose my father to be her partner and she chose to be a part of my life, despite the many challenges I presented. She couldn’t control the mean things I said, but she chose to love me anyway and to find humor in her role.

Dammit, that lecture she gave me on "choice" - she was right, again.