Mid-Life Crisis

In 1989, my dad died. He was 47. He died from malignant melanoma. Who knew that skin cancer could sneak through your body and lodge in your brain and decimate your liver and snuff out your life? He was diagnosed and four months later, he died.

He died in the bedroom we'd set up for him in the house he owned. My husband of two years and I had moved in with him in May of that year. He worked nights, we worked days and we were going to each benefit from this new living arrangement. Except that he was diagnosed with cancer the week before we moved in. He quit his job and puttered around the house most days.

When we moved in, he gave us the blue master bedroom and he claimed my old lavender bedroom for his own. That's how it happened that he died in the room where I grew up.

I was 24 then. I'd been married for two years and during those two years, I'd worked at a law office while my husband earned his Master of Arts in Religion degree from Yale Divinity School. I adored the adventure of living in a new state, a new region, a new city. I walked the mile and a half to my new job, soaking in the sights and sounds of the city. But soon, I was bored by my job. I worked for a lawyer who'd just started her own private practice and I did not have enough work to do. I'd stare out the window at the three churches across the Green and I'd imagine my life, my Real Life, which I figured would start as soon as my husband finished school.

My co-worker, Leo, the paralegal in the office, would say in his Boston accent, "Don't wish your life away," because I was always wishing it were time to go home or wishing it were the weekend or wishing it were lunch-time. I wish, I wish, I wish.

Then my husband finished school and we moved back to Washington state and boy, did my Real Life begin with a vengeance. My dad died within 9 months. My sister started taking drugs and staying out all night dancing at raves. My husband couldn't find a job, and when he did find work (at a bank), he was fired. I began working for a medical insurance company and again, I was bored. Don't get me wrong. I was a great employee. But I was waiting for my real Real Life to start. I figured that would start as soon as we had a baby.

Um, no. No baby that is. From the very first month--I have journals that confirm this--from the very first month, I was panicked and pessimistic and glum. I somehow knew that I wouldn't get pregnant. This underground knowledge, though, didn't stop me from hoping each month, from imagining pregnancy symptoms each month and from crying hysterically every month when my period started.

And everyone--I mean, everyone was pregnant around me. Everyone from my married friends from college who were using birth control to my 17-year old sister's schoolmate (who had an abortion) to the girl I went to high school with who got pregnant with twins on her honeymoon--everyone. I was the common denominator, a fertility goddess for everyone but myself.

I spent the year weeping. My husband was bewildered and lacked my sense of failure and urgency completely. All I wanted was a baby. I wanted to be pregnant, I wanted to be a mother. I wanted a family. That's all.

I did think briefly about becoming a nurse and I even took a biology course at the local community college. But between my full-time job and helping my husband start a brand-new church, I just couldn't muster up the enthusiasm necessary. I wanted a baby. Period. It was like my own personal Hierarchy of Needs. Oxygen. Sleep. Food. Husband. Baby.

Over four years later, I sat wedged between two carseats when we took our newly adopted twins home. As we pulled in the driveway, I remember thinking, "What the hell have I done?"

And then, just to prove He has a sense of humor, God gave me my long-for pregnancy when the twins were almost four. YoungestBoy was born when I was 33, nearly ten years after I had first started trying to get pregnant, many years after the doctors told us it was "unlikely" that we'd ever conceive.

And then, to prove that He always gets the last laugh, God gave us Babygirl when YoungestBoy was almost five, just when I was started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the proof that life did, indeed, exist beyond my family room.

And because my Heirarchy of Needs has been met over the years, I sense this new urgency, this drive, this longing for more. But not more babies. My flashing "NO VACANCY" sign is up.

But I wonder if I'll be more than this. Will I have a career? An accomplishment besides having all laundry finished? Will I someday go somewhere that a briefcase is necessary? Someplace that requires quiet precision, steady concentration and single-minded attention?

Or will I always be washing dishes and wearing capri pants and slippers and organizing Vacation Bible School while I'm wiping snotty noses and folding socks?

I guess this is my mid-life crisis. I am a mother. Now I want to be more. My dad died when he was 47. I'm 39. Time's a-wasting.