Expanding My Horizons

Millie writes:

Yesterday was a banner occasion at our house – it was Jack’s 17^th birthday.  We celebrated with fried chicken and cake, movies and card games, Mochi Balls and lots of laughter.

Privately, Lance and I took a more solemn moment to observe a fact of significance only to us: It was the last “child’s” birthday party we would host for one of our own.

I’ve been noticing that a lot of the recent milestones in my life – at least as they relate to the “parenting” aspect of my life – are “lasts” rather than “firsts.”  The fledglings are trying their wings and will be making longer and longer flights until they’ve left the nest for good.

I’ve spent 26 years amassing wisdom about diapering, colic, schooling, last-minute Halloween costumes and the PTA, and I’m not about to leave that part of me completely behind.  Once a Mama, always a Mama is my motto.

Old tradition speaks of a three-faced goddess who shares the aspects of Maiden, Mother and Crone.  On one hand this division can be explained completely biologically: pre-menarche, fertile and post-menopausal; on the other it’s an emotional progression from girl to woman to – well, there is no other word for it but “crone!”

“Crone” has always been one of my least-favorite words.  Not only does it just sound ugly, it’s derived from the Old Northern French word “caroijne,” meaning “carrion.”  That’s right, gals!  Once we’re no longer in the Breeder category, we’re filed under “the decaying flesh of dead animals!”

Well, I’m taking “Crone” back. 

For one thing, now that someone who’s 50 can reasonably expect to live another 30 years, it’s ludicrous to consider the end of the child-rearing window the end of a woman’s vitality. 

For another, there are a lot of us out here.  I’m near the tag-end of the Baby Boomer generation and there are at least two generations of people before us who are nowhere near finished yet! 

There is no graduation ceremony for a Mom who’s done a good job – no gold watch, no processional, and no speeches.  As with so much else related to motherhood, the only thing people can tell you is that “you’ll know it when it happens.”  I’m not quite ready to join Mollie on the stand as a Mother Emeritus (I’ve got at least another year of hands-on work to do before Jack and Sassy graduate from high school), but I can tell that something’s happening.

I plan to document my journey into Cronehood.  The only thing I know for sure is that (like motherhood) it is not for the faint of heart – nor (me being me) will it be for the timid of ear.

Whether you’re a maiden, a mother or a sister-Crone, won’t you join me?

If we're going anyhow, we may as well have a few laughs along the way!

ANNOUNCING:  CRONES DOT COM 

Milestones

Millie writes:

Tomorrow I will have been a mother for a quarter-century.

The last 25 years have been the most wonderful adventure of my life. Being a parent makes my heart soar – the piercing joy of my relationships with those six people more than compensates for the moments of sheer terror.

2011, the year our oldest child turns 25, is the year I will turn 50. I've been a mom for half my life. Next fall our youngest children will begin their senior year of high school, so I'm also entering my last year of having kids in K-12.

I have always expected to hate this moment – and who knows, it may still happen when the Littles start college in Fall 2012 – but now that it's almost here, it seems perfectly natural. Maybe that's because now I have experienced how cool it is to have adult children – they're still the same people I've always been crazy about, but once they move out their table manners and laundry are no longer my responsibility! I think a bigger part of it, though, is that now that I'm almost there, I remember what I'd lost sight of in the midst of the diapers and the PTA meetings and the choir rehearsals:

I'm still a person.

Over the last 25 years, as the kids have become more independent, so have I. I'm not going to have an empty nest for years yet, but I no longer spend the majority of my time dealing with other people's bodily processes. If my life is a movie, it's become a lot less Mary Poppins and a lot more Animal House.

I hope to move mindfully into this new stage of my life. It would be all too easy to fill up the days with Facebook and Redbox and entertainment-grade shopping, instead of doing the writing, traveling, gardening and relaxing that I've daydreamed about so often over the last two and a half decades. Sometime during the next 25 years I may get the opportunity to finish a thought uninterrupted, and I don't want to miss the chance.

All six kids have accomplished astonishing things, and I can't wait to see what they do with the next 25 years.

Or, for that matter, what I do!