I had my first post-pandemic eye appointment a couple of weeks ago. My husband had meetings, so I brought my three-month-old son with me in his car seat. I thought I was going in for a fairly routine appointment--I needed a new contact lens prescription and wanted to update my glasses. Sure, I had recently noticed that I was squinting more when reading small print. But I was not prepared for what came next. My son woke from his nap just as the eye doctor was going through her slides of letters and numbers. He then proceeded to have a spectacular meltdown, forcing me to nurse him while I completed my eye exam. As if that wasn’t enough mortification, as I was burping my baby, the doctor informed me that I would now need progressive lenses (read: fancy bifocals).
I am young enough to have a nursing baby and old enough to need bifocals.
The term for mothers with young kids is “young mom.” But I am older than some moms who have teenage children. Maybe my new glasses are rose-colored, but I’m glad to be an older “young mom.”
--
Like a lot of people in their 40s, I wake up asking myself, “how did I get here?” Deep in my heart, I still feel like my 13-year-old self, dying my hair with generic Kool-Aid and dreaming of the life I would have when I finally grew up. It’s jarring to realize that I finally did grow up, years ago. After a series of choices and some may say, the hand of God, I find myself living in Alexandria, VA, married, a boy-mom, and freelance writer. But I only have about 30 seconds to dwell on those facts before I get up to nurse my baby and get my three-year-old ready for school.
When I do have moments--and they are just moments--of midlife panic, they are about whether I will be able to have another child at my age, maybe a girl (from my fingertips to God’s ears). Because I do hope for another kid, for one of the rare times in my life my path feels clear. I have only a few years ahead with small children, and then they’re in school and this long-hoped-for season of my life—the one in which I am an older young mom—will be over for good. Midlife crisis? More like midlife clarity.
--
Being an older young mom has also made me understand the value of time. I think every young mom is told at least once that “the days are long but the years are short” or that “babies don’t keep.” Having now raised one small baby to preschool-age, this feels painfully true. It all went by so fast! One of life’s cruelest jokes is that the time your children are the most physically demanding and least intellectually stimulating, they are also the least static. Colicky baby? Strong-willed toddler? Good news? They’ll grow out of these phases. Bad news? They will grow out of these phases.
When your kids are young, it’s very easy to see each day as Groundhog Day, reliving the same routine, the same tantrums, often watching the same movies over and over again. It feels like there is too much time. Too many repetitive days. Too many hours between waking and sleeping. Life becomes about surviving the long hours and often mind-numbing days.
You don’t have to be a mom to get that though, much less one who is 40. You can just be slogging away at work, putting cover sheets on your TPS reports, but if you pay any attention, you’ll know that this too is for a season, and that all seasons pass. There were only 10 summers in my 30s, just as there will only be 10 in my 40s. I will only have maybe 15 more Christmases with my oldest son at home. Only five or six of them will be ones where Christmas is magical and full of wonder. This is the only September during which I will have a three-year-old and a three-month-old. Next September, one will be four and the other will be toddling about and I may not have another September with a baby ever again.
If I value time this way, as a precious resource that has already been partially spent, escaping the present feels like bad stewardship. Do I want to read The Lorax for the 35th time? Not really. But do I want to soak up as much of my son adorably lisping “Bar-ba-loot suits”? Yes. One day he’ll stop doing that and I can’t control when it will be.
--
Speaking of control, by their 40s, most people by now will hopefully have realized how little of it they actually have over their own lives. You try to change what you can and accept what you can’t and learn to live with grace. Serenity is a wonderful gift to give to your children, especially when they are their fourth tantrum and it’s only 10am. Or when they are melting down during an eye exam while you’re being reminded that your body is marching swiftly toward death. I can’t control when that day will come (even though at that moment I wished the ground would open and swallow me up). But I can control my response.
After my eye exam was over, I sat with a salesperson and tried on frames. She looked at the notes my optometrist had written up and started calculating what my benefits would cover. As she did that, I started fussing with my son, who was back in his car seat and not happy about it. When I turned back to her, she asked me how old he was. “Three months!” I said and then made a joke about how many moms of newborns she knew who needed progressive lenses. She replied, “You’re really put together for a mom with a baby that young!”
I smiled and said “Thank you! What do you think about these rose-colored frames?”