Being a grown-up

Tags

adulthood, aunts and uncles, chocolate, cousins, death, etsy shops, family, forts, mourning

If you need me, I’ll be in my blanket fort coloring!

I don’t think I want to be an adult any more. I think being an adult is over-rated. In fact, today I think that being an adult stinks!

If you need me, I’ll be in my blanket fort coloring. Or in the garden hiding behind the clothesline. Or driving around aimlessly in my Jeep, eating chocolate and talking on the phone.

Today started out nicely, as I spent the morning picking the brain of a sweet friend about the mysteries, perks, and pitfalls of having an etsy store. I am excited about a potential new direction for my Close To My Heart business and a sales venue for many of my mother’s things. Who knew etsy had a vintage division? I certainly did not!

The day started its downward slide as I talked with my cousin about how well her father-in-law, my most favorite uncle, was doing now that he is home from the hospital. It got a little better when my sister answered her phone and we started talking about that same uncle and how he is progressing. (For those of you who have been reading for awhile, this uncle is the husband of my precious Aunt Betty I have written about more than once.)

The truth is that none of us know when it is our time to go Heavenward. So we must make the effort to gather our loved ones around us. So I was talking to my sister on the phone (again about Uncle Phil and Aunt Betty) when our brother called. I just let it ring and kept talking. And he called back again, which is unusual. I put Melody on hold to talk to Donnie, only to hear that my east coast (actually southern) most favorite uncle (my dad’s little brother) had died. Our first concern, of course, was Daddy, and whether he was up to a cross-country trip for his brother’s funeral. And then for our aunt, who relied very heavily on her husband and now would be bereft.

We talked about the reverberations of Uncle Jim’s death throughout our family…about the great-grandchildren who would lose their playmate, about (in my case at least) remembering Uncle Jim before he married Aunt Jackie and gave us cousins. About how he in no way was the one we had thought would be the next relative to approach Heaven’s gates. And we came to one golden conclusion:

Being a grown-up bites! We are tired of having loved ones die and having to report the news to other loved ones. We are tired of watching loved ones become more and more confused and frail. And (this goes for me only) I am not feeling up to the challenge of becoming the next matriarch of our clan.

So if anyone needs me, I’ll be in my blanket fort, coloring.

Growing up

Tags

babysitting, death, family, growing up, loss, mourning, neighbors, parents

Among my treasures is a letter written to me by my cousins’ paternal grandmother on the occasion of my eighth grade graduation. It was written in her precise script in blue ink on her signature pink scalloped stationery, and the message is as relevant now as it was in 1963. I had written Grandma Petty a giggly letter telling her how excited I was about my upcoming graduation…how there was going to be a dance afterward and Mom was going to let me wear stockings and Queen Anne heels for the occasion.

Her reply congratulated me on my accomplishment (eighth grade had been a tough year after moving to a new school and community at the end of seventh grade). She then went on to caution me that there would be plenty of time to try all these adult things, and not to be impatient to grow up, but to enjoy it along the way. I recognized the wisdom of her words even then, but I’m not sure how well I followed them.

I spent this afternoon with the family of my Daddy’s best friend who died earlier this week. I started babysitting these kids as an eighth grader and all through high school–they were closer in age to my siblings than to me–and kept in touch very occasionally through our parents as they grew up, married, and had children of their own. As their teenaged neighborhood babysitter who mediated the television wars and kept the middle child from climbing the kitchen cabinets monkey-like, searching for chocolate chip cookies, I never imagined a day like today.

I didn’t even consider that some day we would be in our 50s and 60s, spending the afternoon sharing/visiting/celebrating/mourning the life of their father as we played “catch-up” with what our children (and in my case, grandchildren) were doing. We had great fun looking at the table-full of photographs of their parents (and mine) in various stages of their lives; laughing at the clothes and hairstyles, reminiscing about how our houses looked then and now. Missing from our gathering was their mother, hospitalized yesterday, and their sister who is in poor health.

It was a very strange feeling to know these people…yet not to know them…almost like family we hadn’t seen in years but were still very related to. In retrospect I wish we had kept closer in touch. I really like these former kids who are now adults, and the people they married. It is a shame it took the death of a parent to bring us back together again.

I wonder if days like today were what Grandma Petty was seeing in my future when she urged me not to hurry growing up?