The Circularity of Time
Thursday, July 13th, 2006 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joyfinderheroNoticed the other day that I was giving far more thought and daydream-time to the past -- my childhood, and even my mother's childhood -- in recent years than ever before. Began to wonder if that was somehow a "turning 60" thing. Like the "turning 40" thing of looking to reconnect with long-lost childhood / teenage friends. Or the weird thing that happened around 40-45 of old boyfriends turning up to see if, now that they'd been divorced or widowed or were traveling on business or whatever, they could get lucky this time when we hadn't had sex in our previous relationship. (That was pretty strange, actually -- felt like they were just trying to cross me off the list of 'ones that got away' or something.)
But this thing now: Dwelling on the differences between my childhood, and my kids' childhoods, and my grandkids' childhoods. The obvious practical ones -- they have cellphones, computers, assorted private phone numbers for every individual in their lives, where my kids and I shared a single phone number for the entire household and my mom only had a phone for her dad's business. So she wrote letters, and our phone calls were necessarily shorter and more likely to be monitored. Or at least our parents had some idea who was calling us. We had huge amounts of unsupervised free time between homework and supper, today's kids seem to be tightly scheduled and always in some organized activity or other.
But also a lot of differences in fortune among the generations of my family. My mom was raised in a house with multiple servants, her parents in their 40s and well established before she was born. Then she came of age at the start of the Great Depression, and then "the" war (this would be World War Two) ... so we were raised in a house with a once-a-week maid who did floors and changed beds and helped mom with spring cleaning and the like. My kids were raised predominantly by a single mother (me) who often wasn't sure whether the money would last to the end of the month and sometimes served rice and beans for a week or two at a time. Even after I landed a "good" job.
My mom learned to cook at the age of 33 when she married my dad, having never needed to know more than boiling an egg before that. I learned to cook at the age of 18 when I first moved into an apartment, having never been much allowed underfoot in the kitchen before that. My kids were both accomplished cooks before they were 10, having discovered that their mom was too often willing to just do something boring.
And so on. Why is this coming so forward in my awareness just now?
Is it that my powers seem to be waning, the loss of physical capacity becoming a commonplace? Is it that my granddaughters, at 5 and 7, have arrived at ages I can remember myself being, so the differences are graphic? Then what is it that evokes my mother's childhood, a place I never visited and about which I really heard very little. But have all these mind pictures about ...?
But it sure is here. The more I try to write fiction, the more I seem to be hooked into decoding some of the never-before-understood elements of my mom's life. Which is the odder because she's no longer on-planet to ask about it.
Maybe it's that nowadays when I look in the mirror, it's her face I see. Maybe it's that now I can relate to so many things she never really talked about. Or maybe ... something else.
Proud of myself today, though. Today I did yoga, paid bills, returned phone calls, completed the list of errands. Only wished for a game of solitaire a dozen times, but each was brief. Today my novel-writing class began. Today I completed the next step of pre-teaching homework for Vermont camp next month. Today I am more centered than yesterday.
Progress.
But this thing now: Dwelling on the differences between my childhood, and my kids' childhoods, and my grandkids' childhoods. The obvious practical ones -- they have cellphones, computers, assorted private phone numbers for every individual in their lives, where my kids and I shared a single phone number for the entire household and my mom only had a phone for her dad's business. So she wrote letters, and our phone calls were necessarily shorter and more likely to be monitored. Or at least our parents had some idea who was calling us. We had huge amounts of unsupervised free time between homework and supper, today's kids seem to be tightly scheduled and always in some organized activity or other.
But also a lot of differences in fortune among the generations of my family. My mom was raised in a house with multiple servants, her parents in their 40s and well established before she was born. Then she came of age at the start of the Great Depression, and then "the" war (this would be World War Two) ... so we were raised in a house with a once-a-week maid who did floors and changed beds and helped mom with spring cleaning and the like. My kids were raised predominantly by a single mother (me) who often wasn't sure whether the money would last to the end of the month and sometimes served rice and beans for a week or two at a time. Even after I landed a "good" job.
My mom learned to cook at the age of 33 when she married my dad, having never needed to know more than boiling an egg before that. I learned to cook at the age of 18 when I first moved into an apartment, having never been much allowed underfoot in the kitchen before that. My kids were both accomplished cooks before they were 10, having discovered that their mom was too often willing to just do something boring.
And so on. Why is this coming so forward in my awareness just now?
Is it that my powers seem to be waning, the loss of physical capacity becoming a commonplace? Is it that my granddaughters, at 5 and 7, have arrived at ages I can remember myself being, so the differences are graphic? Then what is it that evokes my mother's childhood, a place I never visited and about which I really heard very little. But have all these mind pictures about ...?
But it sure is here. The more I try to write fiction, the more I seem to be hooked into decoding some of the never-before-understood elements of my mom's life. Which is the odder because she's no longer on-planet to ask about it.
Maybe it's that nowadays when I look in the mirror, it's her face I see. Maybe it's that now I can relate to so many things she never really talked about. Or maybe ... something else.
Proud of myself today, though. Today I did yoga, paid bills, returned phone calls, completed the list of errands. Only wished for a game of solitaire a dozen times, but each was brief. Today my novel-writing class began. Today I completed the next step of pre-teaching homework for Vermont camp next month. Today I am more centered than yesterday.
Progress.
