The gang from Zumba class were trying out a new restaurant for my seventieth birthday. Service was slow and we were overly hungry. It was a spectacularly unlucky case of timing that just when I finally decided to start unwrapping my birthday presents, the long-absent waiter suddenly showed up with the overdue food. Already committed to opening the gifts, I went ahead and ooo’d and aah’d pretty much to myself while chips and dip went flying. By dessert, surrounded by crumpled wrapping paper, the group had caught up with me and I ended up feeling adequately celebrated. But somehow, the fact that there had been more than a long, awkward moment when I’d competed for attention with a bowl of guacamole dip—and lost—has stuck with me.
Until recently, my life was mostly all about me. From earliest childhood, I had to burst forth a larger-than-life identity that would open the door to engagement with the greater world. I remember the day I first realized I had what it took to turn myself into a good student, eventually leading to a career with increasing degrees of presence. Over time, I sorted through a wide range of attention-getting behaviors, discovering that some were more attractive than others, leading to love, marriage and a family of my own. More often than not, I not only enjoyed but relished filling whatever space available with my presence.
There was a time, though, fairly early on, when I experienced myself as something other than being the center of my life. It was in the latter moments of my first pregnancy, when I had become little more than a loving, willing container for another. The life in me gained new strength with every kick. Strangers came up to stroke my stomach, as if I weren’t there. I shared my lungs, my stomach and my heart with another, and though uncomfortable at times, mostly it was something of a relief to be serving something greater than myself for a change.
There are a number of other incidences of my willingly, reluctantly or unwittingly becoming beside the point over the years, but like the pain of labor, they faded quickly—until I grew old. Now, it’s not just about getting upstaged by a bowl of guacamole. A loved one’s knee is bruised, and other lips get there before mine. Books are being written, careers are being developed, relationships begun and advanced, children born and raised—and it is not my story that is on everybody’s lips.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
When I was young, I needed it to be about me. We boomers were part of the biggest generation ever to enter the pipeline. In a first grade class of 35, if you weren’t sitting in the front row with your hand up, you were invisible. Our survival depended upon learning how to grab attention. Even now, some days I swell with desire to be recognized for the import of my existence. Other days, I’m happy just to be left alone. If I don’t make a fuss about the way things used to or could be, these quelled days can be sweeter than I’d ever imagined.
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