Somewhere Between Old And Young
By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd
It started with his teeth.
One day, standing in the kitchen, my son Everett smiled at me and his two front teeth looked gigantic, like a rabbit. I stared at his mouth with my own agape, half confused and half amazed, as if he had just pulled off a magic trick in front of my eyes.
He lost the baby teeth a while ago. I knew that, of course; I was there. I remember the excitement, the discussion about putting teeth under his pillow in exchange for money from the tooth fairy. We kept the gig up for three, maybe four teeth total. By the fifth one, we kept forgetting to slip a dollar under his pillow. Same with the sixth, the seventh, and so on. Just last week he lost another, and my husband didn’t even bother with the charade. He handed Everett a crisp ten-dollar bill.
“For all the teeth,” he said.
I’m not sure we’ve missed ten tooth fairy payments, but if you consider interest, that’s probably accurate.
There are other things, too. Sleep, for instance. Some nights he’s up past 9, close to 10 p.m. I’ll wander into his room for a final check before going to bed myself, and his blue eyes will meet me at the door.
“I’m not tired,” he tells me. The next morning, he’ll sleep until 7:30—at which point, we send in the two-year-old to wake him up.
“Hi, Evvie!” she says, leaning on his bed, breathing morning baby breath all over his face.
He grunts and pats her on the head.
Ten minutes later he trudges into the kitchen with his hair askew, eyes half shut, wearing slippers on his feet. The black, fleece-lined slippers are new, a gift from my mom last Christmas. Everett keeps them neatly lined up next to his bedroom door, and every morning when he wakes up, he slips them on before gracing us with his presence for breakfast. Something about this routine gives off serious old man vibes, as if he’s going to request a cup of coffee and ask for the newspaper next.
I see little glimpses of his older self throughout the day—in his demeanor, his questions, the way he carries himself. It’s not just his large two front teeth and his feet that are “almost as big as yours, Mom”—but it’s the whole of him that seems to be transforming in front of me.
In the next breath, though, he’s sitting at the dining room table hunched over a few sheets of white paper with crayons and a stapler, constructing “costumes” for his stuffed animals. He’s playing with a bubble blaster in the backyard, building a fort in the living room with his brother, exerting wild enthusiasm over something as simple as: yes you may have a piece of gum.
Every day I see flashes of his babyhood, and also peeks of a teenager. He turns nine in a few weeks, marking the middle of the 18 years he’ll be (legally) under our care. Nine years down, nine years to go. He’s sitting in the center of the teeter-totter, hovering between little and big, young and old.
Some days, I feel just like him.
***
My husband started greying in his mid-twenties. He turns 40 this year and his hair is solidly 90% grey, 10% brown. I’ve teased him plenty about it over the years, comparing our wedding and anniversary photos to those portraits of presidents on their first and last days in office. Look what being married to me has done to you, I joke.
One day I brought home a “salt and pepper” hair color kit from Target.
“You’ve got your whole life to rock a head of grey hair!” I told him, “What if we just bring back a little more pepper?” He went along with my beauty experiment, laughing, enjoying the head massage, even though his grey hair has never bothered him.
This year, a handful of grey strands finally graced my head.
Let me tell you: I was bothered immediately.
Ironically, up until now, I’ve spent most of my life trying to look older than I am. Trying to be older than I am. I wore thick eyeliner all throughout high school and college. My favorite compliment? “You’re so mature for your age.” And, yes, okay, I stuffed my bra once in eighth grade. (Okay, fine, twice.) (Okay, fine, maybe three times.) I couldn’t wait to be 16 and drive a car. To be 18 and vote. To be 21 and order a cocktail with dinner.
Recently, Everett has started fantasizing about his own adulthood. He wants to move to San Diego and work at LegoLand. On the one hand, there are worse places to live. On the other, how are we already talking about this? When Everett dreams aloud about where he’ll live, where he’ll work, what kind of car he’ll drive, it is like looking in a time machine of my younger self.
That was me: bored with the present, obsessed with the future.
I always wanted to be in the next stage, the next season of life. When I was in high school, I couldn’t wait to be in college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to be in the “real world” with a “real job.” When I was dating, I couldn’t wait to be married. When I got married, I couldn’t wait to have kids.
Now I have three of them and I don’t know what is what anymore. I am no longer waiting with bated breath for life to speed up. Nor do I want to go backwards to the angst and insecurity of my teenage self. I’m caught somewhere in the middle, standing on state border lines—one foot in young, one foot in old.
I look at my 19-year-old babysitter rocking her mom jeans and Birkenstocks and think: I’m not that much older than you. Three hours later I’m sitting at the dining room table with my husband talking about life insurance and how much we owe on our Home Equity Line of Credit, gathering documents for our CPA and transferring money into the kids’ college accounts.
My babysitter is probably at home eating ramen.
One day I’m zipping through my neighborhood on a bright pink scooter, positive I could pass for the babysitter myself. The next day, I’m nursing a sore neck because I slept on my pillow wrong. One morning I am belting out Taylor Swift songs in the kitchen; later that same night, my husband and I are walking around IKEA looking at furniture as a “fun” date night. I own three different pairs of overalls, but I’m also starting to consider arch support in shoes.
If Everett is hovering between the little years and teenage years, what am I hovering between?
***
In roughly two years, my own flesh and blood will be walking into middle school. I have a million thoughts and feelings about this fact but the most pressing one is: I don’t feel old enough to have a child two years away from lockers and school dances.
On paper, I am 35.
In my head, I am 25.
I keep waiting for a certain level of confidence to overtake me. For heaps of well-earned wisdom to envelope me like a blanket. Isn’t that the alleged blessing of getting grey hair? That you suddenly appear poised, enlightened, like Meryl Streep? Yet here I am, staring in the mirror at four grey strands and a dozen wrinkles forming around my eyes and I do not magically feel Older or Wiser. Most days I still feel like a child, peering over my shoulder wondering when the Real Adult is going to come take over and tell me I’m doing everything wrong.
(And also how to fix it.)
In Almost Everything, Anne Lamott writes, “Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this very moment.”
She confesses she thinks of herself as 47, even though she’s roughly 20 years older than that. This makes me wonder if my inside person will calibrate up at some point. If today I feel 25 on the inside, maybe by the time I’m retired, bopping grandkids on my knees, I’ll feel 45 on the inside?
I wonder how old Everett feels, if he’s even aware of the constant up-down-up-down motion of the teeter-totter. One second we are talking to him about Big Heavy Things—racism, guns, the dangers of using the Internet unsupervised. The next we are hunting all over the house for one of his “stuffies” he can’t sleep without. He is beginning to ask more questions about life and faith and death. Five seconds later, after we can only hope and pray we’ve answered sufficiently, he is laughing hysterically over a line in a Captain Underpants book.
Back and forth we go. Maturity, innocence. Big kid. Little kid. Old. Young.
My days resemble the same dance. I am both the mother of a diaper-wearing toddler, and also the mother of a child who rides in the front seat of the car. I parent one child who calls bananas “banamas” and one child who is already dreaming of an apartment in San Diego. Perched in the middle of the seesaw, I can slide into young or old versions of myself depending on the day, the moment, the hour, the child I’m with.
I suppose we are living the best of both worlds, Everett and me. We possess the wisdom that accompanies growing into ourselves, but also the humility and curiosity of knowing we don’t have anything figured out yet.
He wonders what his life will look like in ten years.
I often wonder the same.
Words and photo by Ashlee Gadd.