The Other Side of Fifty

The Other Side of Fifty

The view changes from where you stand.  Take that phone, move it a little to the right or left, stand back a little, things look quite differently on the other side of fifty.  I don’t mind being called “old” by my kids.  It is a badge I wear proudly, considering all I have survived, when I read about those who have not made it to my age.

 I look and see things through the first fifty plus years of life before I respond to what is here now.  That is the reason I am a little slower.  It is not because I am old, it is just because there is so much I am reliving before I get to the present day.  Maybe I rethink which name it is I need to say (Thom, Jason Jeremy, John, Weslee?) I got it wrong again!I called him Chester(the dog) instead!

The files in my head are so packed, that often I have filed the information in the wrong spot, and  it is hard to find.  “Hummmmm.  What was that name (word, place, person…)  I seem to have forgotten…it is on the tip of my tongue…I will remember later…!”  Sometime later, often in the bathroom, or in bed in the middle of the night, the long lost item will just POP into my head suddenly, from nowhere… then I will not be able to forget it, like a sick song stuck in my head to repeat endlessly, mindlessly, over and over, to be lost again, until the next time.

But it is the renewed understanding that I now have of my Mother that surprises me.  She gave all for us as a young Mother in war torn Germany.  She survived through bombing and firestorms.  She walked with a baby carriage and two babies through Germany with the faith that she could survive.  We did.  She made a better life for us in America, and we had a great life.  She helped us with a great education, home and vacations.  We had good food, clothes and family.  And the teenagers we became, were not understanding of the personality of who she was.  She had to be strong and overpowering to achieve this.  We felt only the smothering of her ever presence, not the strength of her character to survive when millions died in Hitler’s Germany.  We became adults by separating from her, but not being close.  Tyll lived in Honduras, I lived in Cincinnati.

In one bombing in Germany, she volunteered out from a small village with a white handkerchief to show there were just women, children, and the elderly hidden in the bomb shelter unarmed and wanting the American soldiers to peacefully enter their town.  With a toddler at her side she was the only person brave enough to step out of the shelter, trying to get the shooting to halt.  When the soldiers moved toward her, she spoke in halting English, “Do not shoot, we are not fighting!”,  and she looks down to see she has a strange child at her side.  She does not know where her own babies are.

Her trust in the Americans allowed her to walk from Berlin across the lines of fighting, to the south of Germany where her parents lived, and then later find her way to America.  I am sure every mother knows how strong they feel, doing whatever they can to protect their child, so my Mother kept her two little ones safe.  And we did not really know then what I know now from the other side of fifty, because it just looks and feels differently.

As a parent I do all that I can for my child.  It feels awful as they leave, but it is my job to send them into the world.  I have done my job well, when they leave, yet it is the pain of separation and loss I feel, the lack of gratitude for what I have done, all that I gave, that turns me back to see  what my Mother did, and understand her.  I never really understood her, thanked her, or was grateful.  I left her and was glad to go.  I needed to go.  I did not look back.  I was quite angry at her for what “SHE” did to me, thinking of those times when I was not treated as I thought I should be.  Is any child able to view themselves in real perspective, with their youthful eyes?

They need to leave looking forward, not looking back.

We need to look back, and allow them to move on.  Holding them back hinders them.  Later they will come back to us with their husbands, wives and children as the adults they have become, and maybe, on the other side of fifty, be able to understand the entire progression of nurturing a child, launching it, letting it go, to let it find its way home again someday.