As Time Goes By

Reflections on the surprises and joys of growing older.

Year by Year

The night before her eighth birthday, I found my daughter Lizzy weeping in her bed. "I love being seven," she sobbed. "I don't want to be eight!"

I held her in my arms and explained that being eight was going to be even better than being seven. I told her how much I loved her and what a wonderful birthday she was going to have. Eventually she was comforted, or maybe I just talked her to sleep.

I understood her feelings. It's always strange to imagine getting older, even when you aren't very old. I know that my own intense "when I grow up" yearnings throughout childhood were locked in combat with an equally intense wish that nothing would ever change. I never wanted to be a "grown-up" or even an adolescent.

I don't remember whether I loved being 7, but I loved being 12. Toward the end of being 12, I was afraid that I'd become a different and detestable person on my 13th birthday. On that day, without my permission, I would wake up and not be a kid anymore.

I would be a "teenager." Instead of climbing trees and spending my days outdoors, I would wear my hair in a ponytail, put on lipstick, and talk on the phone constantly. I would grow breasts, which looked to me like a real nuisance at the time, and have to wear a bra. Obnoxious seventh-grade boys would see the bra strap through my shirt and would reach out and snap it in the hallway in junior high. I had seen this happen to other girls. Worst of all, I could tell from their responses to this cruel and annoying behavior that I would lose my senses and become brainlessly boy-crazy.

I definitely did not want to be 13.

When you are a child, adults, of any age, are ancient. When I was 24 years old and teaching second grade in Readsboro, Vermont, one of my kindest students was a boy named Shawn who asked me one day whether I had any children. After I confessed that I did not, he responded with sympathy, "What happened? Did they all grow up and leave home?" In his eyes, I was trembling on the brink of decrepitude, with most of my life already over.

I didn't see myself quite in that way, but I did already think I was pretty old. At 26, I felt perilously close to 30. At 39, I was not comforted or inspired by Jack Benny's claim to be forever "39 and holding." At 45, I wondered how I'd ever arrived at such an age. (All I'd asked to be was 12!) At 50, I blew out the candles with good humor because I had to-but I gulped inside.

Now I'm in my early 60s, and though I don't always recognize the face in the mirror, something has changed in the way I think. The process of aging increasingly interests and amazes me, annoys and irritates me, and sometimes still frightens me, too, but much, much less than it used to. I find that there is also amusement -- how often and in how many places can I lose my glasses in a day?-and that in place of fear for my own survival, there is an ongoing sadness at the absence of the friends and family members who have died before me.

I don't miss my youth even a tiny fraction as much as I miss my sister, Anne. How I wish she were here. She would make age and death seem so funny! She would complain eloquently and wittily about getting wrinkled and cranky and myopic. We would talk on the phone every day about our bad memory and our sagging skin and our poor eyesight, the way we used to talk about our children and our dogs.

Anne died many years ago of cancer, but I miss her as much as I did the day she died. I worry less, not more, about getting old myself. I don't mind if I do. I wish she could too. That's one reason I don't have the same age-and-death dreads that I used to.

There are other reasons, and I hope they all add up to maturity. (Or maybe it's just memory loss.) My concerns are more practical, less egocentric. The other day, while driving to see one of my daughters at a time when she felt stress and distress, I had to brake suddenly to avoid a large, speeding truck. My first thought after the truck thundered past was not for myself-Thank God I'm alive! -- but for my daughter: For heaven's sake, pay attention! All she needs this week is a dead mother. This was a whole different emotional tone, more peevish but less selfish. Once I could breathe normally again, I decided I preferred it.

• • Book Excerpts
• • Parenting Teens
• • Anti-Aging
• Happiness
• • Parenting Kids

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