Aging

A small note to sing the praises of mascara…

Depending on when I work out, I don’t always shower and get ready first thing in the morning during the summer months. (During the school year, I work out before the sun rises and get ready for the day before seeing most people.) There are days I sit around for hours in casual clothes or my workout gear, running errands or reading or running Dylan where he needs to be.

It seems silly on those days to take time for makeup, and I generally don’t. Lip gloss or lip balm? Always. I can’t live without it. My other must-have? Mascara.

While it’s always been a favorite makeup item, the older I get, the more I’m convinced I would put on at least one coat even if the house started to burn down, and I REALLY needed to leave. Age is changing the tone of my skin (less blush, more monochrome) and the length and lushness of my eyelashes. They’ve never been a prime feature, but now? They’re virtually invisible without mascara.

I wear it to go on walks with friends, drop Dylan off at tennis, and to pick up groceries. Does anyone care except me? I doubt it, though I must think it matters because it’s become a serious makeup crutch.

This isn’t one of those confessions that leads to, “I realized I’m caving to beauty standards and don’t care about that anymore.” It’s a confession to say, “If my eyelashes look a little sparse when you see me next, it’s because I only had time for a quick eyelash curl and one coat of mascara. Hopefully, the next time you see me, I’ll have had time for at least three coats.”

Apparently, age hasn’t done away with some level of vanity around here.

I was digging through old photos last night. It looks different now, of course. I had to hook up an external drive, and wait for Abbey to be home to give me her password for my old computer, since I don’t have the right cords to hook up to my new one. (That’s me, tech genius.)

It’s time to turn in photos for Dylan’s 8th grade farewell ceremony and all that that entails. We have the option of providing a kindergarten and 8th grade photo. Of course, the easiest ones are the school photos, but we all know those don’t always do the best job expressing who are kids are or what they’re wearing day to day.

I found, instead, a photo of him playing a ukulele at our friend Joe’s house. Dylan’s eyes look almost neon blue, and he’s wearing pajamas, which happens when you are visiting friends out of town but also when you are someone who really values being cozy. In his eighth grade photo, we had a little back and forth regarding what he liked versus what I liked.

I found a photo of him at the Kansas City Zoo, birds perched on his arms while I took the photo from outside of the enclosure (birds landing on me? no, thank you). He’s laughing. I remember the day vividly. Instead, he chose a photo of him lounging on the oversized Adirondack chair at the Ron Jon store in Cocoa Beach. Like most of his photos from this year, his hair is growing out. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and smiling with his mouth closed, obscuring his braces.

He looks every bit of his fourteen and a half years.

It’s a strange thing to look back on old photos, especially when you keep them in a not-the-simplest-to-access location. Facebook memories pop up every once in a while, but for the most part, we’re busy moving ahead and don’t always take the time to wallow in old hard drives and cloud storage locations.

I wallowed a little yesterday. Those days were hard, physically hard, with chasing and feeding and rocking to sleep — or not — and never having the chance to finish an adult conversation, let alone devour a novel in a single now. Now I can do all of those things, but I don’t have a chubby set of fingers reaching for mine or apple red cheeks laughing at just about anything at all.

As a writer, I hate cliches, which is (of course) a cliche in and of itself, but oh my goodness. It all goes by in a blink.

(Guess whose kids are getting extra long hugs tonight?)

For years, I’ve known I should sleep more. I like working out in the morning, so I (try to) get up early. I shake off evening tiredness and procrastinate sleep, because I used to be most productive in those hours after the kids went to bed. Now, they are productive, and I’m generally reading or putzing around online or trying to find a snack that sounds snacky but isn’t four billion calories.

I wouldn’t say I’m productive at night anymore.

When I started taking Lexapro, one of my main side effects is fatigue. Yet, I don’t think that’s the only reason I’m tired. I think part of what I thought was a need for less sleep was my anxiety keeping me awake, keeping my mental and physical motors churning, even while my emotional motor was whirling with a mind of it’s own. (Too many unfinished metaphors. It’s ok. It’s only a blog no one reads except the dust motes in the room with me.)

My age is a whole other post. Dear friends have warned me my inner sleep clock would start to collect all those missed hours at some point. I didn’t want to believe anyone who told me that. I don’t want to believe I can’t control the cortisol levels in my body without sleep. I like those extra minutes each day.

This Sunday, Abbey returned from an amazing school trip that took her to Boston and New York City before coming home, delivered through the night on a plane that taxied to the gate at 11:45 p.m. By the time we collected luggage (all of the kids had to check because of a lack of space) and dropped off friends, we didn’t roll into our driveway until basically 2:00 a.m. I didn’t fall asleep right away, partially from adrenaline and partially from Diet Coke, but I had to get up in the morning to take Dylan to school — we let her sleep — and to get myself to work.

I dragged the rest of the day, though my Monday workday is only a half day. I tried to nap and couldn’t. Wandered the house like a phantom. Tried again and napped, the twenty minute break leaving me more bleary eyed than revitalized.

I need to sleep more. At night. In my bed.

I’m ready to concede defeat to the idea that I can, indeed, function productively on five hours a sleep (or even six).

I don’t think it’s going to be easy for me to go to bed at 10:00 or 10:30, because the kids are still awake at those hours now. It means Ryan will be the one to do the final, “time to hand over your phone” goodnight hug. I already miss reading or just sitting, wrapped in a blanket, in a quiet house, the darkness surrounding our family and keeping us safe.

It won’t be easy for me, but I have to try. I’m tired of feeling foggy and a little lazy, living many of my hours in a state that isn’t quite powered on but isn’t asleep.

We’ll see how this goes.

I started wearing my mouth guard again last night. (As though I need one more example of why I am the opposite of inspirational…) I went to my six-month dentist appointment and had to have a filling replaced because I grind my teeth, which is something I know but don’t do much about. Thankfully, I guess, they were able to repair it immediately following my cleaning, but I decided to do my best not to further the damage to the filling in the tooth immediately below the repaired one.

I’ve tried this method before. Basically, I hate the mouthguard. I’ve had it fit twice, and they swear it is working exactly how it should work, but it feels kind of like I should be playing football and less like I should be sleeping. I sort of feel like I’m suffocating or choking, which is obviously anxiety and not what’s really happening in my mouth, but it’s not exactly like that feeling makes it easy to fall asleep.

As much as I hate the mouthguard, I hate the idea of cracking my teeth even more, plus I think it’s starting to erode my gums, and why isn’t there just a method that would teach me NOT to grind my teeth in my sleep?

So in went the mouthguard. On went the pink noise, which I should write about a different day, when I’m not so focused on annoyances and more focused on things that might help with annoyances. Sip of water. Try to determine if I swallowed the water around the mouthguard. Go to the bathroom one more time. Turn up the pink noise another notch.

I woke up a couple of times during the night, which isn’t unusual. I check the time each time, try and fail not to calculate how much time I have left before my alarm(s) start chiming.

By the 3:00 a.m. wake up, I felt like the mouthguard had made a successful first time back in the bedtime rotation, and I tossed it onto the nightstand.

We will see if I can make it until 3:30 tonight.

I’m not chill about a lot of things, but I am usually calm about my kids leaving home. Between sleep-away camps and dance intensives in various lengths of time and various levels of supervision and freedom, they’ve both cobbled together experiences that make me feel like they’re tip-toeing their way to independence. That’s the goal, of course, so these boomerang adventures, the ones where they circle back, are helping all of us get more comfortable for when the boomerang flies for a truly long time.

But Dylan is in Washington D.C. on the ubiquitous eighth grade trip, and our house is quiet.

It’s not that he spends his evenings chatting with Ryan and I about his day. We chat, separate, rush places, maybe eat together on good days, play a little cards on better days, and basically cleave together the same routines that take place in millions of houses across the world. Yet even on the days when we barely have conversations, I hear him chatting with his friends while playing video games or get a breakdown of his day while we’re driving in the car. He sends me Tik Tok videos. He (for now) still hugs me goodnight.

Our house is quiet.

For all of the logical understanding about building responsibility and freedom and the idea that I know they’ll be on their own eventually, I cherish the times we’re all sleeping under the same roof. I breathe easier, even on nights when my anxiety is racing about something, anything, everything. Maybe it’s partly because time is creeping up behind me and tapping me on the shoulder more frequently. Two kids taking a PSAT this year, two kids in high school next year — milestone upon milestone that once seemed so far away are slipping from my calendar.

Our house is quiet, and tonight I miss the noise.

One of the things that helps keeps me organized is my commitment to color-coding my planner. I know that might seem like a silly thing, but for years I’ve coded everyone with a color (it’s not always consistent year to year, but it is consistent for A year). That means I can glance at my monthly or weekly calendars and know who’s busy when and who might be able to fit just one more thing into their day.

Lately, my coding is breaking down.

My beloved pencil case is tired, and I started to worry that overstuffing it was leading to an early demise. I pulled out everything but the colors I needed, a couple of highlighters, and a single black gel pen, for when one of my brighter colors just wouldn’t do. Then I got distracted. I like the way the pens wrote, which meant I started using them at work and in my journal, which is something I didn’t do with the calendar pens when there were other pens in the case.

Things got confusing. One ended up on my nightstand. One ended up in the bottom of my belt bag, one in the bottom of my work bag next to the stainless steel straw that I probably need to throw in the dishwasher at this point.

Then I made an appointment and needed to write it down. I won’t lie. In the past, without the correct pen color, I’ve been known to write the appointment on a small post it and add it to the calendar, until I can find the correct pen and code things in the correct way.

This time I simply wrote Dylan’s appointment in my pen color, the one I’d been holding at work when the doctor’s office called me back to confirm the time and location.

The floodgates opened, and I started writing lists in purple (Abbey’s color), when only her activities used to be in purple. My dentist appointment is in red (Dylan’s color), and you can see how once the breakdown starts, there’s not a ton of incentive to put things to right for April, since my quick glances now require reading and not just color sighting.

I realize this is a lot of words about colored pens. I think part of the reason it’s not bothering me the way it used to is because Abbey’s driving now, which means I don’t need to keep such a tight rein on the evening activity color overlap, because I rarely need to be in two places at once or within a tight time frame. Her driving has relaxed our evenings — in a scheduling sense but definitely not an emotional sense.

It’s strange, this lack of reliance on colors to keep my brain organized. It hasn’t affected anything yet or made me late or ruined any plans, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The end of an era often surprises me, and I’m not sure I’m ready to let this one go yet.