Wasted on the Young

It’s funny, how, except for the occasional babysitter and the year of teaching the youth class at Sunday school, my life has had very few teenagers in it since I was one. It’s sort of a shock to be around them and have them move around you, not acknowledging your existence or at least your personhood, segregating themselves — and I find myself tempted to get in their faces “I remember being just like you.” Which would be about the worst thing, I think, I could say. Because the essence of youth is thinking you’ve invented the whole experience.

Still, a recent dose of being around some Bahá’í youth, and having a facebook account, which seems a little like eavesdropping in a playground for teenagers, and the fact that my son going into sixth grade has put him, in our Bahá’í community, officially in the ranks of the ‘pre-youth’ which seems completely impossible because I am just too young to be te parent of… Anyway.

I surprise myself missing the intense yearning to change the world, the burning passions, the deep loyalty to friends, the sense of endless possibilities. I miss staying up all night talking because no responsibility was more pressing than the need for connection. I miss the slight ambiguity of male friends with whom there would never be a romantic spark, and yet these aren’t the friendships I have as a married woman, associating primarily with other married women and avoiding even the suggestion of confusion.

A sentence in the unreliable narrator’s blog “the flavor of that era in my life—young, uneducated, thrashing around, putting up with a lot more than I should” resonates, though. I miss the possibility, but not the uncertainty. And though I know people who have prolonged their youth well into their thirties, there does seem an allotted number of days in our lives to each of thesee stages. I can as easily miss the sensuality of my children’s infancies, or the imaginative reach of my own childhood, totally ignoring the painful aspects of sleep deprivation or having almost no voice, the horrible uncertainty of making mistakes I didn’t even know existed as possibilities, picking my way between social/parental land mines. Some days I look forward to the possibility of wisdom and maybe stature, the wry and gentle humor, feistiness and patience, I see in the faces of the women ten and twenty years older than me whose lives are no longer bound up in the lives of their children. But then, I already ache anticipating missing the boys.

So it is possible that for me, right here, right now, knowing exactly what I know now, is a fabulous place to be: Raven makes me feel beautiful, my children all still want to be with me, but allow me to sleep through the night peacefully, I am as strong as I have ever been and more confident, we are getting better at having friends as a couple, and the friendships I have maintained from my twenties have been tested and are strong. I wonder if my youthful self would despise the settledness,the settled for, the settled down, the compromosided complacence and concessions to a practical life, mortgage and minivan, but, no, this is what I have always wanted, and I am proud of the commitment, the work it represents. And of course, if you mention to me the fact that in approximately twenty five and a half months I will officially be the parent of a teen-ager, I clap my hands over my ears, squinch up my eyes and start singing loudly.