Older and Wiser

I have put in my headphones and am listening to a self-help podcast, because that’s all I have downloaded on my phone, and cell service is scarce on this train. The woman’s voice in my ears asks: 

What would you say to your younger self if you could speak to her now? 

I am on the train home. The trees bloom with springtime blossoms, and each flutter of their petals feels like a reprieve from the endless winter. A thin veil of pollen coats the window, and I curse the momentary lapse of joy I’ve felt. I sneeze.

I am on the train home, headed to my mother’s house. When I arrive, she’ll have dinner waiting for me, and I’ll hang up my trench coat in the closet. My family dog will run off with my shoes. I’ll yell at him, but his tail will be wagging, and I’ll admonish myself for being stern with such a sweet creature. 

My mother will ask how the ride was. I’ll tell her that it was crowded, and recount, in detail, the conversation I had with the woman sitting next to me. She was my mother’s age and took an interest in my life. She mentioned at one point that her children were much older than me, before asking me my age. When I told her I’m twenty-six, she reared back. 

“My god, I thought you were in college!” 

I smiled and thanked her, because at a certain age, you’re supposed to thank people for thinking you’re younger than you are. It turns out, I am her daughter’s age. Her daughter has three children. The woman asked me if I had any of my own, and I resisted the urge to laugh. 

Tonight, I’ll go to sleep in my childhood bed, where I dreamed of being the woman I’ve become. The walls of my room, a museum of past accomplishments. My bookshelves, a mausoleum for my childhood diaries. Between their bindings, my farthest-flung ambitions. 

When I’m home, I’m every age I’ve ever been except for twenty-six. I am the baby of the family. I am the precocious eight-year-old. I am the bratty twelve-year-old. I am surely a seventeen-year-old. 

But when I was seventeen, I was often told that I didn’t look or act like a seventeen-year-old.

I was the youngest of three, but at a certain age, I didn’t feel like the baby of the family anymore. My father never stayed in one place for long, and I grew accustomed to sleeping on his side of the bed.

Still, my mother gave us a beautiful life. My brothers and I were always busy with baseball, book clubs, music lessons, field hockey, and dance classes. In the rare times we had nowhere to be but home, I’d lock myself in my mother’s bathroom, and dance to imaginary music in her full-length mirror, or lie supine on her office floor, and fall asleep to the sounds of her typing. Conor and Liam were often in the family room, playing Madden or watching the Mets.

Sometimes, the three of us would cram ourselves onto the piano bench together and play “Chopsticks” in three-part harmony. Conor taught me my multiplication tables, and Liam taught me how to ride a bike. I stole a lot of their chore money from their piggy banks, and wished I could spend it as adults did. And years later, I told them why Mom and Dad were getting a divorce.

We were at my graduation party, sitting in the family room. I was drunk, and they were a bit high. I told them everything I knew. Liam stared at the floor, wide-eyed and shell-shocked. Conor sat slumped, biting his nails. 

I had no name for the role I had in my family until I was years into therapy. But my family’s structure forced me into adulthood. Maybe because of this, in my adult life, I’ve found I attract a certain type of person I like to refer to as the “divorced mother in crisis.” 

My first encounter with the archetype was in a classroom. It was senior year, and my teacher was going through a divorce with her then-husband, who, funnily enough, was also my teacher. I had her class on Tuesdays/Thursdays, and his class on Mondays/Wednesdays. I think another student had asked her if she was alright when she started crying. She was at the front of the classroom, sitting on a stool, in the midst of a lesson, and the room fell silent. 

I got out of my seat on instinct. I hugged her on instinct. She was taller than me, but sitting down, her head fell against my abdomen, and she didn’t hug me back, probably because I was her student at a public school. But I made a joke, and we all laughed, and the moment passed, and everyone had the decency to never mention it again. 

Except I suppose I am putting it into writing now. I realize I could’ve stayed in my seat, and maybe I should’ve. But I loved her, and still do, and if someone I love is in pain, I want to help anyway I can. I think that’s true of most of us. She invited me to her beach house that summer, after I graduated, and I wish I had made the time to drive down. I think she knew I was someone in need of care, too. 

After all, she watched every Tuesday/Thursday as an adult man picked me up from school in his pick-up truck. She pulled me aside the first time he honked his horn for me, and asked, her eyes glowering at him from across the parking lot, “Who is that grown man?” 

I laughed and answered, “My boyfriend.” 

“Your mom knows?” 

I nodded. She did. My teacher released my grip, and I wish her quiet disapproval had meant more to me then.  But my relationship with him made sense. I acted so old for my age. I started drinking at bars when I was seventeen. People believed me when I told them I was twenty-two. In fact, they assumed I was twenty-two. If I told the truth about my age, they’d balk and remark, “You act older than your age.”

His hand was on my waist when I told him, and he didn’t pull it away when he said, “You look twenty, at least.” He just smiled.

It was an excuse for bad behavior, but it was purred like a compliment, and I wore it like a badge. So, I refused to act my age. I held my head high when I should’ve gored him. I bit my tongue when I should’ve used it as a lash. 

I pretended to know the movies he referenced, and I tried to sing along to the songs he liked. But none of it resolved the issue of my age. I was smart until I was naïve. I was sexy till I was a sniveling child because age ain’t nothing but a number, till it’s used against you. 

He wanted to marry me, and I told him I couldn’t marry him till I was of drinking age. That was too long to wait. So we broke up. And then I turned 21, and 22 and 23. He texted me when I turned 24, and told me he “hoped I became the star I always knew I would be.” Then I turned 25 and now 26. 

But for years after him, I lied about my age in bars, because I still felt too young. When my friends ask me my age now, I have to override the urge to age myself by two years. I spend time with my oldest brother, and refer to “people our age,” despite our six-year age gap. 

I have a friend who introduces me as her most emotionally mature friend, which makes me laugh each time she says it, because I feel like I’m the least regulated person I know.

But because of the years of therapy, I do have a plethora of coping mechanisms. I believe in direct communication and live by the rule that “clear is kind.” I forgive easily and move on quickly. 

Because I used to be addicted to being angry, I’d provoke anybody I could. I was obsessed with people who gave me a crumb of attention. I loved to be disappointed.  

My air of maturity was a false spring. My branches were black and wet with winter, but my blooms were overeager. A chill set in before I could blossom. So into myself, I retreated. So while I presented as older, I was really just like any seventeen-year-old. I let people believe I was five years older than I was, while I kept myself from ever growing up. 

Because if people were going to assume I was older, I’d take back my youth in the most self-destructive ways. Take, for example, my wisdom teeth. I never had them taken out. 

Sometime in high school, I started driving myself to my dentist appointments. I remember the doctor telling me I needed my wisdom teeth removed. I remember the pink referral slip. I remember it well, because I left it on the floor of my passenger seat for months. But then, I left for college, and let my wisdom teeth age alongside me. 

So this week, I’ll sit in the dental examination room of my family friend’s practice. And he’ll call several oral surgeons and cast a look over his glasses at me as he asks, “How long has it been bothering you?” 

I’ll tell him it’s painless, but I’ve known it’s been there for two years. He’ll tell me I must have a high pain tolerance. I’ll joke, “Well, I’ve been hurt many times.” But it won’t sound funny when I say it. 

I’ll be in an oral surgery office within the hour, and there will be another set of stainless steel tools in my mouth, and another dental hygienist giving me a pitying look when I tell her I don’t have insurance. 

I had an appointment to have all my wisdom teeth removed in early 2025, but when I gave that practitioner my insurance, they reported it as expired. I called the parent who’d been responsible for my dental insurance, and they verified the claim. I was unexpectedly uninsured, so now an oral surgeon will say the words “facial paralysis” with a smile as his headlamp blinds me. 

So, I’ll drive the long way home and call the one person in this world with whom I can act my age.  He’ll ask what’s wrong, and have to ask again and again, because he won’t be able to decipher my words through my tears. 

At one point, I’ll be crying so ferociously that I have to pull over into a rec center parking lot. It’s the same rec center where I played field hockey growing up. In its auditorium, I had my dance recitals. I went to prom in the gymnasium. 

He’ll ask if I’m really so scared of the surgery, and I will try to tell him through gasping sobs that I fear it’s a different sort of wound. He will sigh into the receiver and quote to me, “The bark of the tree hides its scars, but if you peel it back, the wood will show where the lightning struck.” 

He says things like this often because he knows where I come from. He knows I’m 26, but at home I’m seventeen, and that when I was seventeen I was a bud trapped in a sudden frost. So he lets me cry and get angry and make a mountain out of my wisdom teeth removal. 

Because I was brought into this world, in part, by someone who didn’t know how to care for me. So now my fiancé has to tend to the scars someone else inflicted, and I do the same for him. 

He used to be the only person I let love me in this way. But I’ve been lucky these past few years to form friendships with women who need care, and give care, the same way I do. We fill in the gaps where our parents failed, and we hold each other through the growing pains. 

So I’ll let my friend’s father examine my teeth. And my brother will pick me up after my surgery. And my girls will bring over soup, and we’ll watch 27 Dresses on the couch, and I’ll have to beg them to stop making me laugh, because it hurts. I will tell the people I love how I’m feeling, which soon will be like MY MOUTH IS FULL OF BLOOD. Because sometimes you have to ask for help, especially if you want them to HELP DRAIN THE BLOOD FROM YOUR MOUTH.  

And with gauze in my cheek, I will feel younger than I did at seventeen, or at twenty-one or twenty-three. The first essay I wrote for this blog–ee, gads–was written on my twenty-third birthday. I wrote about feeling old and fearing time. I hadn’t been lying, I did feel old, then. 

I had never imagined living past prodigy age. 

But I did. So, while I’m home, I’ll take a picture of my senior portrait and send it to my friends. They’ll send theirs, and we’ll laugh at our haircuts, and lament the passage of time. I’ll tell them how I would’ve been their friend in high school, but I’m glad I met them when I did. 

We are still the people we were then, maybe a little older, in my case, none the wiser. (They took out my wisdom teeth! I don’t have any wisdom left!) 

I still date older guys, though no one keeps count anymore. I still dance in my mirror. In fact, a large part of my writing process is my dance breaks. But I’m not wishing away the days anymore like I did when I was begging to grow up.

When I get off this train, I’ll be six hours older than the person I was when I boarded. So with my eyes shut, headphones in, trying to evade my seatmate’s prying questions, I realize:  I wouldn’t tell my younger self a thing because she got me here. 

And god, do I love it right here, right now. In spring, with two impacted wisdom teeth.