I traveled to Houston and then to San Francisco today and overheard a thousand and one conversations. There were two conversations I kept overhearing – one was the young parents jockeying multiple toddlers and infants and the other was the older parents talking about their children’s post college plans.
You know how people are, and I’m no different, you look at the world and try to find your place in it and of course, as I was overhearing the older parents, I kept thinking wow, these people are my age and their kids are in or graduating from college and I’m just beginning! And then I’d look at the harried but happy faces of the toddler’s parents as they navigated a world that has them on perpetual alert with minimum energy reserves and thought, good god no wonder I am feeling so exhausted!
Then on the way into the plane, this man kept striking up a conversation with me and I kept thinking to myself “don’t sit by me, don’t sit by me, don’t sit by me” because I was going to relish my alone time – time to read my New York Times and find center. And thankfully he didn’t sit by me. But I sat between two men and I instantly put my earphones in so my Wonder Woman shield was high and mighty. But midway through the flight, the guy on my right was getting hot coffee, and in a delicate balance he was reaching for it in midair over me and my computer and he reached with the second hand to make sure not to drop it and his shoulder caught me and through the apologies we began to talk.
He is originally from India and he was on his way out here for work but was going to see his son who is a sophomore at Berkeley. We started talking about college tuition – $58K for out of state – and the peer level and professor accolades that Berkeley represents. I told him that I was a new mother late in life.
He was talking about how he had been very close to his son – that they would always do things together, like sign up for a 10K at the last minute and then train hard for a few months before the race. Or they’d simply go to a museum or he would tag along to his son’s debates. He said since his son went away to college, it’s almost as if his best friend left the house and his wife was pushing him to get a hobby.
We changed over to how at our age our physical self now versus what it was is a puzzle, about how the motivation to perform high impact exercise wanes every day. I told him about yoga and he said his father who is 84 is a daily practitioner of y0ga. He told me about a system where you do something different every day to challenge your body – so one day may be yoga, but the next day should be karate. I told him about our Tai Chi class that I now miss. He said he loves Tai Chi.
He said he was thinking of joining the country club and taking up golf. I looked out the window and through the clouds, I suddenly had a clear epiphany:
It is all ahead of me. Everything.
My life with T, my life with Tin is all ahead of me and before my son is 20 and away at college, I still have all the things to do with him for the first time like swim in the ocean, taste Croatian chocolate, go to the D’Orsay, eat tapas in Spain, ride a bike, have him read me a poem, watch movies… I still haven’t heard him speak a complete sentence.
My dear friend in California said that when I adopted a son I had given into hope, a belief in the world that it was a place to raise a child. I knew this a long time ago when I wanted to have a child, my hope was to go on a journey with people I love and here I am on that journey, T1 is my wise companion and T2 is grasshopper, the student, learning to be wise and we’re off on our adventure.
