No Going Back

Life gets better in so many mundane ways. What would you not want to go back to?

I was recently talking to my sister and we realized we both made a big mistake with our teenagers. For good reasons at the time, we both opened up a lunch food budget but now can’t seem to close it. They have all come to expect that they should be able to buy lunch if not every day, a lot of days. We can’t seem to get the genie back in the bottle without being accused of denying our children food.

This made me think about how many things we can’t really go back from. In fact, there are many things I wouldn’t want to go back from. That is a more fun game to play:

Once we bought a pre-owned car, I couldn’t imagine buying new again. I am currently cruising around in a luxury car I could never have justified buying new (not that I care if other people do, I just like to keep extra cash for my TJMaxx visits).

Once I had the idea to put mashed potatoes in the crock pot at Thanksgiving to keep them warm and I never would change that. Mashed potatoes cool off faster than a Kim Kardashian relationship but in the crock pot (after cooking them regular way), they are always tasty warm.

Once I put a topper on my bed I have realized I can’t go back to sleeping without one. Every night I sink into and feel like a princess. One without a pea. Good sleep is the holy grail of the middle aged and I am killing it.

Once we got a Spotify account I can’t imagine going back to CD’s or tapes or records (that is going way back. I’ve used them all! Record player. Tape player. A Walkman. A Discman. An MP3 player). Hear a song you like and immediately it is in your possession. Unlike those days when I kept a tape cued up in the boombox so that if I heard a song I liked I could run to it and hit ‘record.’ None of my songs back then had the opening notes.

Never going back to not running. Fingers crossed my knees hold out because my mood is too dependent on it. I’d like to keep my family around and am not sure that would be possible without the regular brain bath of endorphins that turn my anger/resentment/anxiety knobs down enough to function in polite society. 

Never going back to not meditating in the morning. See above, re: smoothing out anxiety/squirrel brain. Even if I need to get up at 4:00 am for a flight, I either get up ten minutes early to calm my brain before I leave or I meditate as soon as I get to the gate at the airport (not possible in the car, too anxious about arrival time. Even though as a Rankin I leave early enough to arrive at the gate with hours to spare – thanks for that legacy of time anxiety Rankin side of the family, I’m talking about you Grandma Rankin who I love forever and ever but yikes the anxiety).

And speaking of airports, I’m not sure I want to ever go back to flying on a plane without a mask, even after the pandemic is over (will that ever happen?). Now that I’ve thought about how I am inhaling the exhalations of a hundred other people for five hours I feel sick at the idea of every going back to that (I don’t buy this ‘recycled air’ business, not every flight could possibly be filtering all the germs out of the air). I imagine germs flying towards my face and skidding to a stop in disappointment when they see my mask, they look at each other and shrug and fly towards someone else.

It is a supreme comfort to me that I will never be forced to go back to high school. The bubbling insecurity, the braces, the pimples, the body shame, the way in which so many other students externalized these same things by bullying any handy target. The uncertain future, the desperate longing to be liked, for a date to the dance, for someone, anyone, to notice something good about me. I can’t even look at pictures of those days without my whole torso knotting up. My husband and I watch our son enjoying high school and shake our heads at each other, what must that be like? We are bewildered. It’s like we gave birth to a unicorn.

Which brings me back to my kids. Even with all the whoops-now-they-expect-that-stuff mistakes, and the stretch marks and the late nights worrying until the garage door goes up and the hemorrhaging food budget, I’m so very grateful there is no going back to life before them.

Thanks to the running and meditating (and other tools in my Holding It Together Parent toolbox) I can just manage to live with my heart walking around outside of my body, because that is what being a parent feels like.

No putting that heart back in.

Completely worth it.

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