My Fifties: Getting Ready for the Dessert Course

If life is a meal, I’ve gotten through the main course and am eyeing the dessert menu.

Time is fluid. At least, our perception of time is fluid.

Twenty years ago, my husband and I began looking for a home to share. I came to the relationship with two daughters, a seventy-pound German Shephard, and some emotional baggage. I also had a three-bedroom house I got in a divorce.

My husband was living in a four-bedroom house with a retired Greyhound and his son from a previous marriage. His baggage was less obvious, but he’d had a decade to work on it. I’d only been divorced for three years.

We found a large five-bedroom home and moved in two weeks before the new Millennium began. A week before Christmas. It was the start of a brilliant new life for me. I like to think my husband feels the same.

If I ask him, I predict he will say “I’m still here, right?” with a smile.

Those twenty years flew by. Sort of. This is where the fluidity of time causes a dichotomy in my brain. Not quite a painful throb.

I am embracing two completely different concepts. They are equally accurate and yet equally wrong at the same time.

Life is messy. My perception of time is part of that.

My baggage caused problems. Not in our relationship, but in our personal happiness.

We were always a team. We never fought about our kids. Think about that for a minute. How many couples can say that?

This isn’t to mean we didn’t disagree sometimes. We did. But it was a discussion and our approach helped.

I was the ultimate authority on items having to do with my girls. He was the ultimate authority on items having to do with his son.

So, when I say I had baggage, it concerned my kids, but it wasn’t my kids. My former husband and I had continuing disagreements.

They lasted up until our youngest graduated from high school. Once she walked across that stage, our daughter was the ultimate authority on her choices. Her parents took a back seat and their disagreements whithered away.

Adult children are a gift. Almost as much a gift as they are at birth.

Some parts of the last twenty years seem to have elongated and dragged. They are the parts inherent in being unable to start over with a completely fresh slate. Times when my old life slapped up into the new.

Time flowed slowly when I reflect on those unhappy moments over the last two decades.

Thankfully, that is the smallest part of my life. It is the gristle. The steamed Brussel Sprouts. Full disclosure: I hate steamed Brussel Sprouts.

The rest of those years are all the good parts of the meal. The filet mignon and loaded baked potato. Are you hungry? I may have taken this a little too far. And, if you are a Vegetarian, apologies.

To get back on track, the quick flowing river of time is the good stuff. Our relationship. Watching the kids grow up. Adding new pets to the family. Travel, laughter, and love.

It feels like I am in the dessert course right now. I am planning on having at least two or three more decades with this man. This wonderful, amazing man.

That’s a really long dessert course. I’m going to be eating that Crème Brule for a long time. Good thing I like it. A lot.

The analogy falls apart there. Yes, our kids are grown and starting their own families. Becoming established. I am retired by default. Some health issues make working a full-time job difficult.

My husband still has a few years to work before retirement. It isn’t Crème Brule time for him yet. Maybe a better way to put it is that I’m now looking at the dessert menu. I know I will order the Crème Brule, once my husband is ready.

Still, the time has flowed fast. How is it that two decades have passed since we began looking for a home with an open floorplan and five bedrooms? How are we now downsized?

Then I look in the mirror and realize “Oh yeah. Twenty years have passed.” At first, this was a real wake up call every single morning.

I’ve made a kind of peace with it now. It isn’t that I look terrible. I just have that thirty-five-year-old in my head. When it doesn’t agree with the facts in the mirror, it is jarring.

Oh, Grandma. I understand you so much better now that I am in my fifties.

People with new kids get sick of the middle-aged warning them not to blink. They will miss their children’s childhoods and it will be terrible.

It isn’t exactly true. I remember what it was like when my kids were young. I remember the good, the bad, and the frustrating.

It is just that fluidity of time rushing by. If we try to catch it in our hands, it escapes and continues flowing around us. There is nothing we can do about it, outside Science Fiction.

We can spend time living it. Taking photos. Making notes. Loving a lot. We can try to let the sluggish debris in the water flow by without hanging onto it. Let it go. Let all that nasty stuff go.

If you still have young children, take a moment to let the Disney song wipe itself out of your brain. I can wait.

All in all, it is better that time flows easily. As long as we pay attention as we are caught up in it, we will have great memories and will be ready for the next great thing that is coming down the river.

I am really looking forward to that Crème Brule.