For the last few months, Chase's commercial, "Life," has made me dissolve into a blubbering ball of tears every time I watch it. For a long time I thought it was just because of the sentimental music, the kissing, the bride and the pregnant belly. And yeah, I can sometimes be a complete sap over things like that. But the more I've thought about it, the tears I cry over that commercial aren't happy tears or nostalgic tears; they're more like worried, fearful tears.
If you've seen the commercial, you know that it chronicles one guy's life from the time he's able to get his first credit card in college until he's an old fogey with an AARP card. It shows major milestones: college graduation, professional success, dating, marriage, kids, etc.. (and if that's the proper order, man, did we ever screw things up). And I know they only have 30 seconds to tell a story, but it jumps directly from showing the guy with his child and pregnant wife to showing the couple all gray and retired and fishing with their grandkids. And I guess it makes me nervous because I'm not sure what's coming up next for me.
The first thirty years of my life have followed a pretty predictible pattern. I grew up, went away to college, graduated, got married, got my first real job, went to graduate school, and then had three babies in rapid succession. I've never been one to reminisce much about the stage I was leaving, mostly because I've always been looking forward to the next stage. When it was time for me to go to college, I started counting down the days in March, when I think I had about 150 days until classes started in August. I got married the day after I graduated from BYU. I handed in the big end-of-term seminar paper for my last class in graduate school on the way to the hospital to be induced with Bryce. I've never had the youngest baby out of diapers before a new baby arrives.
But now that our older kids are getting (a little bit) older and we're trying to get our last one on his way here (already talking myself into the fact that the last one will be a boy), I keep wondering what I'm going to do with the next 50 or 60 years of my life. The kids won't need me in a few years in the minute-by-minute way they do right now. I've always said that I wanted four kids and a PhD by forty, but in the last few years I've been so consumed by the kids part of things that I haven't thought too much about the PhD. I just know that knowing myself, I'll have to have some sort of big project to keep me busy for the next 50 or so years.
And here's where Juanita Brooks comes in (again). This afternoon I finished her biography. A couple of days ago I wrote about how she was such an example to me of staying intellectually engaged while she had little children. When she was in her late thirties and forties and had nine (just typing that makes me tired) kids at home, she wrote, but her biography talks about how she was constantly apologizing for not being able to give her full attention to the things she was writing. It was definitely a delicate balance for a few years.
When I first picked the book up, I glanced at the index, and felt a little bit puzzled that one of the chapters towards the end of the book was titled "Life at its Peak." I mean, I've always sort of thought that the stage of life I'm in now, the tearing-my-hair-out, never-peeing-by-myself, snot-on-my-shirt stage was the peak. After that, I'd just (hopefully) have the satisfaction of seeing them raised right and living their own lives. In fact, I've been a little bit worried to think about a PhD because I've worried that I'm over the hill, because by the time I get back to school (when the as-yet-unconceived baby goes to preschool) I'll be at least 10-15 years older than your average doctoral student. But it is kind of weird that I'm all worried about this, since Eddie is still four years away from being done with his training. So he's a young neophyte and I'm all washed up, is what I guess I'm saying.
But if anyone's still reading, I agreed with Levi Peterson that Juanita Brooks's sixties and seventies were the peak of her life intellectually. So it gives me some hope that at 31 or 35 or 40 I might not be too old to find a purpose for the next phase of my life. There will come a time when I'm not writing a blog post with someone sitting on my lap, begging for another cup of grape juice, when I don't have to drive the carpool, and when I can write until late in the night without worrying about getting the kids out the door to school. What, exactly, I want to write is still a question. Yes, the creative phase (in the babymaking sense of the word) is coming to an end, but I think that my own creativity is still very young.
--originally published 1/21/06
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