"I don't want to make it sad"
"Don't make it sad"
"I know. I want a hook or something. Something to reward people. Especially if anyone clicks this after having read any of this for 17 years"
"Talk about the kid"
"I can"
So this is for all my friends etc. who are at a certain age or level of experience to tell you about my being here. And to admit that I've been engaging in some invisible mental fisticuffs regarding aging. Denial. Arrested development. "You aren't 18 anymore." I loathe phrases like that.
I turned 48 on Christmas as y'all may already know, and 2 days beforehand I had my annual wellness visit. I wanted to talk about getting a vasectomy and some hip pain I'd been experiencing and attributed to 20 plus years in martial arts and being the kind of floppy flibbertigibbet onstage that tends to wreck himself for a laugh prior to any thought of checking myself. I came away with an appointment for a colorectal screening, learning (to my delight) that the last 6 months of really, really trying with my food intake I shaved off 20 lbs and moreover my blood pressure was "good".
I also got an X-ray that said I have signs of moderate arthritis in my left hip.
Great.
My delusions of indestructibility had been given a cold splash. Something that affected my mom her whole life, I learned that I have an infirmity that'll be with me forever. And I still have an almost-four year old to chase around. Now I KNOW it's not a terminal diagnosis. It's not, you know...a rarity. Mom blamed her arthritis and fibromyalgia on our clenching our buttcheeks when she spanked us. I had just hoped to get some exercises and maybe see an ortho for some assisted stretches I could bring home that would provide relief from the occasional...pain. Instead I experience an intense and vivid flashback from taking mom to a doctor and helping her get on a table with her bare buns in the air while she screamed getting a cortisone shot.
But...but...I wanted to take my wife to the 1st Ave danceteria for her birthday on 80's versus 90's night on her birthday. Ive got theme parks to walk around! Vacations that need a lot of steps to be walked! I was gonna run a marathon! Take up Jujitsu! I'm "choreographing" and skipping around our basement while showtunes play while my kid copies me. It's fun. Until that one weird second I get a blast of pain around my hip flexor.
Skipping. In my basement.
And so NOW I can't NOT think about it. And feel it. All the time. When my kid wants me to swing her around or lift her up with my legs, when she wants to shuffle step side to side...Jesus, when I'm turning over in the middle of the night and a sharp feeling surrounds my hip and leg.
Ok. Woe is me. What is you point, Michael? What story do you want to tell: Well...I want someone to say "it's gonna be okay". (This, of course, is because of the list of restrictions that come with the preliminary diagnosis.) I've never really been bent out of shape about aging. That my reward for whatever life I had lived wasn't the couch and a heart attack. I've just apparently been out of touch or in denial about what's been happening to me.
I remember my first gray hairs- actually, the first white wiry eyebrow that jutted from the brown ones. I remember buying knee braces, the first time I was called in for "dad" auditions from my agents and getting paired with a strangers kids to score a gig selling couches. When I went from having the sharpest eyes of anyone I knew before buying cheaters just to read the cooking instructions on a box.
I knew I was getting older, it just never occurred to me that it'd be a thing to slow me down. I was doing all the things right...
"Mikey, Getting Older Sucks"- My dad, August 6th, 2009. Around lunch time and a few hours before he passed away from a heart attack.
In 2016, I woke up early on my 42nd birthday in the cool basement guest room early Christmas morning while my wife bundled under the comforter she had pulled off me and the first, the VERY FIRST thought that popped into my mind was "I am one more year closer to dying". Death had been on my mind in almost the entirety of 2016. I had lost my mom earlier that year and buried she and dad at Ft. Snelling. I'd managed to bury some very close relationships that became very toxic. Visited Paris and schlepped from churches containing crypts with momento mori to momento mori for 8 days and started to wonder, really wonder: What the fuck had I done? Who was I? And mostly "Jesus Baby. This is the one day you've woken up your ENTIRE life and almost EVERY ONE is celebrating because TODAY is YOURRRRR BIRTHDAY!" Suddenly and painfully time became an issue for me.
It makes sense, as it was also the first birthday without my dad AND mom. The first I wouldn't be at a house other than my own or figuring out Christmas Eve at my in-laws before heading home the morning OF then back to my house for a nap and then Mikeymas. No, I was going to have to figure out who I was on Christmas if I wasn't Mom Postle's best Christmas gift for 40 some years. It was Christmas, but the birthday's I'd always looked forward to, without realizing it...were with my own family.
I have been so goddamn privileged, full of gratitude, and mostly happy in the intervening years since their passing- travel, new jobs, a baby, a new home, and my family's health have been a blessing, but I realized I had been seeking this sort of tacit "approval" from my family. And of course I have communicated as much to my wife, but it feels like perspective has suddenly caught up with me all at once. And worry. Worry about my kid. Money. The epic Fear of Missing Out and "Do I have friends any more? Does anyone like me? Why does everyone else look like they're hanging out except me??" (Y'all, it's real. And the pandemic has only ratcheted those notions up to eleven. 3 years of pandemic has felt like 20.) Anxiety and the shitty notions that other people can be just rotten to each other 24/7 and this constant thrum of advocacy of unfairness and injustice happening and has been happening on a steady uptick since people and family I KNOW support what we ALL HAD TO GO THROUGH between 2015 and NOW.
Looks like I picked the wrong time to quit drinking...
There've been other signs aging has sprung on me, but like a silly optimist I chose to interpret that my life and health will improve drastically with the necessary adjustments. While I finally realized I was at the point that alcohol no longer served a purpose for me and recognizing that self-medicating was going to (be too expensive) keep me from being fully present for my kid- the tangible proof was the effect it had on my blood pressure and being able to finally-soberly- recognize how I was using alcohol to combat low-level anxiety and act as my full-time social lubricant. (But mostly anxiety). I started getting the perspective that maybe myself after a couple of cocktails wasn't someone even I'd want to hang out with at a party. Ergo my self-worth tanked from being that of a younger version of myself- a 20-something who loved to go dancing, party, and had this bizarre confidence that likely read as toxic arrogance. The privilege. The nerve. The wasted moments! Ah! Me! No one wants to hang out with ME WHEN I'M SOBER!
Or something.
Our kid is amazing
For as much of a financial drain day care is with ONE child...having teachers recognize patterns of behavior to address and help develop and assist with growth is...different now than it was when I was a kid. In our meetings with early childhood educational development specialists, I find myself in a pretty constant state of my own memory of development and upbringing to understand, justify, argue, that these things were all things I went through as well.
"Your child can use help with these letters when speaking. Creating these opportunities will help them develop better social integration tools." It goes on. My mom used to joke that I was in a constant land of make-believe and (occasionally) scaring other kids when I was in day care. "The doctors told me that you were rotten and a bad listener, but you'd grow out of it". So when they say my kid is acting out scenes from a Disney or Nickelodeon cartoon she's got in that particular day's mental rotation, I can only compare it to the time I was in nursery school and kept ripping my clothes off and screaming at other kids because I thought I was the incredible Hulk. And then I realize wow. If these tools were around when I was a kid, how would I have been diagnosed? How would my development been different? And it actually helps me accept the help from the teachers and not feel "leave my kid alone she is FINE she is a KID and KID'S are KID'S..."
Then again, I used to say (and still hear) people say "let kids eat dirt and germs and blahhhh" in the same breath dumb shits try to spout Antiv@xx horseshit and I just think I was incredibly naive when I made those comments and those other people are still just sad and painfully misinformed.:
"Rocky! Pat!...I mean, MIKEY!!!!"
I have managed, on several occasions, to call my dog my daughter's name, my wife's name, my daughter my dogs name, etc etc. You get the jist. Just like my dad went through every family name and their dog before finally getting to me. As of this writing, I'm about a week out from my first colorectal screen. Something I've joked about and has been joked about ("Fletch"? Anyone? Will I be too doped up to sing "Moon River"?) but is now recommended for the pre-fifty year old set. It's here I'll brag a little by saying I'm pretty happy that I've managed to have a pretty vegetable heavy diet for the last fifteen years or more. More happy I've been practice fasting and evening-fasting so I don't get bushwhacked when the pre-procedure restrictions start. I need my glasses to read at night or my phone even...and I just scared my kid using the nose and ear hair trimmer when she heard the whining noise and saw daddy trying to exorcise Wilford Brimley's mustache from my earlobes and nostril. I don't find any of this graceful. I don't think I will ever be able to wrap my head around the notions of aging even as my body rebels.
It's not the years, it's the mileage. And even then things aren't that bad...
We rejoined a gym which has been a blessing- both to keep me from falling and injuring myself after making a point to get daily runs/jogs/walks in for my mental health the 2 plus pandemic years when I DIDN'T have a membership, but also this winter has been absolute shit for cold and snow. And since my mobility is going to take a turn, I can still lift the bevvy of weights I don't have access to at home.
I've been married for 7 years after my wife and I have been together for 11. My kid is great. Curious, chatty, energetic, manic, emotional, irrational, independent, protective, and gives the best family hugs when asked. We've had two cars in the shop. My wife just opened her second show in a year (leaving me home to play solo permissive-dad...much Disney has been watched and sang along with) and even I'm considering getting back to audition in the next few weeks.
After that, it's a vasectomy appointment. Some ortho recommendations that we can hopefully have covered by our insurance. And, as my wife is fond of doing...day dreaming of future trips together. In short, I have no real complaints. Except my hip. And my shoulder. Managed to fuck that one up straightaway going to my in-laws for a Vikings game and one-arm grabbing a grocery bag with treats that was a little too heavy. Annoying.
TLDR
This year on Christmas day, I went for a bundled up two mile walk. We'd had some heavy snow leading up to it and the sidewalks were janky and uneven so I just made it within a loop in my neighborhood. To add an extra tenth of a mile, I looped through the Catholic Cemetery off 7th. There was a plot that had a portable awning erected over it and front end digger off to the back of the cemetery, and (the above pictured) plot that had been recently covered. It appeared there was to be a service today in the near-single digits, and I imagined the decision that family made to hold it in the dead of winter.
"Memento Mori. The practice of memento mori– acting on the Latin phrase that translates to “remember we must die,” has the profound potential to wake us up and breathe more life into our lives."
There are people who won't be here next Christmas that should be. There will be those who will be gone who's time has finally come. I'll still be here, thinking about what I could've done betters, what better choices I could have made, and other useless hindsight reflections I try to shake loose on every walk or jog in order to clear my head for being present. For my wife, and kid. And ideally... as I shift closer to another landmark birthday- being present for me.
