It’s Weird Figuring Out What You Want To Be When You’re 60

 It’s Weird To Be Figuring Out Who You Are/Who You Want To Be…in your 50s into 60s

Like millions of people, when I was a girl my dreams were of things far from what my life became. When I was small I loved to write and wrote some poems and a couple of stories. When I wandered aimlessly through piano then clarinet and finally found trumpet thanks to the observant elementary school music teacher Mrs. Kahn, I was in heaven and wanted to play all day every day, and I did play a lot. My parents bought me the best horn their money could not afford, they gave me private lessons with one of the best trumpet players in the region. They were great like that, supporting me in anything I wanted to do. I was a very good trumpet player, I assumed it would always be part of my life in some way. But rules.

Fastened permanently underneath that supportive exterior of my parents was a infinitely louder though unspoken expectation that I’d be a miniature better version of my mom’s making, and I’d dutifully play the part. That I’d be the silent do not disturb anyone grown woman of my dad’s unconscious expectation. It’s infuriating how these unspoken rules grab kids in families and shove them off track for who they were meant to be into some feeble vehicle of their parent’s creation. My blindness to it kept me ignorant well into my 50s.

So I wrote again after I divorced; pages and pages of rants and rages and when social media became a thing, several accounts where I could scream into the void and still stay silent, you know, not to bother anyone. I played sports only until high school ended and I put my gorgeous horn away in 1980 when I married at 18, the abuser who I’d spend the next 18 years with confused about why the amount of love I gave was simply unimportant, and when I finally decided to be a grown up version of myself, he doubled down on things and went after my first born as well as me then eventually went after another woman.

When I decided to marry him, I did so with the maturity of a 17 year old who’d turn 18 a month after getting married - with the infatuation and excitement I’d have later in life when I bought my first car with my very own money. I didn’t understand that, I thought the feeling I was giving him was actual something to build on love. What it was instead was my deeply unconscious mind taking the first opportunity that looked like it had promise to escape my childhood family. Finally, independence. Nope. I instead made an unconscious to me agreement to turn myself off and be in complete service to his life. I learned to loathe myself and hate him all the while accepting his abuse as deserved and betraying my own strength with silence every day in that marriage.

My dad died in december of 2015 of alcoholism. The stroke was the thing that got him into the hospital where when he went into withdrawals that I told them he’d go into, the male nurse watched him go deeper into hallucinations then something exploded in his throat and he started to suffocate. A few days later when he was extubated I watched my dad die. There was definitely negligence on that dude’s part that I don’t think would change any outcome but it is something that stays with me that the nurse waited so long to get help for my dad. Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox Illinois, you should do better. 

I am ambivalent about my father dying. 

In 2019 my mom died. After a two year ordeal including a mastectomy and “preventive hysterectomy” she was told she was in remission from breast cancer, all the while the ulcers in her stomach were metastasizing into what they’d later label breast cancer they would not be able to do anything about. So for another almost 2 years her life was filled with days of not being able to keep food in her stomach, getting scope after scope, one resulting in a perforated intestine because of their scoping that sent her into emergency surgery. Her care team  saw the fucking ulcers eating her stomach tissue but somehow the people in charge of said care took so long to declare she had cancer again when nothing could (would?) be done. The men taking some kind of care of her, Reza Gamagami and Erik Borncamp, said when ulcers show up, it’s almost always cancer. She’d known she had ulcers well before her mastectomy. Makes me wonder why there are different cancer departments at all because her breast care team led by Anne McCall sure didn’t communicate with her ulcers probably cancer team and that’s fucked up in my mind. Silver Cross hospital in New Lenox Illinois should have done better. 

Cancer is a systemic disease in my opinion (nope, not a medical opinion obv) and it has always confused me that when a woman (most often a woman) gets past breast cancer, it shows up later in her liver, stomach, bowels - all that time of focusing on the woman’s breast cancer and the fact that it’s left to grow everywhere else in the body until the cancer alarm sounds and someone bothers to check again, is shocking to me.

I am ambivalent about my mom dying.

My parents were mostly good about keeping us alive and involved in things and going on a few of the obligatory family vacations white lower middle class families go on - camping, visits to a friend’s lake house, road trips to visit family they barely wanted to be around. But in my family there was zero introduction to the world as someone who would live an independent life, have dreams, need to plan a life or grow in maturity. I was pretty invisible in my family and am pretty sure my parents simply expected me to get married and carry on the toxic recording of their lives. And that part I still don’t know, I may never know why they were like that themselves, continues to hurt me deeply to this day.

Until my 40s and 50s, I turned how I felt about things into a copy of someone else’s opinion about something. I had whispers of thinking I thought separate, independent opinions but rarely voiced them. The times I was my strongest was for my kids. Never for myself though, no, that’s not good mothering per the silence rules of core family and the suppressive rules of abusive marriage.

Usually the people whose opinions I absorbed handled things things poorly or immaturely except for one mom friend I had when our children were growing up. So my examples of how to handle stress were rarely mature. My children’s father compared me to everyone he thought did things better than me, turned out that was every single person alive. He’s a chiropractor and took his concerns about me to the audience of his clients. Then he’d bring the consensus back to me in the form of demands on how to be a better *anything*. He was always wrong. Professional. Mature.

The first time I met his family, his younger brother made the comment to him that I was wide in the bottom. Did he protect me in that conversation to his brother? No. He came back to me and shamed me about my body and gave me tips on how to lose more weight, not at all caring a bit that my 5 foot 5 body was already starved and hovering too close to 115 pounds in preparation for marrying his abusive ass.

Through my life, my mom saying something universally was wrong brought back the quiet warning to shut the fuck up and recall whatever her example was around those encrypted messages. I think it was her expectation I’d hold every value she ever did forever. Exhausting. With her death, I was free in a sense to walk away from being obligated to silently agree with her so not to betray the toxic sinewy band of invisible flesh we were bound by.

In my core family I silently became my covert narcissist mother’s and passive aggressive father’s image of me. In marriage I ignorantly became his reflection. If he said something was a way, I incorporated that into my way of being. I was learning to hate myself in the same moments by betraying myself. Maybe it was self preservation but I wish it had been self confidence. I would have happily skipped those 18 years.

Today there is much much more growth inside my being than there is outside. I’m still angry, and finding ways to use the anger for good. I’ve had hits and misses with counseling, I may be starting medication soon, if i do, I will report on how that impacts things. The thing about human growth is it’s not linear, it’s not easy, it’s not pain free and we do not stop growing until we die (then maybe we’ll feed a tree or two and that’s the growth continuum).

I have begun to love myself - any of you reading this who understands the monumental concept of genuinely loving yourself, welcome, I’m as proud of you as I am myself. You deserve your love. You deserve the massive love you have given every other person except yourself. Let’s keep growing and making mistakes on the way to where we’ll end up.