Adulting

More so than my birthday, February is a month that marks the passage of time, the month of anniversaries of losses and other milestones. While I can feel a little heaviness creeping in, I haven't had time to sit with it -- my daughter had whatever norovirus-like thing is going around, which kept me emotionally occupied for a week, and there’s always work -- but I guess there are still plenty of days left before March for me to start feeling like I'm lying under a two ton gorilla?

My body keeps the February score even if my conscious mind doesn't: after my period hadn't shown up for seven months, it arrived on the day after my daughter's birthday, my reproductive system getting in a meaningful jab (ha! ha!) just as I've started to breathe a sigh of relief that maybe my cycle and I have parted ways, as if to assert that it's still in charge. Not that I'm surprised, mind you. We've been more at odds than usual for a while, my uncooperative body and I: in addition to the fallout from the concussion and mysterious undiagnosable illness, the perfect storm of injury and hormone shifts over the past few years without the ability to run or dance has added twenty pounds to my frame (ha! ha! it says), yet another way in which my physical container is sometimes unrecognizable as my own.

In the fall I tried a tai chi course offered by my public library, and though I was dealing with tendonitis and tennis elbow (even though I don't play tennis - ha! ha!) it felt good to move again, so I signed up for an eight week course offered by the local adult school. The first class in the series was on Monday, and after stumbling around the municipal complex in the dark for a while, I finally found the building, marked by the sign "Center for Modern Aging." I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud. At the very least, I laughed in my head. It sounds sexy or cool, "Modern Aging." Which I definitely am not.

I had worried about finding the room, but shouldn't have, because I could see the converted basketball gym (also not cool or sexy) from the doorway, and since I was a few minutes late, I got a first look at my classmates before they saw me: slender bald guys with glasses and hearing aids, women of many shapes and sizes wearing all manner of clothing that wasn't quite designed for us, and in whom I saw my menopausal self.

I shed my winter layers as quickly and quietly as I could, finding a spot in the back of the class where I hoped I could hide. Is this who I am now? I wondered. Am I the middle-aged woman in tai chi class, hair thinning, eyes not quite focused, trying to keep my balance and finding myself frustratingly unable to get a good view of the teacher?

It was okay, I guess. I will go again next week.

I came home to an empty house; my husband had taken my daughter to dance class, which is two hours long and twenty minutes away (so no sense coming back in between). It--and I--felt abandoned. I puttered around, a little lost, without a plan. There is always plenty to do, but the weight of the silence was distracting, even though it didn't feel right to disrupt it, either. Soon it will be the norm.

This feels like a new chapter in adulting, and it's going to take some time to get used to who I am again.

Pumpkin Brownies
I've been wanting chocolate, and now I think I know why. These are not good for you. But you can pretend they are because there's a vegetable. And I'm using up the pumpkin puree I froze back in November, so that's good, right?

1 1/2 c. chocolate chips + 1/4 c. (divided)
1/3 c. butter
1 shot espresso or dark coffee
1 t. vanilla
1/2 c. white sugar
1/4 c. sugar
2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1 1/2 c. pumpkin puree
1 1/4 c. all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, grease an 8" square baking pan.

Melt chocolate chips and butter together slowly in the microwave or over a double boiler, stirring as often as possible.  When they are completely smooth you can turn off the heat and start adding the other "wet" ingredients:
shot of espresso, vanilla, sugars and then finally the pumpkin puree. Stir briskly until smooth.

Fold in the baking powder, salt and flour. Stir to mix completely, but do not overmix.

Pour the batter into your baking dish and top with 1/4 cup chocolate chips.

Bake 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool another 10-15 minutes in the pan before cutting. And for the love of all that is holy, eat them with whipped cream or ice cream or something else and try not to feel too bad about your spreading middle or thighs or whatever you've got going on in that uncooperative body of yours.

The Gift Must Move

(cross posted at https://theyakboard.com/)

In 2019, I traveled to India with my yoga teacher and a group of her yoga students. I think I was seeking enlightenment; that’s what so many yoga programs promise middle-aged women like me. While I have positive memories of that trip — walks along a dusty road to town and admiring the warli art on the concrete walls, getting elaichi from the tiny stand close to town, squashing into auto-rickshaws at the crack of dawn to attend aarti at the temple, visiting a workshop where women were sewing — I left India feeling uncomfortably like a consumer of the experience, rather than a participant. I remember coming back thinking maybe I'd do teacher training, but I actually stopped doing yoga, uneasy with my own practice, feeling like I'd appropriated something that wasn't mine, but not wanting it to devolve merely into exercise, which seemed wrong, too. I’d bought a pair of earrings that I loved during the trip, tear-drop shaped tiger eye, and eventually lost one of them. The loss felt symbolic.

Fast forward seven years. 

I am standing on a walkway along Fateh Sagar Lake in Udaipur, at a "Be the Gift" festival sponsored by Shikshantar, a movement founded to re-think education and provide opportunities for people to participate in social regeneration. I have been tasked with holding a sign that says “Free झप्पी” ("Free Jhappi," or "Free hugs"). I awkwardly wave the sign and smile; many teenaged boys cluster across from me, talking to each other and giggling before shoving each other forward to take turns posing next to me for a picture. I am certain that I'm Instagram-famous within minutes. A few people take me up on the offer of the hug (despite the fact that I had worried about gender conventions and the weirdness of inviting that kind of intimacy). I talk with people about the meaning of money, why we worry about it so much, what we can give each other to make it feel less burdensome. At one point I'm invited to play a game I’d never heard of before called "Beauty and the Beast" that feels a lot like tag but it much more confusing.

I'm on a program with students and a few colleagues, facilitated by Where There Be Dragons, that is intended to provide a context for students to broaden their understanding of community activism, education, and leadership. And I find that I'm experiencing India as a learner, with humility, with curiosity. 

During the ten days we were traveling, we visited with leaders and visionaries (not people with big visions but small, one-person-at-a-time kinds of visions) who were helping the community collaborate to leave their world a little better than they’d found it. We were invited into the homes of our students’ homestay families, where they talked with us about their relatives, cricket, and upcoming weddings, and fed us and poured so many cups of chai. We took walking tours of villages like Delwara and Kotri and cities like Udaipur with people who call those places home, who have seen them change, who are thinking about the impact of development and the ways in which history and culture and class (and caste) shape individual and collective identities. 

Each day, I’d listen to my fellow travelers asking questions, recounting their homestay siblings’ funniest remarks, reflecting on their perspectives on India, education, and what it means to be “doing enough” in this difficult world to help create and nurture positive change. I felt deeply fortunate to be in this space, in this moment. I thought a lot about my own communities, and things we build together just by showing up.

On the last night, we walked down a street in Delhi on the way to Hemanji’s favorite tea shop, a pair of earrings in a small jeweler’s window caught my eye. They were tear drop shaped tiger eyes, like the one I’d lost, but the stone was dangling from a tree of life, a symbol I’ve connected with over the past few years as I’ve tried to be more mindful of things like community and rootedness and mutual growth. It was like a visual representation of the ways in which this trip was both similar to but completely different from the one I’d taken seven years ago.

At the airport in the wee hours of the morning, Neeravji, Tserginji, and Hemantji (our Dragons leaders) stood outside to see us safely towards home. I felt sadder than I expected to feel, like I was leaving people who had become friends, but also grateful to be traveling back with people who were going to keep asking questions and challenging me to be more reflective, too.

It's hard to know where to go from here. But that’s the point, right? To be open, to be curious, to be unable to distill complicated places and people down to a single blog post or photo.

I told the group towards the end of our trip that there’s an anthropologist who says one of the essential qualities of a gift is that it must “move,” that if gifts aren’t passed on, that they lose their tranformative abilities and become just things. This journey was a gift, generously given (the “free jhappi” that people offered to me, the beautiful mehndi that I received at the festival, the boost from Hemantji and the extended hand of Neeravji that helped me get up the mountain), and I hope I can do that gift justice for a long time to come.

*photos don’t include other people because I didn’t ask permission to publish them … not because I was alone in India!! 🙂