In which nobody reached me about my extended warranty

Today, I am be 47, which is fine. I’m sitting cross-legged on the loveseat next to a first grader doing phonics via Zoom, because school has come home for covid again. Every few minutes, I throw something at the dog to make him stop licking himself. Licking himself isn’t wrong or bad, but it’s my house, and I want him to stop, but I also don’t want to get up off the loveseat. I am 47 years old, and it’s my house!

Someone once described me as a typical American mom who doesn’t have any real problems, and is just discontented enough to invent stuff to write about. I imagine he also thinks the Paradisaea apoda is a bird that has no feet, because every time someone delivered one to his laboratory, they had removed the feet first. Silly bird, what a lovely life, wafting around on its pretty mom feathers. No feet, no problems. 

I self-indulgently Googled “is 47 middle aged” and the internet told me a study has found that adults only become middle aged at age 47, and also that middle-aged misery peaks at 47 years of age. I skimmed, I skimmed. I gather that, statistically speaking, I’m right at the peak of some kind of happiness curve. I would not take a bet about which way I’m headed once I pass the peak. Up or down? Not sure. 

I do have problems, but my feet aren’t one (well, bunions, but those Dr. Scholl’s cushions work fine). My physical therapist says I’m so much stronger than I was even five weeks ago, and I know I’m stronger than I was a year ago, or five years ago, twenty years ago. Part of this is because I have a giant heap of pallets out in my driveway, and whenever I feel like I’m going to go crazy and kill someone, I move pallets around instead, and those mofos are heavy. The other part is yoga. Go ahead and laugh. Yoga gave me the core strength to paint the ceiling and walls of the dining room, which I needed to do so I wouldn’t kill anyone. 

My muscles are strong, but my other equipment is just plain wearing out. Don’t worry, I’m not going to complain about my ovaries. (They’re still working great, which is great. Just what I wanted at age 47, with a six-year-old doing phonics on the loveseat. Moar eggs!) It’s my eyes. My poor old eyes.

I spent a few years lamenting the lunacy of the publishing industry, and how they insisted on printing books in pale, wispy, uneven print these days. Unreadable! Insane! I lamented this trend as I stood beside a kiosk of reading glasses in Walmart, and then a startling thought entered my brain. Reading . . . glasses . . .

$4.88 later, and I could see everything again. What do you know about that. 

The eye doctor says it’s very common for your up-close vision to fall apart almost overnight at this age. But that’s not all. Feeling very foolish, I had them check me out thoroughly, and they said I did have an unusual number of floaters, but they weren’t dangerous, and there wasn’t much to be done but get used to them. Then I took a nap and woke up with a floater so big and dark and central, I saw it before I even opened my eyes. So, feeling even more foolish, I went back again, and was checked out thoroughly again. I was right to come in, they said, and they said it was a bit unusual, but again, not dangerous. This squat, brown bug sitting in the middle of my world was just mine to have and to hold from now on. 

I’m not sure whom to lament to about this. I am an old lady who swallowed a fly, and the fly won’t go away, but just sits there, buzzing silently around my field of vision, leaving a fly smear, a blear, a soil in the middle of everything. It’s like I’ve driven through a mud puddle and there are no windshield wipers. The equipment, as I say, is running down. It’s a good thing I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, or I might go crazy and kill someone. 

I’m just a flightless little American mom with my yoga and my zoom meetings and my birthday campfires, and it’s just a little drifting blob of collagen, but I’m taking it pretty hard.

You know I’m mad about it because it’s something I can safely get mad about, unlike all the other things that have dislodged this year and are floating around with nowhere to go, and have gone so very wrong they are like a mountainside that suddenly let go and collapsed on top of me. And I can’t tell you about it, and I don’t know what to do, but do yoga and move pallets around.

All the moms I know have unspeakable troubles, things that almost nobody knows about, things that nobody can solve. Landslides. And we keep setting our alarms and scrambling eggs and pulling hair out of the drain and writing what’s for dinner on the blackboard and remembering to buy more push pins. It’s a good thing we believe in life everlasting in our middle age, halfway through the happiness dip. I go to the adoration chapel, and kneel down, and I pray, “Well . . . ” and that’s as far as I get, all hour long. 

We had a bonfire last week, with some of those pallets I’ve collected, which is when my husband snapped this rather dramatic photo of me. When it’s night, with sparks and cinders flying everywhere under the stars, and the air is bent with heat and nails are bending in the embers, it really doesn’t matter how your eyeballs are holding up. We are going to the movies for my birthday, and we have made reservations at a nice Italian restaurant. Lots of people love me, which not everybody gets to say. Most likely I can just get used to that landslide feeling. But still, I think I might also have a small fire. I would like to set a small fire for my birthday. 

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