Say it ain't so

My friend Laura just sent me some depressing news: apparently stirrup pants are coming back in style, along with tapered jeans. The 80s were not a high point of personal style for me at all, though I thought I looked like hot shit all the time and posed for pictures all haughty and pouty just to prove it. Why must we relive that era in fashion? I survived my Flock of Seagulls uneven haircut and my subsequent Sammy Hagar perm, and I have a few classic photos I can share with darling C. someday to make her roll her eyes and ask "How could you ever wear that, mom?" Can't we just move on?

It isn't really the fashion WRONG-ness of stirrup pants and tapered jeans that I object to--it's how damn old I feel when I see kids today (damn--did I just use an expression like "kids today"? Get out my granny panties--it's time to retire!) wearing what I wore when I was thier age and calling it all retro. How can anything from my life be retro already? When did this happen?

Thinking of myself as a mom doesn't help matters at all. When I first started taking Clementine out and about (at 4 days old), I thought everyone would be all scandalized to see someone so young with a kid. Um, yeah. How out of touch was I at that point? I'm 30! It's more scandalous these days to be 30 without a kid than with one. Just because I was feeling like I was 10 years too young to be a mom doesn't mean I actually was (duh!), and it's been a slow and painful realization that there is a growing gap between me and that gaggle of cool looking kids I see at the end of the bar on a Friday night as I'm schlepping home take-out to chow on before darling C's 9 o'clock bedtime. No joke. I have to remind myself when I see those cool little barhoppers that I look like some distant future to them instead of a peer, that my separation from them is not a lifestyle choice but an age thing--I just don't fit. At dinner the other night, I said to Nate about our absent-minded waiter: "I'm sure glad I won't be waiting tables at his age--it may be freeing, but it's so depressing!" "Amanda," he said, "that guy's younger than we are. Or at least the same age." Hmmm.

I get it that I'm not old and that I can remain "young in spirit"--but I'm not thinking metaphorically or any of that ya-ya crap. These cool kids I mistakenly think of as part of my generation were born in a year I remember, a year in which I was conscious of there being years and time and a world beyond my playroom. How can this be? How can I be so much older than the group of people with whom I most closely identify? Truth is, of course, that I don't identify with them at all--I just like the way they dress. Or dressed, past tense, if they start wearing stirrup pants. I like the rock and rollness of them, their shaggy hair and complete seld-involvement. I can't afford all those luxuries these days. When I look at Nate, I still see him as the 20-something guy I've traveled the world with, the guy I used to get fall-down drunk with, the guy who lives for old cars and has few earthly possessions. And when I look at myself...well, these days I don't know what I see. It isn't a 30 year old mom who plays it safe, works and comes home to make dinner most nights.

How can I be so oblivious to my aging (except when I tune in and get all mental about it like now) and so in tune with Clementine's? I swear, I see each little change in her face and on her body in the smallest detail. I feel every glance she throws my way changes and disappears even as she is doing it. I feel greedy, like I have to eat every minute of it up. I missed my aging, obviously, and I'm not going to miss hers! The past decade for me is a jumbled and wonderful mix of experiences and ideas and trips and personalities and people--I can't really tell what happened when or in what order, though, so it feels distant and proximate at the same time. But since Clementine, I'e become compulsive about time and chronology. I'm memorizing every minute of it, afriad to let even a minute of it go.

Oh, and for those who are curious, I did talk to Julie yesterday about the bottle propping. Nothing came out the way I practiced it, and she didn't react in any of the 10 ways I thought she might. She said she knew I was feeling wierd about it and repeated that it was only a matter of circumstance--she was alone and Clementine was hungry. I told her I'd rather be pulled out of a meeting to drive down and give Clementine a bottle myself than have her stuck in front of a bottle propped on a pile of bed linens, and Julie promised it wouldn't happen again. I'm moving past this but still keeping tabs. I took Clementine in this morning and know it's a good place for her. When I round the downstairs cooridor, all the kids shout "Baby Clementine!" (or Lementine or Mementine or a mumbled variation that lasts too long to really work but they are all trying so dang hard), and Julie can hardly wait to hold her. It's working for now.