So now I am older
Than my mother and father
When they had their daughter
Now what does that say about me?
I am not, in fact, older than my mother and father when they had either of their daughters. I am creeping up on the age that they were when they had their son, but even that’s still about a year off.
Two birthdays ago, I hit the age that they were when they got married, which felt less monumental than it might have. One of the ways that I as a child differentiated myself from my young peers (searching as children do for small things to make themselves special among their fellows) was by noting that my parents were older and had gotten married older than those of my classmates and friends.
My parents were both twenty-eight when they married each other. Twenty-eight is about average for a woman’s first marriage now (it’s thirty for men). They married in 1989, and my mother was five years over the average age of first marriage at the time. So, in that sense, she did get married “old.” But there’s nothing like turning twenty-eight to make a person realize how young that still is.
Over this last Christmas, my dad checked out a VHS converter from the library where I work and spent a couple of afternoons digitizing his old tapes. He showed us one of the videos at our next monthly family night. It’s a house tour. My dad walks through each room of the first house he and my mother lived in in Ypsilanti. They’ll be moving soon, to the town where they (and I) still live, and my dad is marking the occasion by making this record of the place that they would soon leave. In some shots, you can see things that I recognize from my childhood—a clock, a chair, some of the my brother’s first toys. My sister and I weren’t born yet.
You have to, in that situation, notice how young your parents were. In that video, my parents were younger than my brother and sister are now. While watching my father show off the improvements he’d made to that old house, my brother noted how responsible my father seemed. “I had a kid,” my dad said with a shrug, not unkindly or by way of suggestion. None of his kids have their own. (Two us also don’t have our own houses, but there’s been more than enough ink spilled on both those subjects to skip rumination on that here.)
This sort of realization happens to everyone eventually. There’s that scene at the end of No Country for Old Men where Tommy Lee Jones realizes that he’s outlived the age at which his father died by twenty years. There’s the Fleet Foxes lyrics I’ve got at the top of this piece. Part of getting older is recognizing that the people in your life that you used to think of as “old” aren’t. They weren’t.
My family always plants flowers on the family gravesites on Memorial Day. We’ve done so for decades. Every year, we’re a little more efficient. Every year, the dates on the graves slide a little further into the past. This year, while up north for our annual horticultural tradition, I spent some time flipping through the photo album that lives next to the cottage fireplace. In it, there’s a picture of my grandmother with a birthday cake. The number candles that she’s about to blow out show that she’s the same age then that my parents are now.
Being older than my mother and father when they had their daughter probably doesn’t say anything about me, except that population statistics have shifted since 1989, or maybe that I’m not interested in the same things that they were at my age. Someday they will be as old as my grandmother is now. Someday I will be older.
I wonder who will plant flowers on my grave.
