The best part of my day

Friends, if you haven’t yet made it to the other side, I want to reassure you – being 40 is actually pretty good.

I can’t lie: it took me a while to make peace with this new combination of digits. But now that I’m here, I’ve learned to enjoy it.

For me, at least, there’s a radical self-acceptance. Acceptance of others follows. At the very moment you gain the courage to tell people where to get off, you find you no longer want to. People are people. A subset of those people are also dicks. You still get angry, but you save it for the big stuff.

Even as you accept some things, others have to be let go. The Salvation Army gets those skinny jeans you haven’t fit for five years but you hung on to just in case – because unless you contract a rare wasting disease, it’s not going to happen. Not. Going. To. Happen.

For me, the hardest thing to let go is being the mother of little children.

Every night over dinner, everyone in our whānau has to say the best part of their day. It’s a rule, non-negotiable. Still the kids tried to negotiate it, as kids do.

Clarify ‘day’, 15 year old E demanded. After some debate, we replaced ‘day’ with ‘reporting period’, defined as yesterday’s dinnertime to now.

But the challenges to my parental authority were not over. Night after night, 10 year old K claimed the best part of his day was ‘being awesome’. Suspecting K was not taking his reporting obligations seriously, I made a new rule. If you say ‘being awesome’, you have to give two instances of your alleged personal awesomeness within the reporting period. It’s about accountability.

The ‘being awesome’ rule was not well-received at first – but when the anger and recriminations had passed, a positive lesson was learned, and the children were able to see the value of well-designed regulation. Kids be messing with the wrong bureaucrat, yo.

It’s a cliché, but when I look at my sons over the dinner table, I don’t know where the time has gone. I can’t help being delighted with the humans I made. But sometimes the feeling of loss – of my little children, of my time with them – is tremendous, overpowering, a thing that feels like grief and grabs me by the throat.

When your children are small, you’re exhausted, stressed, broke. You wait for those years to end.

When those years end, you want nothing more than to have them back.

This, for me, is the hardest part of aging as a woman. It’s mixed up with feelings that I could have done better. I could have worked less, read Clifford the Big Red Dog more often, worried less about the mortgage, cherished the specialness of kissing my little ones as they slept.

It’s not that I want another kid. I don’t really want to share my body with another human again. I prefer to use my body for going to the gym, then for putting coffee and blue cheese and wine into. (I am all over that incoherent middle age lifestyle shit.)

And I know other women have bigger problems. Babies they had that they never wanted. Babies they wanted but could never have. That’s what my brain tells me – but it’s not about my brain. It’s my heart that hurts. I know that each snuggle with my kids could be my last.

After dinner, when it was nearly bedtime, K came to find me. He excitedly asked me if he could revise the best part of his day, because his day had got better. He snuggled up with me, told me how he’d cracked a level in a video game that a better mother wouldn’t let him play. He trusted me, one more time, with a special small boy thing.

I asked him for another hug. He said no, briefly did a leprechaun dance in the doorway, and then vanished into the night.*

I can’t keep my kids little forever. It would be wrong to try. I am blessed with the children I have, and will be more and more blessed as I watch them grow into the wonderful adults I know they will become.

Still, that snuggle with a random leprechaun was a small treasure, tucked away in my memory and my heart.

And now you know the best part of my day.

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*He did this because he … really enjoys dancing like a leprechaun. I don’t know what else to tell you.