She Made Me Cry On My Birthday – And I’m So Glad She Did

I recently celebrated my 36th birthday. Perhaps in part due to a “1/3-life crisis” (I’m avoiding calling myself “middle-aged”), I have committed myself to completing a sprint triathlon later in the year. Thus, on my birthday my husband and I found ourselves wandering around a sporting goods store with our four small boys, he and I in search of training equipment and the boys in search of shenanigans and discarded coins on the floor. They found their calling in the section with stationary bikes and rowing machines, where they each clambered up on a separate apparatus. Of course the buffoonery began, but the nearby sales associates didn’t mind so I didn’t sweat it.

“Look! I riding a horse!” my three-year-old son exclaimed with glee. The middle boys, or ‘Middles’ as I call them, giggled endlessly and my oldest son studiously sat astride a rowing machine trying to figure it out. I intermittently indulged in laughter with them and spaced out to look at the cute running tops on the adjacent clearance racks.

It was then that I saw her.

She must have been at least ninety years old. She stood there with a beautiful smile on her face, staring as though lost in a reverie. I followed her gaze directly to my three older boys, who were by then fully reveling in the hilarity of their chosen exercise bikes. They really were funny. I smiled and looked back to the lady, and I noticed her tears. She was still smiling, but tears were visibly rolling down her cheeks. I felt an emotional tightening in my heart as I watched her watch my boys.

Riding on the Christmas train

It wasn’t long before another lady stepped close and accompanied her. I suspect it was her daughter, but I can’t be sure. The younger lady smiled and said aloud for my benefit, “Watching the kids?” The younger lady must have thought that the older lady was troubling me, or else she was just in a hurry, because she put her arm around the older woman and steered her around with mild abruptness.

The daughter looked at me again and said with an embarrassed smile, “Retired teacher here,” pointing at the older lady. The older lady looked at me and smiled wistfully, her tear-stained cheeks obvious to everyone. I smiled back and warmly said something that I don’t remember. My words probably didn’t matter anyway.

She wasn’t paying any attention to me; the catalyst for her emotional response was all of the monkey business happening on the stationary bikes behind me. Despite what the younger lady may have been thinking, I wasn’t bothered by the older woman at all. In fact, I was grateful for her, and I didn’t really want to see her go.

It took exactly three seconds for my own waterworks to begin. Mama friends, just watching her watching my kids made me cry. Her tears–her nostalgia–truly touched me. It made me wonder what she was really seeing, because I know it wasn’t just my kids.  She must have been seeing her own kids too, and her own students perhaps–a whole lifetime of love. It was sweet and sad, and the poignancy of it was ridiculous because my birthday is a marked reminder of my own aging. Here I am, nearer to age 70 than I am to birth (oh, great Caesar’s ghost!) and someday I’m going to be that woman.

My youngest and me

Sure, my children sometimes exasperate me and make me wish it was their bedtime already. Yes, they get selective hearing when I call them into dinner and then I have to retrieve them from the muddy creek behind our house and then shout at them for ruining my boots in the process. Of course I grow weary of shushing them when they won’t settle down in their bunk beds at night, and I roll my eyes at their proclamations of my unfairness when I command them to clean up the discarded toy dinosaurs I keep tripping over with my bare feet.

Sometimes I feel like my four boys are my one-way ticket to Crazy Town.

But you know what? One of these days I will have basically completed my job of raising them, and one of them will deign to come pick me up and drive me to a store, and I will stealthily escape his distracted eye and wander to where the youngsters are frolicking on the exercise bikes, and I will watch and cry and remember how little he and his brothers used to be. I know I will miss these days because sometimes I already do, even as I close the days one by one like turned pages of a book.

“Enjoy these days while they are little,” they all tell me. Don’t worry. I’m listening and relishing. Someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll be an old woman with a heart full of memories. But today I get to be 36, and my kids are all six years and younger, and the days are mine to make of them what I will. My ambition for this year, apart from the sprint triathlon, is to enjoy as many of the moments that these funny little boys will give me. Fortunately, there are plenty of both the boys and the moments.

 

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Jenny
Jenny is a native of Moore, Oklahoma, where she currently lives. After graduating from OSU and getting married to her husband BJ in 2003, she lived in frigid Minneapolis for four years while earning her doctorate in clinical psychology. Jenny worked in private practice as a licensed psychologist for several years before leaving her job to become a SAHM in 2015. She has four sons ranging from baby to seven years. The testosterone runs wild in her house, but she loves it! She once considered it her full-time job to stop her boys from doing flips on the couch and otherwise wrestling like bears, but soon realized her surrender to their collective energy was inevitable. Jenny, BJ, and their boys enjoy eating at metro-area restaurants, playing outside, learning, and traveling. When her kids are (finally) sleeping, Jenny thrives on jogging, reading travel books and feminist writings, baking high-calorie treats, and laughing hysterically at the likes of Amy Poehler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

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