The Gero-Punk Project

There was a single gray hair taped to the bathroom mirror yesterday morning. Maybe it was because it was 5:30 a.m. and I was still waking up, but I felt confused as I considered the tape and the strand of hair. As I brushed my teeth I muddled over a possible explanation. My daughter Isobel sometimes leaves notes attached to the mirror before she goes to bed (which is almost always long after I do) asking me for a favor (can I print something for her in the morning before school?) or telling me something (there was a gigantic spider crawling on her bed last night!). So I looked around for a note, thinking it slipped out from under the piece of tape. No note. I removed the tape and the hair from the mirror, took a closer look at the hair, and then tossed both into the waste basket. It was time to make coffee, feed Happy-dog, and wake-up Izzy.

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I haven’t been sleeping as well as I’d like or as well as I need to.

One reason, which I will merely mention for now, is that my body has begun to experience some mid-life hormonal turbulence.

For another reason, for the past few nights I’ve been woken up around 2:00 a.m. by dreams in which I am visited by who I understand from within the dream to represent a teacher or elder in my life. In each of the dreams there’s been a different character who has asked me a question or given me some sort of idea about reality to ponder. After a particular wise one transmits their special lesson to me I wake myself up from the dream. And then I lie awake in bed for anywhere from a half hour to a couple of hours, working away on the question or the idea. I’m not a Zen Buddhist, but it is as if I have been given a koan to center my contemplation and meditation practice upon, to carry around inside me as I go about my daily life, until which time I come to some understanding about what the dharma riddle might and might not mean.

Another contribution to my restless nights is the intensified state of excitement in which I find myself. Not only is it the first week of spring term at my university and, thus, the first week of the three courses I teach this term, but it is also the week leading up to – more to the point, the last week before – my “gero-punk world tour” which begins on Friday, April 4^th at the 72^nd Annual Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama Conference in Oakland, CA., and then moves on to the University of Nevada/Reno for Careers in Aging Week and the Sanford Center on Aging Distinguished Lecture Series. I fly home on the 9^th and jump right back into the business of my “normal” life. I’m excited, very, and anxious, more than just a little bit. I don’t think I’m anxious because I’m unprepared (though I almost always wonder if I’m prepared enough for just about everything that happens in my life). For many weeks I’ve been dreaming about, brainstorming alone and with others, and provisionally choreographing the two keynote presentations I’ll be offering. But just days before I take off on this adventure, I’m still working out the details, filling in what happens between the different gestures I intend to make, provisionally staging each presentation. Right now, the two presentations feel very different in quality to me because they are being created with very different audiences in mind, because they have distinct purposes, because I’m playing two very different roles almost back-to-back with little transition time in between. This is an unprecedented experience in my life thus far this time around.

So, I haven’t been sleeping so well. I’m excited. I’m anxious. I’m cold. There are bees buzzing in my chest. I want to take a long nap.

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My mom and I text each other most mornings. Yesterday morning when she asked, “How are you feeling this a.m.?” I responded with: “I am tired and mildly PMSing and nervous about my upcoming presentations but good enough, I think.”

She texted back encouragement in the form of something written on a coffee mug I gave her when I was a teenager. On the mug there’s an image of a mom-caricature, she’s hearty and wearing an apron, wooden spoon in hand like a queenly scepter, chattering on to her unseen daughter. She says, “….now listen to me, I am not just saying this because I am your Mother…you are the smartest, prettiest, nicest girl in the whole world….!”

My mom has repeated this little cheer many times over the years and hearing it now as a grown-up daughter, I giggle and immediately feel more relaxed (though I suspect when I was Isobel’s age I had a different response….).

I might inhabit a mid-life body doing new and strange things, I might be mother to an 18 year old daughter soon to head off to college, I might be embarking upon my own unprecedented and thrilling adventures, but at this moment I feel very much as though I am masquerading as a grown-up. A pep talk from my mommy is exactly what I needed.

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And while we are on the topic of my 18 year old daughter, she did eventually reveal the mystery of the gray hair taped to the bathroom mirror.

Later in the day I received a text from Isobel in which she told me she “HATES!” me.

I suppose I should feel good about the fact that in all of our years together she’s never once told me she hates me. Until today. She hates me not because I forgot to slice the mango I put in her lunch for ease of nibbling, though I did forget. (Yeah, I still pack a lunch for my kid though she’s a senior in high school.) Nor does she hate me — at least she’s not told me that she does– because I am blackmailing her in order to compel her to make good on her promise to clean her room (no more money for clothes or movies or fun with friends unless and until she cleans her room).

She hates me because she discovered her first gray hairs. And apparently it is all my fault.

She’s placing the blame on me though her father has gray hair, too, but he’s in his fifties so she thinks this his  gray hair is normal and uncontroversial. She’s placing the blame on me because I was her age when a few single silver strands began to appear tucked in between my otherwise very dark brown waves. She knows because I told her that I’ve been “going gray” since I was 18 and by the time I was in my early thirties, it was full-on obvious (though no one but me knew because I did such a creative job at concealment). And starting in 2008 she watched me go through what I experienced at the time to be an eternal grueling process of growing out my artificially colored hair to reveal its natural state.

Though she’s supportive of my decision to “go natural” and says she likes my silver hair, she wants nothing to do with any of this when it comes to her own embodied experience. She’s deeply offended by finding gray hairs on her head when she’s barely 18. She says she wants to “stall it for a few decades.” To her, there’s nothing cool about having a few strands of silver hair. Nothing.

I apologized to her, tongue in cheek, for the fact that she inherited some of my genes.

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I wonder what it would be like to live in a time-place-space where we were encouraged to greet changes and transitions with openness and curiosity, rather than with considerable confusion and ambivalence, if not with fear and dread. I imagine that there has been someone somewhere at sometime who, upon seeing their first gray hair (even if they considered its arrival to be premature), felt excited, imagined their gray hair to be a potent harbinger of a new liminal time in their travels through the life course, something to celebrate. Or at least something to just let be.

Just as I have, just as I am still, Isobel will make her way throughout her hopefully long life guided by her own star. She will gather experiences. She will make decisions small and large, including whether or not to conceal her gray hair. She will find the rest of her tribe, her creatures and comrades that will be her chosen family. And even though right now she wishes she hadn’t inherited certain genes from me, in time, she might feel differently.  Or not.

As the wise elder in one of the dharma dreams reminded me: either way, it’s cool.

Holy holy! Whose hand are those typing away on my laptop keyboard? I could swear that the vintage star sapphire ring on the left middle finger and the wedding band on the right middle finger belong to me. Hey! That watch looks identical to the one Isobel and her dad gave me for my birthday a few years ago! What the hell is going on?

As I observe the hands move across the keyboard making words on the screen I see tiny little creases and pleats on the surface of the skin. I see some evidence – little variations in color and texture — that the person to whom these hands belong usually remembered to wear sunscreen but sometimes didn’t. They seem to be pretty agile hands—I’m impressed with the smooth and confident fashion with which they fleetly slide from letter to letter on the keyboard. But I’m even more certain that these hands can’t be my hands because the hands I’m watching write these words look unmistakably like grown-up hands. By which I mean they could even be the hands of one of my older female family members. Except that many of the women in my family have some arthritis or tendonitis in their hands and they certainly can’t type as fast as I can (well, maybe my mom can).

Either something really weird has happened — some partial body-snatching situation — and these hands are able to tap into my mind, accessing and then typing every secret though I’ve been thinking about them, or….YIKES!…these hands are my hands!

When did this happen? And more to the point, how did I miss it? I’m Ms. Gero-Punk, the close observer of my own and others’ travels through the life course, so how did I miss the fact that time has inscribed itself upon the back of my hands? To riff on a question posed by the authors of one of the articles I use in my Embodiment in Later Life course, how do we know we are aging when we can’t see it happening in real-time?

Well, one way we know  we are aging is that suddenly we see our hands-in-motion in a certain light and realize they are no longer new hands. They are mother hands. They are grandmother hands.

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Sometimes it is my feet that take me by surprise, though the surprise they give me has less to do with where I am in my particular travels through the life course and more to do with reminding me about a kind of embodied legacy of which I am a recipient.

I’ll be ambling along with Happy-the-dog and I’ll look down at my feet and feel confused because instead of my feet, I see my grandmother’s feet. My gramma and her daughter, my mother, are both known for their extraordinary walking talents.  There’s a particular way their feet look, clad in their “tennies,” when they are perambulating. Not every time, but sometimes as I’m walking along my feet look exactly like their feet look, like how their feet have looked during the many walks I’ve taken with each of them since the time I was a little girl. I can’t really describe the jarring immediacy of the experience, nor can I tell you how their feet look; it is a feet-in-motion thing, it is simultaneously physical and energetic and spiritual. It is as though generations of women in my family are matrilineally connected in this way, through our feet.

But as I realize once I’m over the shock of seeing my gramma’s feet attached to my legs, the truth is that one of the ways in which we – my gramma, mother, and me — are connected is through the pleasure we get from the simple activity of walking for no other reason than to be out in the world, in our bodies, moving.

She was the first person who caught my attention when I walked into the store. She was pushing one of those tiny shopping carts made for little kids. I watched as she bent down to place a bottle of olive oil in the cart. I thought how strange and cute that a grown woman was using a tiny shopping cart to do her grocery shopping. I wondered if she was shopping within a tight budget and using the tiny cart as a way to constrain how many items she purchased. I secretly admired her look: knee socks and granny boots and a modest but edgy skirt and the kind of orange curly hair one of my cousins has that I’ve always been envious of. Then it occurred to me that the woman was probably the mother of a tiny person, thus the tiny cart.

Only later in my grocery shopping did I receive confirmation that the woman was in fact the mother of a tiny person. I was in the produce section looking for shallots when I first heard and then saw a miniature male version of the woman. How could I miss him? He was stumbling and ricocheting down the aisle, past the citrus and avocados on the right and nuts and dried fruit on the left. He held a small container of yogurt in one hand and a plastic spoon in the other – his snack for the car ride home? – and he was engaged in an animated, loud monologue as he followed his mother, who was quite a ways in the distance but definitely keeping an eye on him (and still pushing the little cart.). I think I got the gist of his commentary though I didn’t understand a word he said. He was new to walking and seeing the world from the vantage point that walking allows so he had a lot to observe and report on. And he was new to language, he was in that awesomely odd phase during which little humans sputter, babble and utter their way through the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of this strange planet they’ve landed on.

My attention was arrested by him. I couldn’t stop watching him. So as to not freak out his mother with my intense fascination with her child, I walked closer to where she stood observing him and waiting for him to remember she existed. I caught her eye, smiled and raised my eye brows. She smiled and raised her eye brows back at me.

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As I understand it, at most we spend a couple of hours a night dreaming. But if I didn’t know better I would say I was dreaming almost the entire night last night. I don’t know if I had one big dream or a series of interconnected dream-episodes. Over and over again, I was offering reassurance or encouragement to persons who from within the dream I recognized to be my students. Inside the dream I wondered why so many students were struggling, not with the subject matters they were engaged in learning, but with confidence about their capacities as learners, about whether being a student was a righteous pursuit, and whether they were up to the challenge. So I gave pep talk after pep talk to a parade of discouraged and overwhelmed students.

I felt perplexed inside the dream because I knew with complete certitude that each and every student who came before me was amazing and capable in their own singular way. So that’s what I told each student who appeared before me: that they were special, and wonderful, and were doing great even if they didn’t feel as though they were.  And I also told each and every one of them that they were engaged in a major error in thinking because if they were measuring their learning and development – as well as their fundamental quality as a person — against how confident they felt at any given time or holding on to some expectation about the smoothness and ease of their learning journey, I could guarantee they’d find themselves in a constant state of disappointment.

My dream-self’s punch-line to my dream-students was that the deeper they went into the process of learning and transformation, the less security and certainty they’d discover.

The alarm woke me right as I was about to launch into yet another round of telling what’s what.

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I suspect I had this particular dream because I spent most of the past three days reading (and giving a lot of feedback on) student papers. I had a total of 45 students in my winter term courses, so that means at least 45 papers. I love reading students’ papers and offering comments and feedback. It is never a chore or a burden. It is a pleasure and an honor! Each integrative essay, each inquiry prospectus or synthesis and action plan I read is an occasion for engaging with and getting to know even better the particular student who wrote it. Sure, I discover a lot about what a student has (and sometimes hasn’t) come to understand about the “content” we explored in a particular course. I discover what kind of thinker and writer they are and the areas in which they might improve, if they desire to do so. But my most exciting discovery is of the whole complex self each student brings to their learning – their own particular bundle of worries and aspirations, hopes and anxieties. I find out about their lived experiences, the internal and external challenges they are facing; sometimes I find out just a bit, sometimes I find out a ton.

One of the very best things I get to do as a teacher is to reflect back to my students how they look from where I stand: resilient; quirky (in a good way!); creative; keen; skillful; compassionate; fascinating; committed; full of great ideas and unlimited potential to bring beauty and goodness to a confused and hurting world.

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William James, one of my intellectual ancestors, is the guy who said the thing about a small human being’s world being characterized by “blooming, buzzing confusion.” I remember the first time I heard this phrase, when I was a student in an undergraduate child development course, because I had a major and immediate somatic reaction upon hearing it: my face flushed and my heart pounded. My body has always been really great at letting me know things and what my body let me know then was that there was something about James’ phrase that captured how I felt at that time in my own development.

I had just barely exited adolescence and embarked upon young adulthood and I felt completely disoriented and ill-equipped, both dull and hysterical. My confusion triggered not insignificant anxiety. I wanted to be saved from life’s blooming and buzzing. I needed comfort. I had the constant urge to nap. I took many aimless walks. If I had had access to a tub, I probably would have floated in the bath to avoid doing homework.

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Perhaps this is true only for me, but thus far traveling through this life course, I’ve had many ongoing opportunities to experience “blooming, buzzing confusion.” The full-on adult version is different than the toddler version, no doubt, because who we are and what the world asks from us – and what we ask of ourselves and from the world — is different when we are 47 (or 67) compared to when we are 4.

Though some things change very little despite becoming a full-on adult. Most days I do a pretty decent job of passing for a grown-up but the secret is that I often feel like a toddler, like I’m getting acclimated to this planet. I feel wobbly when I walk and I wonder if anyone understands my excited babbling. I point a lot in an attempt to command attention. And when I get overwhelmed or too tired, I’m prone to melting down. If I could collapse upon the floor kicking and screaming, I would.

This experience of being and becoming human is wild and complex at every stage and in every phase, from beginning to end and in between. Wild, complex, and confusing! What I know, though I often forget it, is that this blooming, buzzing confusion can’t be avoided. Nor will experiencing it destroy me. Actually, the opposite seems to be true: it is through beholding and entering into the blooming, buzzing confusion as it continually manifests in the world and within me that my deepest learning happens.

That’s the teaching the tiny red-headed human gave me yesterday. He reminded me of the transformative potential of practicing openness, curiosity, and presence to whatever is happening.

But if openness, curiosity, and presence seem momentarily beyond my capacity, I know I can comfort myself with a walk, a nap and a bath, in this or any order.