The Beauty of Being 40

I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror. I’m wearing a Nordic print Sherpa hat, no make-up; I’m sweaty from tromping through the snow down by the river. I kind of look like a 15 year old boy as I tend to when my head is covered and my face is bare. (Come on! Let me have my delusions!) I laugh. I love how ridiculous I look. I love how happy I look! Glamour chicks have nothing on me. I’m beautiful!

This is something I never would have thought even just 5 years ago. I think I can safely say that we’ve all heard the old adage that true beauty comes from the inside. I think I can also safely say that I was not alone in thinking: yeah, whatever, give me my make-up and hair products. But now, at 40, freshly out of a Very Bad Relationship and ecstatic about my hard won happiness? I not only get it, I see it. There it is. Radiating right out of my sweaty, bare, Sherpa-hat-surrounded face. And it’s beautiful.

Seeing this with my own eyes makes me think of all the other wisdom I’ve finally come to embrace. For starters, I am Paula and I am a recovering Drama Queen. I used to think: Why do it the easy way when you can make it really, really hard? Yeah, I’m over that now. Mostly because, honestly, I’m too tired to care. What my wise old self has discovered is that most drama is just a lot of ado about nothing. Drama is just a way to feel like I’m in control. Which, save myself, I most certainly am not.

Once I grasped that control is just an illusion, it’s been very, very easy to let go of things I cannot control. I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about what other people were doing and how I could get them not to do it. Like I didn’t just have a choice in the matter! I couldn’t control them but I can control me. Just walk away, Sister!

For a long time, I labored under the misconception that if people treated me badly it was because of who I was and that it was up to me to fix it. How silly was that? It was hard for me to grasp the concept that if someone sucks, it’s not because of me. How people act towards me and the things they say to me is far more telling about them than it is about me.

I have also realized that it’s not my business what people think about me. Not everyone is going to like me. Some people won’t for good reasons, some people for bad reasons and some people for no reason at all. That’s okay. Again, it tells me more about them generally than it does about me. Live and let live, I say. I probably wouldn’t have liked them anyway so they’re just saving me a lot of grief, really.

I’ve also learned not to take things so personally, because you know what? They just aren’t most of the time. For most people, I’m just not that important. And that’s okay. Actually, it’s more than okay, it a relief! I don’t have to let other people’s actions have such an impact on my happiness.

I know now that personal responsibility reaps massive rewards. This is two-fold actually. First, I am responsible just for my own actions and my own happiness. No one else’s. Also a massive relief! Second, when I screw up, owning it and sincerely apologizing works wonders. Especially with my children. Rather than losing face with them I have gained credibility with them and respect from them. I also find that I screw up a lot less with them because the guilt of past failures no longer haunts me.

None of this stuff has come easy. I try to explain it to others sometimes. They don’t get it. I don’t expect them to. I didn’t. Sometimes only time, experience and many, many failures make sense out of all these simple truths.

If this is getting older, then bring it on. Because happiness like this? Radiating out of my sweaty face? Me loving me, my children, my life, my family and friends totally and completely? Finally not being scared, lonely, insecure and hurt? Worth every terrible, wonderful, rotten, lovely minute. I can’t wait for the next 40 years.

Conversations I Never Imagined Having: The Word Police, Part 2

One of the many joys of parenting is the conversations I have with my children that I never in my wildest dreams imagined having. I knew there would be talks about sex, drugs and their crazy music (I tell you, my daughter’s penchant for light rock drives me crazy! Can we have some White Stripes up in here?). What I didn’t imagine was vocabulary. Yes, we are having a rehash of the Word Police, only this time, the shoe is on the other foot. I am the Word Police! Me! Of the Swearing Like a Drunken Sailor Dishonor Society!

My mother is now laughing her ass off. Payback is a bitch!

The girl-child wants to negotiate the language she is allowed to use. Fair enough. I guess. However, I really feel like she’s reached her blue language limits with the last negotiation.

At the ripe old age of 10, the girl-child wanted permission to use the word “crap”. After scolding me for years for using it. The thing is, I’d never really explicitly forbidden her to use that word although I didn’t really condone it either. I’m just not comfortable actually giving her permission to use vulgar words. It seems like a slippery slope of negotiations I do not want to have. Better if we don’t discuss it and slowly over time, say like 40 years or so, it just creeps into her vocabulary and by that time, I’m too deaf (given my family history) to notice anyway.

She pled her case, thusly reaffirming her nickname, The Little Lawyer. I caved. I actually gave my daughter permission to say “crap”. That just feels…wrong.

Soon after, the 5 year old boy-child wanted permission to say “crap” as well. I couldn’t do it. Slippery slope. However, we settled on my giving him permission to say “stupid” as long as it wasn’t about people. This after he chastised me for saying ”stupid” about inanimate objects that refused to work. He took great delight in saying, “That’s stupid, that’s so stupid.” Little does he know that in some circles what he’s really saying is, “That’s so cool!”

Now, the girl-child at 11 and in middle school wants to renegotiate her allowed blue vocabulary usage.

I think why? I really don’t want to do that. Can’t we just have the sex talk again? Where it goes horribly awry and I giggle like a 6 year old remembering my 6 year old self learning about sex on the bus? I’d much rather sit through an awkward conversation about how oral sex has nothing to do with talking where I try to be parental and not giggle like a middle-schooler myself at the completely disgusted look my daughter’s face. Talking about highly inappropriate sex acts 7^th graders are experimenting with seems highly preferable to negotiating swear words!

It’s because I’m a hypocrite and I know it. Drugs? Not worried about being a hypocrite. Teenage sex? Not worried. Underage drinking? Nope. Of course, I’m not doing those things anymore. As far as I’m concerned, I did them. They are bad. Don’t do them. She’s just lucky that I survived my teens at all to be able to share this hard earned wisdom with her. But the swearing? Sometimes like a sailor? Still guilty. And even though I told her she had to be 21 to use those words (oh, it worked so well for so long), she’s gone out in the world now and learned that isn’t true. Damn you world!

Now she wants to say “frickin’”. Another word I say in place of something else I should not say in front of my children. But it sounds bad. I can’t do it. No permission to say a word that so easily slips to something else. Can’t she just say stupid?

She Little Lawyers up. I waffle. Then the boy-child chimes in. He’d like permission to say “crap”. The slope! It’s so slippery! I run from the room yelling, “Lalala!” with my fingers in my ears.

That ought to confuse them enough for a while. Meanwhile, the old rule still stands: You have to be 21 to use those words. Can’t legally drink, can’t legally swear. Seems fair to me.

Crying in My Fritters

I spent much of my formative years with my grandmother. My mother’s mother. No daycare for me while Mom worked. My grandma and I shared many, many activities through the years. She taught me to sew. Didn’t take. She taught me to knit and crochet. Nope. We did crafts and played cards (her favorite). And despite my feelings about some of these things, I value them all and the time I got to spend with her. But the thing that stands out above all others is the Christmas Deep-frying.

I know! Christmas Deep-frying! And we aren’t even from the South. Not even a little bit.

I think it was my favorite because of the treats we made: rosettes, fattigman and apple fritters among others. I love them all! Good Scandinavian fare even though we are predominantly German. We would set aside a whole day and fry until we had enough to stock a bakery. For the whole holiday season.

For years after she died, I missed the Christmas Deep-frying. It made the holidays a little bland. It wasn’t until I owned my own house that I started doing my own Christmas Deep-frying. However, despite the fact that I had a whole box of her cookbooks and recipe books (literally 1000’s of recipes!), I couldn’t find her recipes for these treats. Chances are she had it in her head. I combined several recipes for fattigman to get something I felt approximated my grandmother’s recipe. This worked for everything else too, except the apple fritters.

It took me years to find even one fritter recipe and then it wasn’t even so much a recipe as merely a list of ingredients. I wasn’t sure this was the recipe she used, but I suspected it was. It was another several years before I connected my lack of fritter making experience with my love affair with Google. I found a recipe that seemed about right, copied down the frying instructions and called my mom.

“I’m making apple fritters!” I crowed.

A pause. “Okay?”

She doesn’t love the Christmas Deep-frying the way that I do.

I set out to make the fritters with my kids. I mixed together the ingredients and started deep-frying! Right off, it was all wrong. The dough didn’t drop in so much as drizzle in. In my mind, apple fritters were round. I didn’t have round. I had a dragon and one that looked like a chicken. I tried one spoon, two spoons, a cookie scoop, a measuring spoon and a serving spoon trying to get the fritters to look right. My kids were anxious to try it out but every time I dropped dough in the oil I got more and more upset. This one looks like an abacus. This one looks like a tree. This is not right! I finally sent my kids out to play in the snow and called my mother.

“They’re not working!” I complained. “They’re runny and not round!”

“I don’t remember them being round,” she said. “I think they’re supposed to be weird shaped.”

“This one looks like a bird!” I wailed.

Yes, a fritter that looked like a bird sent me over the edge and I was seriously crying in my fritters.

Now I’ve heard myths in books and movies about other cultures where crying in your dough while baking (or deep-frying as the case may be) is a good thing. However, I’m quite certain that there is NOTHING in my Nordic heritage about tears and dough. It won’t bring me love or make me dream of lost loved ones. We’re just not like that. Crying? Are you kidding? My family already wants to send me out east because they think that I (and my emotions) would fit in far better with those exuberantly emotional East-Coasters. Of course, those people would send me back in a heartbeat for being a stoic ice queen. But I digress…

I was so upset that I couldn’t remember what the apple fritters were supposed to look like. I could remember standing at the stove but I couldn’t remember how the finished goods were supposed to turn out. It wasn’t about the fritters. It was my fading memories of my grandma. What else have I forgotten? All I have left of her is my memories and it’s devastating to think those may be going, too. It’s like losing her over and over again, a little bit at a time.

“Add more flour,” my mom said. "Grandma always put extra flour in everything." And I did. It helped some and I got through the rest of the fritter making, tear free but sad. I missed my grandma so, so much. Nearly 20 years after her death and all I wanted to do was call her. Why is there no phone in the afterlife?

People who say you get over someone dying? Purely ignorant. Or insane. You never get over it. All you do is learn to live with it. An emotional scar. Sometimes when you least expect it, the scar rips open a little. It makes me sad and happy at the same time. It’s sad that she’s gone, but there’s joy in remembering someone I loved so much also.

I know it’s the act of the Christmas Deep-frying that honors my grandmother, not how they turn out or whether I use the right recipe. Doing this with my kids keeps my grandma present for me. Hopefully, some day (a really, really, REALLY long time from now) my kids will do this with their kids or grandkids and remember me.