Me My Mom My Grandma

Out of sheer curiosity I decided to create a spreadsheet that would automatically calculate for me the age of both my mom and grandma (aka my parents) at every year of my life so far, alongside my own age, so that I can see how old they were when I was their age…. or something like that. Trust me it makes sense in my head lol. The point is to re-contextulize certain events from my childhood and adolescence by comparing my age to that of my parents at the time. I don’t think I could conceive of this if I weren’t already in the middle years of my life. Anyway…

So I will be turning 43 in just a few weeks, and when my mom was 43 years old I was 18 and graduating from high school. My grandma would have been 65 years old, prime retirement age. It’s unfathomable to me now at my current age having a teenager, let alone one that was graduating from high school. A few years before that – I have always clocked it back to the age of 14 – I experienced my first bout of depression. I’ll use depression as a blanket term here because in the work I’ve done in recent years I can see how much more complex my mental health situation was back then. But for now we’ll generalize it as depression. It was around this age I attempted to take my life for the first time, and around the same age I started hyperfixating on music as an outlet – emotionally, creatively, and in other ways, too. While I was starting to go through all of that, my mom was transitioning from her late 30’s into her early 40’s, and likely experiencing perimenopause, which is where I currently am in life. I struggle enough as a mom with a pre-k aged son, and I can’t at the same time imagine having a teenaged daughter who is going through some of the worst parts of adolescence.

There’s no profound conclusion that I’m inching my way to here. At least not yet. Reflecting on your past means something new as we age, you know? Perhaps being able to recontextualize those major events from my life through this different lens will help me process the feelings that come along with it differently. Maybe even in ways I couldn’t have done before when I was younger and less… mature? As they say, time will tell.