Time watches from the shadow

JPod points to a very moving post in which a young professional woman nearing middle age, husbandless and childless, opens a vein to talk about how much that hurts.

I was not one hour ago e-mailing a friend to tell him that at the ripe old age of 40, I spent much of my weekend sleeping off having stayed up all night on Thursday, working on my Evangelical Press Association speech (which I'd finished earlier, but me being me, I can't leave well enough alone). I used to pull all-nighters with no problem. But now, I just can't do it. Julie's eight years younger than I, and still we both wonder, given how physically and mentally tiring it is raising kids (especially for women, obviously), why on earth people would wait till their mid-30s or later to start having children, if they had any other choice.

I think we fool ourselves into thinking that we can delay making these choices, in part because we are terrified of losing our freedom -- and because we live in a media-driven popular culture that tells us we can have it all, when we want it. I suspect it's all crap (or as Nora Ephron put it in the NYT Magazine yesterday, all these books about how great the sex and everything else is as you get older "just make people feel bad. Because it’s not true.") Nobody wants to be told that, of course, because it makes them worry that they wasted time that they can't get back. So they tell themselves that there won't be any price for having delayed marriage and/or childbirth.

But there will. If I thought that I was just starting a family now, at (only) 40, I would be pretty dispirited.

There is a lot to be said for the freedom we have today to marry when we want to, and not to be conformed to the expectations that our parents and grandparents had in their time, that you had to marry well before age 30, or be thought a weirdo. I was re-reading Corrie ten Boom's "The Hiding Place" recently, and Corrie, living in Holland between the wars, considered herself an old maid at 29. And she was. I didn't marry until I was nearly 31, and I'm very glad I didn't face social pressure to marry earlier, and to make possibly a bad match. On the other hand, I was so antsy about keeping my options open that if I hadn't been utterly bowled over by Julie when I met her, I probably would have found some neurotic reasons to avoid commitment. It does seem to be the curse of my generation -- longing for roots, stability, commitment, but fearing the burdens that come with same. You cannot go through life maintaining ironic detachment. You have to commit at some point, or Time makes a fool of you and all your hopes and dreams.

Of course there are many, many people who are single and childless through no desire of their own, but because that's simply the way their lives have turned out. I thought my life was going that way. Until it didn't. I met the woman who was to be my wife entirely by accident, and the only thing I did was to respond to the opportunity in front of me. I was so crazy in love that I didn't have the presence of mind to have done my usual routine of talking myself out of commitment. But see, I know myself well enough to understand that I got lucky -- real lucky -- that the right woman came along and shook me out of my neurotic self. It was all grace. Entirely. All I could do was say yes to it.

I guess the point I want to make here is that I wish people in their 20s and 30s could appreciate how different life begins to look when you reach middle age. Perhaps those who are offered moments of grace, and the chance to fall in love forever, to marry and start a family, will give it more thought than they otherwise would. We can't hope to know how our lives would have turned out had me made this choice instead of that choice. We are not omniscient. But to delay choosing is a choice, one that our mortality entails unavoidable consequences, for better or for worse. One is reminded of the brutal lines from Auden:

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.