Lately, I’ve noticed that by the end of the day, my brain is tired. Like, so, so tired. I used to work long hours into the night, prepping and planning, grading papers. Or doing PTA stuff! Or copy editing! But these days there is no way. Just making a new retake test for my 1A class felt like a horrible slog. My brain just doesn’t seem to have the stamina it used to. Is that just because I’m getting older? I’m only 42. Some women, many where I live, are having their first or second kids at 42. They are getting no sleep and continuing to work at their jobs. How do they do it, when I hardly feel like I can get through the week with my reasoning in tact?
My husband and I have a lot of friends who are just now having kids. We talk a lot about the benefits and drawbacks of having them earlier and later. (Have I written about this before?) It was pretty hard on us to have them at 30 and 33. My husband wasn’t really ready. We, as a couple, certainly weren’t ready. We felt like we’d barely enjoyed our lives together and we were already throwing kids into the mix. We also had so much less money. Paying for childcare was a real hardship back then.
But our parents helped us out a lot, and they could do that because they were younger. It’s clear that now, in their 70s, they wouldn’t be able to handle two young kids like they did back then (and my in-laws have confirmed as much after every visit with their now 3 and 5-year-old grandchildren). Of course all our friends who are having kids now are much more financially stable, so paying for the childcare we got for free from grandparents is much more feasible. We also wonder if it was easier to give up our no-kids lifestyle since we’d had less chance to enjoy it. Or if actually it’d be easier to give it up if you’d lived that way for a long time and felt ready for something new?
Obviously this is all a pointless thought exercise. Very few people really get to “choose” when they have kids. I suppose we could have, but I suspected we’d have trouble conceiving and so I pushed us to start early and when I found out at 33 I had the ovarian reserve of a 45 year old, my suspicions were confirmed and I felt incredibly grateful that we rushed into it. That my husband was willing to rush into it.
But the real point of this is that these days my brain is tired. And I can only imagine how tired it would be if I had a newborn or toddler and were properly sleep deprived. Now I’m just menopause and stress-induced sleep deprived, which are not the same. When I think back on all I took on back when my kids were little – copy-editing for the GGMG magazine, taking writing classes at Berkeley Extension, running the PTA at my kids old school – and what I feel capable of taking on now, it’s like I don’t even recognize the person I was. How did I have all that energy? How did my brain keep working so late into the night?
I honestly can barely finish this post, which I started in November and just reopened tonight. Sometimes it bums me out, how much less I can do now. But most of the time I’m just too tired to care.
THANK YOU.
Being ancient myself, I was always totally bowled over by all you did and got done in tiny amounts of time. It routinely made me remember what I was doing at similar ages with kids your ages….. it was clearly impossible, AND YET, I did it. All I can say is in a few decades (which will pass SO FAST and yet in tiny incremental steps) you will look back to these years and be impressed by all you juggled in a pandemic situation. I watch you and other parents today and am blown away by all the stress you deal with each and every day and hour.
SO yes, naturally, you are deeply tired. It is hard work. More money does help, but hiring and employing help is also full of stress so it is not a perfect cure-all.
It is clearly impossible but you simply ARE doing it anyway.
Glad you are admitting it….. helps me grant myself grace and be gentler about the ways I was human raising 2 alone. (They both are amazing wonderful adults and parents!)
Interesting. My husband and I have been together since age 20, started trying (and failing) to have kids at 34, and finally had them via IVF at 36 and almost 40. Being an older parent is VERY HARD, but you are so right – we can afford to pay the big $$$ for more childcare now, parents are too old to help much. I will say it has been a big and very difficult adjustment to our professional and personal lives, as well as our relationship, to have kids after all the years together without kids. We have not figured that out at all, particularly maintaining our relationship, while being around our kids. They’re still young (7 and 3) so hopefully it will be easier when they are older…