Wintertime nighs...

I am mourning my lost youth. In belly dancing class tonight, I gazed at the smooth, flat stomachs of the girls around me and bemoaned the fact that I will never have one again. Marie-Eve’s expanding belly, and in fact all my acquaintances who are in the process of reproducing, remind me that I will never, ever do that again, that even the remote possibility is closed off to me. It’s not that I want to have more children, I don’t, instead a certain chapter of my life is finished, a part that lasted quite a long time and can never, ever be reopened. I look at all the things I sacrificed so that I could have children and raise them, and realize that I can’t go back and pick them up now. I didn’t pursue an active singing career or any other career, in fact, in order to be a stay-at-home mom. I probably wasn’t good enough anyway. But now that I actually am good enough, it’s too late, because getting into the business is a young person’s game. At my stage, if I’m not already a household word, I’m nothing.

I admit, the ravages of time are becoming more obvious every time I look in the mirror. I came away from belly dancing tonight aching in my lower back and hips. The left side of my neck is painful whenever I let my head fall forward or look to that side. There are new aches and pains every time I get up from a position I’ve held for a while. My body is betraying me.

And yet, I don’t feel old. In my mind, I’m still 24, attractive, energetic. I’m still fun! I don’t know what other people see when they look at me. I see my mother’s face superimposed on my own. I see every single line and wrinkle, the skin where it’s losing its elasticity, the wattles forming under my chin and my sagging cheeks. Does everyone see them? A girl in my Latin class today said she couldn’t believe I had a son who was old enough to be “calling home.” So maybe it’s only I who am so hypercritical.

In other news, I dropped off Hubby’s and my passport renewals at the federal building in town this morning. There was a 40-minute wait, so I went back outside and browsed the shops, most of which are still having January sales, and bought a cute pair of hand-made, fur-lined slippers marked down to $15. The young woman who served me, enormously pregnant, asked me if I was from France. I said no. She herself was from Morocco and was trying to place my accent. If she’d been québecoise, she would have known right away I was an anglophone. So I explained to her that I had learned my French in Ontario from anglophones who had studied in France. That more or less explains it. But I was flattered nonetheless that she mistook me for a native French speaker.

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