Call me Peter Pan

Reading my friend teranika’s diary tonight, and thinking about my own future, I am struck by how settled I have become. She described briefly where she was 20, 15, 10 and five years ago, all different places and situations. Twenty years ago I was here, as I have been all the intervening years. In fact, when we moved to the Townships in 1987, we thought it would be just for one year. My husband had graduated with his D.M.A. in 1985, and this was followed by a year’s sabbatical-leave job in Manitoba, and then another in Ontario. The position in L’ville was again a temporary billet, and we never unpacked completely.

How strange, then, to find ourselves still here all this time later. I never threw out all our boxes (at least the ones that fit LP’s), and there are still some in the basement that have never been emptied, those containing memorabilia that date back to my university days, odds and sods that I could never bring myself to throw out. The first year in L’ville we rented the house of the professor my husband was replacing; the next two years we lived in a house on campus. The following summer we moved into our very own home, and we have become very entrenched here. I look around at all the furniture, the bookshelves laden with books, the art on the walls, the kitchen with every cupboard and drawer stuffed with stuff, and my mind balks at the idea of packing all this up and moving again. It would be a gargantuan task.

On the other hand, my mother has to do the same thing, and she has lived in her house for 57 years, 40 years longer than I have been in mine. How much more difficult will it be to sort through her belongings and start discarding that which she can’t take with her to her new home. I find the whole idea mind numbing. I seriously do not want to think about it, and yet I know that much of that decision making will fall in my lap. I am dreading it.

There are certain aspects of being an adult that require one to grow up, to take responsibility, to put aside a childish attitude, and this is one of them. I have managed, thus far, to avoid those kinds of decisions. It looks as though I can avoid them no longer. My children are on the verge of being launched, and now I have to look after my own mother. I am frightened and worried, both for her and for myself. I have been the child all these years. I am not ready to be the adult.

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