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“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
I’ve been slowly piecing together logic and math in a kind of rudimentary numerical summary, arranged in a spreadsheet I nicknamed ‘Prognosicator alpha’ — it tells us how our student loan payment decisions affect Essie’s college fund and how that affects our retirement — and looking at a grid of all those years and their numbers gives me the sense that this can’t possibly be my life, so easily moved in time from age 29 to 65 that the rows don’t even take up the height of my laptop screen.
As I’ve told Mykala before and as I reiterate now: I have no idea what I’m doing. Not in a small way, like how do I teach Ess about inequality and the way people can behave in frightful ways. Not in a small way, like what’s wrong with our water softener or how to repair it. Not in a small way, like why can’t I just call the insurance company so we get the Jetta’s windshield fixed. No. I don’t know what I’m doing in a BIG way.
A big way, like what will I teach Ess about trading time for money. Trading autonomy for security. Trading future comfort for present pain. Are those even the real choices… or are they straw men, false dichotomies?
A big way: is there an escape from the strictures of consumerism and society? Do we wish to escape? Should we?
A big way, like what even is our full menu of choices?
A big way, like why is it that philosophical understanding puts the events of our lives on such a grand cosmic stage that it feels like nothing matters?
I don’t know what I’m doing.
Comments
Justin +1
You are not alone in this.