At the same rate that I can feel my youth slipping through my hands like a 100% polyester going-out top from Forever 21, I can feel my daughters’ youth accumulating in theirs.
At 11pm, when the photo book app glitched and deleted my entire project, I took a deep. DEEP. Breath. And started over. There was nothing else to be done, and anyway, I liked scrolling back through my phone, back to the day my older daughter was born. Back to the beginning. Even in those bleary days a mere eight years ago, I’m radiating a kind of youth that I’ve since lost, or misplaced, or that has been slowly siphoned away from me.
I was making the photo book for my dad’s 75th birthday. He’ll read this and rib me about my delusion that I’m getting old. I do realize that I’m not geriatric. But I can imagine that it’s strange for him to see his daughter with lines on her face and back pain, long past the first flush of youth.
At the same rate that I can feel my youth slipping through my hands like a 100% polyester going-out top from Forever 21, I can feel my daughters’ youth accumulating in theirs. Every day they reach out and grab more. They pull it into themselves and it shines out of their perfect pores. At the beginning, they were grabbing it directly from the source: me. They sucked away my cells and my nutrients and my energy and my milk. Now that we’re no longer physically connected, they seem to metabolize their youth-giving energy from the air.
My youth, my youth is yours I sang as I drove. A middle-aged woman singing about her youth—even in the solitude of the empty car I felt embarrassed. I’d added the song to my running playlist because it has a beat drop that makes me feel like I can sprint through a brick wall, a feeling I also need when I’m running late for dance class pickup.
Now I’m going to embarrass myself further by writing the words Troye Sivan—an artist who I as a Geriatric Millennial have so business speaking about—on the internet to make a point. Troye Sivan is 31 now (a baby), but he released Youth when he was 22 (a fetus). I can’t imagine, at 22, knowing that I was spending my youth as it happened. I’m not sure I would have wanted that knowledge. A middle school bosom buddy, a high school boyfriend, a college dorm room, a sticky dive bar dance floor: that’ll be 10 units of youth each, never to be seen again. Was it worth it?
I imagine the sparkly trail of my youth scattered like the Milky Way across the Midwest, from Grand Rapids to South Bend to Madison. And then in Chicago, two supernovas: Baby 1 and Baby 2. My daughters are walking around with the cells of my detonated youth in their bones, their fingers and toes, their golden hair. My youth is theirs. It was worth it.
After the song ends, Spotify queues up sound-alikes: Green Light by Lorde; August by Taylor Swift; End of Beginning by Djo. Songs about being on a precipice between longing and love, between youth and whatever comes next.
Most days I feel like the shiny silver skeleton with a disco-ball pumpkin for a head that’s currently sitting in my living room. He may be a skeleton, but he’s ready to party. I may be accumulating aches and pains, but I can still run sprints while listening to Troye Sivan.
My daughters love to play with the skeleton, putting him into different tableaus around the house. He doesn’t fight back, just sits there smiling while they manipulate his joints. They set him up to watch Hocus Pocus with us, a movie about older women literally sucking the youth out of children. The girls were spooked by the witches but I only felt empathy.
My eight-year-old is tipping over the precipice of childhood into tweendom; her younger sister isn’t far behind. They spend and multiply the youth I gave them so freely that it creates a reflective glow, as if the direction of travel has reversed and their youth is shining back into me.
This week I ran my fastest mile in years, powered by my playlist of youth and longing. I don’t know what I’m running toward, but when I came home I caught a glimpse of myself in good light—flushed face, strong legs, sharpened mind. Behind me, the skeleton grinned and glittered.
