On Saturday, I had a tea party for six friends who donate food to the Berkeley Food Pantry through the Berkeley Neighborhood Food Project. I call them "the greenbaggers," because everybody gets a green shopping bag to fill every two months. I collect the bags and take them to the Pantry.
Oh, we had fun! Two cakes from Masse's Bakery (flourless chocolate cake and spice cheesecake, which was much lighter than it sounds) and a bunch of age 60+ women, all liberal, each with a gratifying sense of humor, and all of them generous. Some of them had never met, but no matter. The party lasted three hours.
Did I think to take a group picture? Yes, but you can't see much.
The greenbaggers: Ann, Anne, Suzanne, Valerie, Claudia, Karen. Plus cakes.
The neighborhood food project now provides about half the food distributed by the Pantry. It's so satisfying to see the food I bought in from the group on a Saturday given out to clients on Monday, when I volunteer. Last month, I sent out an alert to the group about the need for dry cereal for families, and they donated so much that our combined-weight total was the lowest it's ever been. Cheerios aren't very heavy.
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Yesterday I had one of those lightbulb moments when you wonder why in the hell it took you so long to figure something out.
I was lying on a massage table having my neck and shoulders kneaded. The young woman with the magic fingers was talking to me about some issues in her life and mentioned that she and her husband have decided they won't have another child (they have a two-year old). She said there are many reasons, some financial, and it just isn't going to happen, which makes her sad because she's 40, and this is it.
Grieving the loss of a child you might have had is something I can relate to. I have no children, by choice (my temperament, lack of patience, desire to focus on other things), but occasionally I feel sad about the loss. For a while, maybe right up until yesterday, whenever I felt a twinge of sadness about it, I'd think I might have made the wrong choice.
But yesterday, listening to this young woman, I realized that you can feel sad about something and still know that your choice was the right one. In my case, I've revisited that choice periodically when I'm around small children, and never have I come away thinking I would have been well-suited to being a mother. Even the adorable girls next door (now 24 and 26), who so enriched my life, were never mine to be responsible for 24/7. Their mother, Laura, did all the work.
The young woman and I commiserated. I told her that for me, the hardest time was when I was 38-42, when I knew window of opportunity was closing. It would get easier, I told her. You can have a fine life without children or with only one. Not that you sometimes won't feel sad about the loss of what might have been. But it doesn't mean you should doubt your choice.
Driving home, I could breathe a lot more deeply, in part due to the massage, but also: Why had it taken so long to figure this out? Maybe because I'd never talked to a younger woman in the throes of making that choice, and I'd never articulated what I already knew, on some level.
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Thank-you, Not Your Daughter's Jeans!
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