I'm pre-emptively claiming fifty

I couldn’t write in September – the two jobs made everything just too busy. I was so tired I messed up at both places of employment, but not so bad as to get reprimanded or anything. It became clear to me by the end of the month though that I couldn’t keep going at top speed both places, so I found a solution. I had racked up over one hundred and fifty hours of paid time off – vacation days for vacations I’ll never be able afford – at the day job. I’m now taking a paid day or two off every other week at the professional gig so I can catch up on my sleep and rest my body so I can work the second job. I’m essentially financing the restaurant hostess position with time from the job I got with my master’s degree. That’s just how the twenty-first century works, I guess.

There have been some real bright spots in the fall so far though. I walked with the Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons under a monarch butterfly lantern underneath the big international puppet tour of Amal the first weekend in October. My aunt came with me, and it was a perfect evening. My oldest daughter received an early acceptance letter to university next year out-of-state, along with some financial aid. Not enough financial aid to really make the offer a lock, but scholarship award season doesn’t start until after Christmas, so I have real hope for her going out of state like she wants.

A good friend of ours did a photo shoot of the oldest child in Piedmont Park for her senior portraits. We had the ones done for free by Lifetouch, but that company wanted too much money for prints, and over $400 for the digital download package. I gave half that amount to a friend photographer and got much better-quality shots for half the price. It’s hard not to post all the pictures online, but the kids started asking me not to share pics without their permission once they entered High School, and I try hard to respect their boundaries. It’s super difficult, but I would rather them know I respect their decisions than violate their boundaries.

I turned 47 at the start of October. When I turned 26, I started telling people I was 30, just to get used to the idea, and so I’ve started telling people now that I’m 50, at least at the restaurant. Saying that I’m fifty also firmly anchors me in the realm of the unfuckable as far as most of the wait staff is concerned, which is a great bonus to me as almost all of them are young enough to be my biological children. Well, actually all of them if you consider the idea of teen pregnancy. I’m actually older than all but one other person who works at the second job. That’s something that will happen more and more wherever I go, I suppose, except in my professional life. I have the kind of profession where people work until they die.

Before the pandemic, I was set to retire at sixty. The idea of retirement is gone now, and though I’ve mostly accepted that I won’t own a house again, and that I’ll likely be working longer than sixty, the idea of working until I die, is something that I have found the hardest to swallow. I can’t get the concept down my throat, no matter how much I try. I keep telling myself that it will be okay – this is always who I’ve been - that the rhythm of work keeps me in line, really. Even if I did retire, I’d just work on parade krewe stuff and the activism that I squeeze in at the edges of everything. Swallowing the idea that I have to keep working for money shouldn’t be that hard, especially since my professional job is a community support position for something I believe in anyway. But this is hard, I suppose, because everything gets just a little harder when as you start to really age. I keep saying I’m fifty, I suppose, to prepare myself for the real thing, because I can already feel at forty-seven the fraying around the edges of my physical form that I know will start to unravel in the next decade.

I’m glad I have the paid time off banked to rest my knees and sleep now and then, because afternoon naps in the autumn are amazing. The city is beautiful this time of year, and the shots of my High School senior in Piedmont Park at golden hour are stunning. I can just glimpse the adult form of my oldest child peaking around the edges of her seventeen-year-old form, and I don’t regret for a minute the time I had to work to pay for the images. Every drop of sweat and ache of my joints has been worth this. As I type, my youngest is playing piano with her teacher in the room next door, and that makes all the work worth it as well, to be able to hear music made by the children I so desperately wanted two decades ago. They’re preparing to leave me, but I’m glad, even if I have to work until my last minutes, that I did all this.

I wish I had more time and energy to write about everything we do and see together more. As many posts as I’ve made on this blog and pitas and LiveJournal, none of it seems enough.