I turned 40 this year. H. turned 37 yesterday. As shocking as my own age is to me, it is somehow even more surprising to wish my little sister happy 37th. Isn't she supposed to be, I don't know, 8? Forever? Age is constantly catching me by surprise. One day I'm 21 with all of life in front of me. (I can be a vet! Or, a serious business woman in a suit and hose and pumps! Hard to believe, but that was a dream once.) The next, I'm forty and sitting in the Ob-Gyn's office with an ultra sound up my yes-that's-where to see if I have any viable eggs left. Turns out that as of this morning, I had two eggs in one ovary and six in the other. This may be more than you wished to know, but there you have it. To quote my doctor, I'm apparently "still in the game." I'm not sure how I feel about the game, but it's good to know I'm not sidelined quite yet. There is more to say on the topic of withering eggs and the like, but I'll save that for later.
The point is that H. and I are starting to "get on in years" and are currently both childless. We both happen to be uncertain about how we got here, 'here' being without families of our own. We also both find ourselves unclear or unsatisfied, depending on which sister you are talking to, about our career choices. Now, while I'm writing as though we two sisters are one and the same, we are, of course, different in many ways. And yet, our lives have often run parallel courses and sometimes, as is the current case, meet at particular crossroads.
All of which led us to the How Did We Get Here? Q & A that we found ourselves having last month over wine in a downtown Manhattan bistro on a sultry, hot evening. H. had recently seen A Solitary Man and was determined to have her life end with more meaning than Michael Douglas' character. Suddenly, she expounded, "What are we waiting for? We need to get on with our lives! We can no longer live in the shadow of our parents!"
Almost immediately, having grown up on bedtime stories of Winnie-the-Pooh, it dawned on us that maybe we'd gotten lost along the way while searching for our very own Heffalumps, and, possibly, Woozles as well. As we all know, it is a tricky feat to find something when you don't know what it is that you're looking for, or when what you are looking for isn't at all what you want to find.
So here we are, one sister in Manhattan and the other in Maui. Together, we're ready to honor our detours, side-step some shadows, climb the path that looks just right, and leave the Heffalumps be.
"Hallo!" said Piglet, "what are you doing?"
"Tracking something, " said Winnie-the-Pooh very mysteriously.
"Tracking what?" said Piglet, coming closer.
"That's just what I ask myself. I ask myself, "What?"
"What do you think you'll answer?"
"I shall have to wait until I catch up with it," said Winnie-the-Pooh.
Kibette & Kibettoo. Early Days.
