Nostalgia for what never was

One of the key features of my experience of life now that never existed before is a weird and unexpected longing for normalcy. For much of my 20's through my 40's, normalcy was anathema. But now, in my 50's, and perhaps as an added complement to this walk through Hades, I find myself feeling homesick for a home I never had, nostalgic for a way of life I never fully experienced.

What does normalcy mean to me? The basics. A wife, children, a career, a house. An ordinary life. The very set of things from which I recoiled when I was younger. A 40 year partnership. Raising children. Staying in the same job long enough to build retirement. Taking it easy in life and just staying put. Absolutely none of these fantasies were appealing to me until this decade of my life. 

I found this picture on a "vintage classic design" web page

Obviously, ye olde midlife crisis (of which I feel like I have had maybe 6) involves the grass is always greener, fantasizing about the opposite of the decisions one has made. Sorting out the true from the false in this weird exercise is challenging. It feels to me now that the truth is that I wish I had been more constructive and synthetic in my life choices, and less destructive and explosive. My life cycle is to build something to whatever degree, and then destroy it, or run away from it, or have it vanish in spite of wanting it to stay put. 

this is cute

It's been an unpredictable combo of my own actions being destructive and rebellious, or of situations just deteriorating in spite of my best efforts to hold them together. It feels true to me that I had one shot at the normal life, when I was about 30 and involved with a premed student and we were talking about marriage. She went on to be a child psychiatrist, got married, had kids, seems to have done the whole normal deal. I saw it coming and totally freaked out and bailed. 

Twice, I have sort of inherited a family. Step-parent at age 32, for a while. Step-parent again, basically, from 2012 to 2017. The only way I could get close to fathering was through existing children. Even then I didn't consciously realize at times that fathering was what I was doing. The way of being and the role and the job and the creative work that I had always avoided. My central fear is fairly ho hum: I was terrified I would end up like my own father. Of course. 

In general, my perception of dear old dad is that he was miserable with his entire life, pretty much 24/7. Now, I have no idea if this is true or not, because my father and I have actually, truly, never had a conversation. Which, in itself, is fairly astonishing to realize. So whatever narrative I have about my father's misery is entirely constructed via reading body language, attitude, acting out behavior and assumption. But it doesn't matter in the least if this perception is true or false. What matters is that it was the tale that informed my whole adult life up to my 50's. 

He did the whole normal thing. College, career, marriage at about age 22 or 23, 4 kids by age 30, house, car, commitment after commitment after commitment. He signed a shit ton of contracts and then he honored them. From the outside anyway, my father's generation is pretty fucking impressive, commitment wise. By comparison, I have never committed to anything. But my perception that he felt trapped, unfulfilled, bored, irritated, outraged by how normal everything was and yet how unhappy he was, resentful at something he couldn't even articulate, completely shaped my avoidance of commitment. 

The problem is, that is a life based on reaction. Reaction is a great self preservation strategy when things are truly threatening. Fight or flight, our evolutionary weapon. But to live with a constant, low level, ubiquitously contextual fight or flight? Perhaps not helpful. Right? Many people have meant me well, including romantic partners. They would have probably allowed me more leeway within normalcy than I even knew a person could ask for. And my own vision of normalcy is itself a straitjacket, a fantasy and a delusion. And I could have trusted some truly trustworthy people who truly did love me, yet I was always on guard. Always afraid I would never be able to get away. 

My life of reaction against the choices my father made has not been productive in any consistent way. There have also been long stretches where I tried, as hard as I could, to be normal and to live a normal life. I bought my first new car (well, I leased it, which was stupid) at age 37 or 38, thinking it would make me happy, thinking I had finally made it. The house, the yard, the job. Trying. I didn't know what was going on with me most of the time. Here it is, I would think, this longed for life of stability and structure, and you feel like a homicidal arsonist a lot of the time. What's wrong with you? And I would start drinking more and more. Of course, I drank a lot when I wasn't trying to be normal also. 

It was chronic with A. She is very skilled at normal. She buys houses, she does laundry the right way, she works at jobs for years, she saves money, she goes to the dentist. You know, adult things. She has voodoo advanced skills also, such as folding a fitted sheet properly all by herself. Who knows how to do that? Hardly anyone. Framing art and hanging it with a level and the right wall mounting. Studying up on the latest nutrition advice and then actually following it. Hydrating. 

I wonder what she and I were doing together, really. But that is probably a good question for a whole other post. The fact is, the 5 years with her were as close to normal as I ever got. I lived somewhere with storage, for example. Weekly cleaning, menus, planned vacations. Two cars. Helping the kid with his homework. 

Honestly, after a while, I would wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and be screaming inside. I can't do this anymore. This has got to stop. This is not me. I am not me. I am trapped. I'm trapped. I have to get out. 

So it's peculiar that I now romanticize it again. I see couples out doing their couple thing, with their kids, and I get sentimental. I walk through my neighborhood and see people and their houses and their riding mowers and their televisions and I feel like I'm from another planet, and not in a good way. 

I think in the best sense there's a dialectic that's finally happening more consciously for me. The extreme of the lone wolf weirdo with no material possessions and no practical commitments, versus the extreme of the nice family man with a nice family life and 38 bills to pay every month and paid on time, these two are not operating anymore. There's finally some sense of a middle way of how to build a life forming. I can make choices that are not reactive against what my father chose. I can become more familiar with what I like and what I don't, on my own. 

It's never too late I guess.