21st Century Spinster

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Reunions? Hmmmmm

Well, I made it through reunion season and the bittersweet was mostly sweet. Especially sweet was reconnecting with a guy at my grad school reunion and really hitting it off. We're taking things slowly (the cliched hallmark of all grown-*ss relationships), but as long as I've been single, what's the hurry anyway? Crossing the border into 40 kind of freed me from the tyranny of life goal deadlines and the biological clock. It's like the relief you get when the buzzer rings, your time is up, and yet you're still here. Now the future is an open book... I had a second reunion, with a performing arts group to which I belonged in college. It was the 25th anniversary of the group's founding. It was an awesome time, but why didn't I feel successful enough when former groupmates asked me what I had been up to during the past 18 years? It was like all of the confidence and self-assurance I have gained over nearly 2 decades of personal and professional accomplishments instantly melted away and I was an insecure, awkward sophomore again who still hadn't settled on a major and didn't have a boyfriend. Ewwww...I need to leave her back in the '80s, with her pink hair and her dry-mouthed awkwardness, once and for all.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Reunion Season

It's reunion season!

Reunions require a bit of courage for even the most self-assured of spinsters, especially when you go 15 years and beyond. They're the reality check we'd rather ignore, where we see the friends of our youth transformed into fully grown people, with kids and spouses, laugh lines and mortgages, their well-earned paunches and receding hairlines. Try showing up to one of those solo....

I did, for my grad school 15-year, armed with the auntie-proud photos of the twins on my iPod and the story of my career for the past decade-and-a-half. I'm learning not to take the domestic bliss of so many of my former classmates personally, to stop asking, "why do they have it all, and not me, when I'm equally deserving?" After all, life isn't about what you deserve, it's simply about choices and luck.

I really don't know what's going on their lives, anyway. People show their best face at reunions. Those whose lives are in the dumps simply don't show up.

Interestingly, at my past couple of reunions--high school and one college-related--most of the men were paired off, but their were several sister spinsters among the female classmates--all attractive, in shape and with solid careers. Safety in numbers?

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Marriage is for white people?

Of course, that isn't true, but it's the title of a recent Washington Post article by Joy Jones. The title is inflammatory and taken from the words of a child, but is used to illustrate the writer's view that marriage is being seen as increasingly irrelevant in the black community.

As a black woman, I'm not totally ready to buy that, but I do think this is an interesting article, especially if you buy the notion that a lot of American societal trends are first seen in more vulnerable and marginalized minority communities, but eventually spread to the mainstream (e.g. rise in single parent households, more women than men getting college degrees, growing rate of obesity, not to mention tastes in music and popular culture).

'Marriage Is for White People'
By Joy Jones
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006; Page B01

I think the children's responses are disturbing; however, I think a lot of black adults who delay marriage really do believe in it, but as she said, the men want to play for a LONG time before settling down and the women become self-sufficient enough in the interim that they don't need to settle for relationships that drain their bank accounts or don't fulfill their emotional needs. I think this trend is growing in other communities as well, filling the ranks of spinsterdom with holdouts of all stripes.

I think this article speaks volumes about why I am single and without children at 40--and how much choice I have exercised in getting here. I don't always own up to those choices, but I have made them.

Truth is, if it weren't for the biological clock, I would still feel the desire to settle down, but far less pressure. Even so, I continue to turn down relationship offers from men that I am "not feeling." I'd still rather be alone than in a romantic relationship that bores me, irritates me, or disrespects me, and I have to face facts: most do at least one of the three. As Jones said, I just don't feel "desperate" enough to accept offers I'm not passionate about just because I want a child.

However, I have not decided (yet) to be a spinster for life, and I believe that the relationship I want is out there and marriage and motherhood are still in the cards for me. One day. Somehow.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Up With Grups

The word spinster sounds old-fashioned and conjures up images of prim and mirthless old women in knee-length granny dresses with their hair pulled back in severe buns--the original 40-year-old virgins. And yet is your over-35 spinster life really all that different than it was when you were 25, bouncy and baby fresh?

The other day a friend of mine sent me the link to an article that suggests the generation gap has disappeared between the current generation of 30- and 40-somethings and their kids. Entitled "Up With Grups,", it appeared in April 3 issue of the New Yorker.'

Fans of the original Star Trek series will remember an episode in which Kirk and the Enterprise crew lands on a planet populated by 300-year-old children who are infected with a disease that vastly slows the aging process, but then quickly kills once the person reaches puberty. The "kids" call the Enterprise crew members "grups," which they eventually figure out is a contraction of "grown-ups."

Writer Adam Sternbergh likens the current generation of over-30 urban hipsters to those kids who feared being grups no matter how old they grew (technically, since they never grow up they could not be labeled as "grups," but why quibble the point?). He points out that today's grups want to be like their kids, enjoying the same clothes, music, and games as their own progeny. Gone are the days of the generation gap, when kids dug rock and roll to spite their Sinatra-loving parents. Now, he says, they download music by groups like "Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and Bloc Party, that you might assume their parents would absolutely despise. Except it doesn't really work that way anymore. In part, because how can their parents hate Interpol when they sound exactly like [the late 70's punk band] Joy Division?"

I would argue that kids will always find a way to distinguish themselves from their parent's generation. I also think this phenomenon ranges far beyond the hip, urban environs of Park Slope, where Sternbergh seems to have done much of his research. People of all shades, lifestyles and walks of like are in the grip of grupism, in my opinion. What about all the balding guys I see on the A train in baseball caps with baggy True Religions hanging below their expanding paunches? Or the grandmothers rolling their carts through Target stuffed to the point of bursting into Baby Phat jeans and tees as tight as sausage casing?

It's clear that many of us don't wish to grow old. We are as frightened of the mantle of mature adulthood as our parent's generation was eager to embrace it. To them it meant they had finally arrived. To us, it means that we are closer to the final destination.

I wonder if the single, childless (or child-free, as some would put it) lifestyle that so many of us are living is simply our refusal to leave the party of young adulthood. To me, it's kind of like the exits have been padlocked and music cranked up to ear-splitting volumes that no longer thrill me. But am I looking hard enough for the master key?

Instead of spinsters, should we be calling ourselves "grupsters"?

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Canes, sausages and the return of Super Auntie

It's a chilling, drizzly night in New York, and I'm laid up with a wicked case of tendonitis I got running this past weekend. Achieving a personal best of 10 miles on Saturday, I got a little too happy and tried a repeat on Sunday. Age is nothing but a number, right? Dumb move at any age.

Meanwhile, Kitty is torturing the neighbors one floor down by chasing his jingleball across the hard wood floor. It's after midnight, but he's 14 years old, so I figure he'll tucker out in about 3 minutes and then conk out for the next 12 hours, dreaming of younger days when he still had his 'jewels.' Anyway, stopping him would require me to hobble across the floor using this fetching, aluminum cane the orthopedist gave me. I'm not in the mood.

However, I am looking forward to the weekend, when SUPERAUNTIE will be in full effect. My sis and her husband are bringing their baby twin girls into town. I can't wait! It's hard to be apart from them, but we live thousands of miles away. Gotta make a Buy Buy Baby run before they get here! It's funny how you can lose yourself in a place like that. Little people, little clothing, cute little accessories--I can even deal with the screaming for hours because I guess, in the end, I get to give them back. I still hold out hope for a keeper one day, though.

Totally off subject, here's some food for thought. I heard a female DJ on the radio today, quoting Andy Rooney's recent riff on the old saw, "Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?" Rooney apparently said more and more women are saying, "Why buy the pig, when you can get the sausage for free?"

Now if only I had some sausage... :)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Someone had a BIG birthday!

I'm baaack. Again.

I apologize for the long disappearances. Just because I've defined 21st Century spinsterhood doesn't mean I've been ready to fully embrace it. But I'm back from the land of denial once again, and ready to explore the open road of my life's journey.

Since my last posting, I have discovered the joys of auntiehood, turned 40, and decided to get in touch with my creative side through a fiction-writing workshop. I still have not found a partner, but I am more at peace with that than ever. I think it is because I'm learning that as long as you give yourself to the world, you will get plenty back--even if it isn't exactly in the form that you had in mind. (My mom, by the way says I'm full of crap and that she knows I am unhappy. Bless her heart.)

I've also become more aware of how my decisions have led to where I am, and more willing to own up to them. I've had plenty of opportunities to pair up and perhaps settle down, and I've turned them down. I still do it. I'm trying to understand why.

Anyway, there's plenty more to get into, but I just wanted to break the ice with this post.

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Childless, or child-free?

Remember that Roy Lichtenstein-like cartoon that ran some years ago when all those "ticking biological clock" articles came out? You know the one, where a woman looks at her watch with an expression of utter shock and exclaims, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children!"

Her predicament seems absurd, and yet I suspect that a lot of 21st Century Spinsters (myself included) are like that woman. We didn't choose this as a lifestyle, nor were we forced into it. We simply let the chips fall as they may while we were focusing on other things, and oh well, here we are.

Yep, yep...

Yet there are those who do choose not to have children; in fact, they espouse the virtues of what they call the "child-free," (not childless) life. Apparently, nearly 7 million women of childbearing age defined themselves as voluntarily childless in 1995, up from 2.4 million in 1982, according to the National Center of Health Statistics.

I'm not sure that I can relate (yet), and maybe my spinster card ought to be yanked for that. No matter. For those who wish to learn more about the child-free life, here's a resource:

www.childfree.net