What’s it all about?

Mid life crises, what are they all about? I had an enlightening conversation with a young acquaintance of mine on Thursday who is rapidly becoming a treasured coffee-date friend. He and I met at the start of the year at a postgraduate student orientation over pizza lunch. The lunch was a haphazard deal, you just wandered up to trestle tables set up outside in the heat, and helped yourself. It was then a bit of a challenge to find a place in the shade to eat them. After choosing a slice of pizza with hot salami, I turned around and he was just there eating his pizza in the shade of a large tree and looking rather cute, so I just had to go over and say hello. After quite an enjoyable conversation we swapped contact details and since then have been catching up for coffee periodically throughout the year.

Recently in conversation with Mirabella we discussed the phenomenon of the coffee date. She distinguished between a non-coffee-date friendship with men, for example the contact would be mainly through email or convenience, such as working at the same place, and a coffee-date friendship, where the practice of having coffee together and a chat is an established or natural part of the friendship. She has a theory that one cannot invite a non-coffee-date friend out to a coffee. She feels that the breach in protocol is too great to be born. If this is true, then I am glad that G and I have established coffee-dating as part of our friendship early in the piece. Note that I use the word dating here for want of a better word, because I’m talking about friendship at this point.

He emailed me the night we met and our pattern of meeting for coffee was set up. The first time we talked a kaleidoscope of topics for ages and ages. We both had fun. Its like this every time. Last Thursday he told me that he doesn’t have that style of conversation with any of his other friends. This did surprise me. Anyway for the first time we dug a little more deeply into each others lives and discovered that we are both going through life crises of different varieties. Mine, a mid life crisis and his a crisis of consciousness and direction.

He asked me a difficult question: What is a mid life crisis for you?

After trying to avoid a direct answer, I finally articulated how I felt as best I could and came up with the following: I have had four children. As you can imagine I have been very much absorbed by raising them for many years. For example, I was either pregnant or breast feeding for eight years straight. This was a wonderful part of my life. My children were my focus, but slowly I faded into the background. This is OK because you do look at your children as though they are shining, and you want them to shine.

But now they are older and I am moving on to doing other things. For the first time last year I left my family to go to an interstate conference and all of a sudden I was being noticed and treated as an individual. I was not used to this and found it overwhelming. I am used to it now, but I am changing as a result.

He is a very thoughtful person. His reply to me was this: So you are experiencing a certain amount of freedom for the first time in a long time. Sometimes freedom of choice is the hardest thing to deal with. It reminds me of a Sartre novel that illustrates what people will endure to avoid having to choose. In his novel, a woman is torn between her husband and her lover. But rather than make a choice she just preferred to go with the one who could pull her the hardest. You know, the metaphor is that each had hold of one of her arms and were pulling.

Well I could have kissed him then and there! This is it exactly! My role as mother nolonger locks me in, and freedom is scary. The other interesting thing we uncovered on Thursday is that I am eleven years older than him. How can such a young man be so wise?