I’m in the Age of Return

It’s a mixed blessing

Photo by Brooke Balentine on Unsplash

I’m in the Age of Return. You know, the part where the protagonist goes back to their roots to wrap up loose ends, to make some kind of reckoning.

Right smack in the middle of my second Saturn return, in my late 50s, I moved back to my home state from abroad, heeding an internal pull that had been growing for some time.

It was in the middle of the pandemic, and in many ways, after 25 years away, I learned the twin meanings of “reverse culture shock” and “You can never go home again.”

The social landscape had changed and so had I — what anchored me somewhat was the land, the place, which moves at a much slower place than anything social or political — it was my anchor when everything else was spinning or made no sense. Watching birds and seeing trees and revelling in familiar rocks made much more sense than navigating the current US health insurance system or a routine trip to the supermarket.

Having moved abroad permanently once and moved back again, my inner calibration has discovered a “five-year rule” — things don’t make that much sense for the first five years, then they begin to. I’m right at the six year mark and am finding it really does take that much time for me to learn to navigate fully in a new environment, even if it’s a new-old environment. I don’t know if I have another “five-year rule” move in me at this point, frankly.

Now I’m in my 60s, and while I’m not ready to roll over and die quite yet, I’m also aware I won’t be here 60 years from now. I’m ready to tie up some threads in the tapestry. In another metaphor, I don’t want to depart the earth with a messy mental filing cabinet.

Not that I’m ready to leave. I still feel vital, grounded, alive, with multiple perspectives and lived experiences.

But I’m ready to tidy up a few things, to dump some dross, and some old obsessions.

I’m also ready to say a few things that have been left unsaid, to tell at least parts of my story, because it’s a doozy. And I’m feeling the time is now.

My dad waited until his 80’s to wake up and be shocked by aging. I don’t want to be old before my time (I feel young for my age, as do many of us these days) but equally I don’t want to wake up one day and feel like I missed a prime window for reflection, retribution, repair, reckoning.

I’m sorting through what to say now, and what can wait.

As the eldest single childless daughter in a fractured stepfamily on the verge of losing its patriarch, I am waiting for our family structure to collapse. Maybe I want to get the mental filing cabinet in order because I know there’s going to be a tsunami in terms of our familial dynamics, and there may not be any familial dynamics left. Maybe getting that filing cabinet in order is an act of mental mitigation, which may work, and may not.

But it’s bigger than just my family, there are people and themes which have woven in and out of my life. I’m at an age where I can see the patterns. So far, when I’ve presented them, they’ve helped people make sense of their own lives as well, and that is fulfilling.

I’m aware some people I’m writing about are still alive, and it’s always a question of “can I tell the truth?” But in the words of the scholar Hillel, “If not now, when?”

I’m wondering, too, what comes after the return? Like, is that it now? Once I’ve returned me, the item, to the store, do a I go to another store? Do I write the final chapter or is this already the denouement? Do I stop mixing my metaphors? Do I make new ones? I don’t have an answer to that, yet. Maybe ask me in another five years.

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