Essay published by Changes in Life, a website that explores change.

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By: Gina Margolies

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My children have not gone away yet. The moment of separation has come into view, not immediate, not distant either. Near enough that I am not as needed as I once was, not so physically required. I nurse fears instead of babies now and offer emotional support instead of a hand up. Somehow, when the physical need abated, reclamation of body caused renaissance of mind. My old passions, longings, thoughts, dreams and, it feels shameful to acknowledge, desires for myself, returned.

The urge to know has been within me for as long as I can recall, certainly since I was a bookish, nerdy kid probing the card catalog at my town library. It burned through my school years, left me gasping for breath sometimes, exhilarated. The urge survived unabated through early career years and that blissful first year of marriage and pregnancy. Somehow though, the graspings of little ones, being physically needed, not wanted but needed, dimmed the fire. I fought for a bit. I read poetry, aloud, while nursing my son, when I learned that the sound of my voice soothed him. My first book was composed in my head during the endless rounds of eating, strolling, bathing, and napping, then scribbled down in stolen moments. Yet the physicality young children so want and need, the hugging, snuggling, playing, picking upping, holding, prevailed. I eagerly gave away every thought in my head but one in those physical moments, so many of them that I assumed there were no thoughts left.

The urge did not come back slowly. It exploded into my brain one day, in my forty-sixth year, like a sling shot being released. The avidity, the relentless avidity of someone like Susan Sontag, bigger and Frenchier avidity than mine, but still, it came back. I arose one middle-aged morning as relentlessly avid to read, to listen, to learn as in my college years, when an idea could set my hair on fire. I became an almost fifty-year-old reading in the bath, attending free lectures at the museum, studying a foreign language, and writing a novel. As urges are wont to do, mine exacted a price.

Little hands do not hold my mind back now; the clock pushes it forward. My reawakening carried an omen of the merciless brevity of time. In my twenties, time seemed like a vast forest stretching out so far I could not see the other side. In my forties, time seems like a clearing in the trees, the other side of which is apparent. With thirty, maybe forty years left, can I experience everything? Rather than staying up late to study I arise early to learn. Instead of the quiet of a dormitory that has gone to sleep, I sit in the quiet of a house that has not yet awoken. I listen for teenage footsteps in the hall every morning, adoration of my children fighting with fury at having to put the pen down, the book away, for just a little while, until they are off to live their day. Relentless avidity is as relentless as the march of time.

I do not regret the minutes I so willingly gave away. Sometimes, even the right choice hurts. Yet I wonder, are there enough minutes left for me?