Cheguei... I arrived, wrinkled and happy

Middle age regret can be a man’s worst enemy… a woman’s too, if she lets it, wondering where the years went and if she made good decisions. I made too many mistakes in my youth to begin apologizing for them now, though. They are the concrete stairs that led me to see lands of gold from the lighthouse of dreams I've found, a place I am so very proud to be at forty-six.

But, when I was twenty-two, I never thought I’d get here. I had fallen in love with a gentleman, or so I believed, a man with a British accent. I’d long forgotten him until three days ago when I saw his name in my email Inbox. I had trusted him with my heart because he was my friend, someone I never thought would hurt me. When you fall in love for the first time, though, you want to believe only the good. You never see the other side, the truth, until it’s too late and the hook is deep inside your cheek.

Yet, without all those mistakes and the poor choices I made, I could never have met the woman I would later become, and I like her… much more than the “young” woman I was… a girl who once drove four hours to “surprise” a man that was in love with someone else. 

I revel in my middle-age flaws now. They’re real. They’re undemanding. They aren’t pretentious or misleading. In fact, each “flaw” has become my new best feature. I’ve earned each and every pleat and stripe, every single laugh line that was chiseled and paved by the salty tears of lessons won. 

I grew into a woman, a person who still smiles in the mirror, free of self-doubt and second-guesses. Of course, I still find lots of things to criticize, plenty of things that bug me about me closing in on the half-century mark, like, Why did I have to lose what’s left of my memory and my car keys on the same day? Or If I have to put on my glasses to see the numbers on the scale then, dammit, I’m deducting five pounds.

But, I don’t doubt my choices now… At this stage of life, my decisions are made with honesty and experience, not from fright or angst. My childhood and youth were carelessly riddled with fear and insecurity and daily doses of deceit… Honesty wasn’t exactly the soup du jour on the adult menu with men either. I had my first taste of romantic deception on my twentieth birthday; two years after I thought I had became an “adult.”  

My forty year-old Corsican boyfriend at the time, Jean-Luc, a handsome and arrogant chef, served me up course after course of pretty lies during my birthday dinner. Then he met up with his other girlfriend the next day at his favorite restaurant in San Francisco. Each time he would take me there I could feel the waitresses' eyes on me and a big question mark hanging over my head. “Which one is she?” I heard them whisper.

I had a slippery attraction to foreign men, a weakness, you might say. That is until I met the one who changed the menu and the main course of my life. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-three… the first honest man to ever hold my hand.

The first man to open up about his own insecurities instead of hiding them. The first man to trust me with his secrets, and the first to openly declare his love without doubting that he had given himself over to it too fast or too young. I married him six months later, after the night he taught me to Samba. That was twenty-three years ago. 

To the boy who stood before him, the middle-aged man now apologizing for things he did almost twenty-five years ago, “Googling” and daydreaming about long drives across The Golden Gate, I have something to tell you after all this time.

If you had not turned your back on me to be with another woman, whose name I never knew, my children would not be here today... If you hadn’t been the person you once were, I would never have met the most loving and loyal man I have ever known. 

And if you didn’t have that quirky British tongue that could make me laugh uproariously, I would never have missed the rhythm of a foreign accent… only it came in the form of a softer, kinder, truthful one.  Brazilian.

But before you fade away again into the memory of days long forgotten, I’d like to say, thank you… for everything you didn’t do for me. I probably owe my middle-age good fortune to you.

 

 

Comments

[Franciléa Macário Gazoli Zorzete]

Querida Cândida - minha cunhada,

Cá estou eu no Palácio do Governo tentando terminar uma planilha que tenho que fazer para o Governador Geraldo Alckmin e recebo teu convite para ler seus posts. Raramente abro pois o tempo é corrido. Parei, abri e li o que você escreveu. Você não contou muita coisa: não falou quem você foi e é para o meu irmão. Não falou da mãe dedicada e atenciosa e da pessoa sensível que é. Acho que sinto orgulho de ter você como minha cunhada americana-brasileira-italiana. Quero te mandar um beijo grande, um abraço forte pelo teu texto - lindo , emocionante e escrito por você que tem tanta sensibilidade, me deixa muito feliz.
Amo você! Bjs. Léa Zorzete