A Bad Case of Nostalgia

Where does time go? (photo from Pixabay)

Time seems to be enfolding around me these days. It’s been four years since the fires on the mountain, how can that be? It both feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago. That’s the strange thing about time. Sometimes I can still smell the smoke of the day I fled my house, other days I can’t even remember what the home looked like. My memories are fading, changing, and yet also clear. The other day, I was sitting in the garden surprised that the forest was gone one minute, and then rejoicing in the beauty as it now is the next. As if I live in both timelines at once.

It's the same with my parenting experience. I’ll wake up wondering why it’s so quiet in the house, why aren’t the children up yet? Then I remember—they’ve been gone for five years. This doesn’t happen very often, probably because there aren’t traces of them in the homes I now live in, since all we physically shared together—the house, their toys, their bedrooms even—was lost in the fire. Yet there is a longing for them within my heart and now that I’ve returned to teaching again, the longing for days past is only growing.

I’ve come to call it a bad case of Nostalgia.

I never meant to become a mother, nor a teacher. I was raised to make money. To be independent. To change the world from the c-suite. Thus, my undergraduate degree was in computer science and there I’d planned to girl boss better than any girl boss you’ve ever met.

Then came my first son and within two short years, that goal was thrown to the wind. Homemaking became my life’s achievement. After a year or so of adjustment, I embraced this role with all my heart and have been rewarded hundred-fold. Eventually, the children were school aged, and I’d found a beautiful Waldorf school worth investing our time and money. As a homemaker, I had plenty of time, but little money. Enter my next career—movement education. A teacher at my sons’ school suggested I take Waldorf movement education teacher training, also known as Spacial Dynamics, and found the movement and games program at our fledgling school. I knew I wanted my kids to attend this school and that meant I had to bring in money, so I followed her guidance and began a new career that would allow me to be a part of the community we were building while also being there for my kids.

From 2004-2019 I’d teach movement, tumbling, games, and dance to kids at three different schools, and I LOVED it. Even better, I loved being with the kids. All the kids. So many different kids. I was at a party once and realized that except for one couple, I’d danced and/or played with every single person’s child in the room. In 2019, as my youngest child headed to college, I thought I needed a full-time job. That finally, after taking the time to raise my own kids and play with everyone else’s, I would get a “real” job that paid me money and do “real” work in the world. Looking back, I wonder why that ridiculous programming was still within a mind that had so joyously participated in her homemaking life. Given how blessed the whole mother/teacher thing had been, why then, had I still disdained it?

Life is my teacher, and shortly after leaving my dance instructor job, I broke my hip. No full-time work for me. Instead, I was to heal for almost a year and then it was March of 2020 and the whole world was crazy, and my kids were back home, my husband was home as well, and my homemaking skills were called upon once more—this time running a Covid household. In August of the same year, the house burned to the ground and my homemaking tasks became something completely different—how to get back home. So my pursuit of “real” work has been on hold ever since.

In the past four years, I’ve managed to get us back home, both to the land in CA but also back to the home of my childhood—the Midwest. Splitting my time between the two is probably part of what activated this bad case of Nostalgia. As I return to Chicago, the city of my bones, memories of those early baby days with my sons have begun to pop up. I even found a manuscript that I wrote in 2003 on a thumb drive that I managed to save in the fire and as I read this manuscript from another age of my life, I both recognize my voice in the narrative, for it is the 33 year-old me speaking, and yet I wonder, who is this wise woman? I’m blown away by my own thoughts from that age, for truly I was in a space of power, surrounded as I was by two very little boys.

Strangely I would find this manuscript the same week I began teaching again. I’m a substitute teacher now, I can’t hold a full-time gig living in two states, but when I’m in CA I’ve decided to spend at two-three days a week with kids. Since the start of March, I’ve been in classrooms ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade and every age in-between. From the first, what I noticed was how strange it felt to be in a school and NOT bump into my kids. I subbed at their old high school and expected to see them or one of their friends as I walked the halls, yet even at schools I’ve never been to before I half-expect to see them run by on the playground. I’ll catch the glimpse of red hair and think it’s my youngest son, or I’ll see boys playing basketball and expect to see the eldest.

After school, as I walk to my car, I see the young mothers and fathers gathering to chat as their kids scamper around them. I was one of those parents once, just yesterday, right? I swear I can remember the sun on our faces, bottles of kombucha in our hands, children screaming with afterschool joy as we planned playdates. Where did those young mothers go? Where did my children go?

Where did I go?

Because I’ve rediscovered this old manuscript of mine from 2003, I’m still in conversation with the young mother I once was. Thirty-something Nicole is speaking to me, across the decades. How strange it is to be in all my timelines at once—my own childhood as I visit with my parents every week when I’m in Chicago, my high school and college days when I hang with old friends and sorority sisters, as well as my young mother days as I re-discover those women, none of us so young anymore. I’m surrounded by memories of my children as the children before me chase each other and scream on the playground.

I didn’t go anywhere, instead, I’m everywhere, all at once.

It’s a bad case of Nostalgia, I’ll admit it, but I’m in no hurry to cure it. Timelessness isn’t all that bad.