" Forget about it"

EMPTY NEST AND OTHER SYNDROMES
by JOAnne Henderson
07/28/02

My son Dan, youngest of four, turned 21 today. The others are 28 to 31, and two of them are married. For many years, my life has been mainly about being somebody’s mother. Now I have to give some thought to what else I am.

I am a wife, to be sure, thirty-two years’ worth; but that role is changing too. At the moment, I am living in our house near the coast in New Jersey. (For my friends in California, that’s the other coast, where if you’re heading north, the ocean is on your right.) My husband Harry is often out of state working for IBM, coming home every other weekend.

It is a mid-life thing to do, I suppose, this introspection about who and what you are. But it’s especially necessary if you’ve been oriented to family and they don’t need you much anymore. Horrors!
You have to get used to your own company.

So here I am in NJ at the end of July -- where the temperature and the humidity are both 90 -- and I have decided to do something drastic. I’m going to focus on me. I’ve dusted off 32-year-old college credits and I am returning to school.

Instead of studying nursing this time (which was a big mistake, huge), I am going to be a Lit major on the Creative Writing track. Which brings me to the Imposter Syndrome. As in: My academic record is impressive, but that was over thirty years ago. The faculty is going to find out that my brain has turned to oatmeal.

As in: I’ll be studying the classics? You mean, like Coke Classic?

As in: Shakespeare? No problem whatsoever. I’ve seen Shakespeare in Love four times.
I am kidding, more or less, but there is the very real fear that if I open my mouth in class, cliches will spill out. If I manage to fool them verbally, the jig will be up when I turn in my first story. Across the top of the page, the professor will scrawl a line from Harry Chapin’s song, “Mr. Tanner”: “Full time pursuit of another endeavor might be in order.”

Okay, okay. It’s probably not going to be as bad as all that. I’m told that everybody feels like an imposter at times. Everyone is afraid of being “found out.” If I just imagine the other students being as neurotic as I am, I think I will be all right.

Then there’s Syndrome X. That is the name given to a cluster of symptoms including high blood pressure, high triglycerides, decreased HDL and obesity, which may signal a predisposition to heart disease and diabetes. My mother had it, my sisters have it, and so do I. My least favorite manifestation of Syndrome X is breaking out in a cold sweat -- when I have to ask the flight attendant for a seat belt extender. The world is not kind to over-sized folks.

So of course I’ve been worried about going to school and being known as “the fat lady.” I mentioned this fear to a friend, who said it was nonsense. “Your fellow students -- male and female -- will come in all shapes and sizes. You won’t stand out because you’re fat. You’ll stand out because you’re old!”

Thanks. I feel better already.