Photo by Nan Palmero

By Ajung Sojwal

Soon after I turned 31, having been a stay-home mom with two kids for six years or so, I became anxious that life was passing me by. I became afraid of waking up one day filled with regrets for having wasted my life. My conversations and reading materials seemed to begin and end with everything to do with children and nothing else. That passionate, young woman with deep social justice concerns, which got me into many arguments as well as long meaningful conversations with my “elders” in a patriarchal society, seemed dead. I remember getting into a massive fight with my husband, packing a suitcase, ready to walk out our front door with an overwhelming sense of anger at everything and nothing in particular.

“Where are you going?” my husband asked.

“I don’t know, but I am going.” I said.

“This is your home, what do you think Senti will feel seeing her mother walk out the door like that?” he said.

Our second child was barely a year old. This was not the first time I had felt like disappearing from everything I knew. Many years earlier, as a teenager too, a long afternoon of heated arguments with my father led me to pack a suitcase telling him I was leaving home. My father sat me down and said sternly, “This is your home and you will learn to grow up here.”

Learning to grow up requires loved ones around you who are willing to see through your many personal crises that come in life. I see now that without a safe place to express your fears of growing up, we will remain stunted with resentfulness. Aging for me has begun to mean more and more about growing myself up.

The clichéd “ageing gracefully” is but the process of growing up. I have had to pack many suitcases with clothes I had outgrown, so to say. I have had to muster up the courage to grow up at “home” while the packed suitcases got thrown. It’s been a painful process of realizing that aging is a perspective, that it has less to do with years passing you by and more to do with wisdom accrued, the complexity of emotions recognized, priorities rearranged again and again, accepting the mysterious balance of paradoxes, gratitude cultivated and discovering joy at “home.”

When I feel anxiety well up within me about life passing me by, I remind myself that Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called him to set out for a new land, that Moses was eighty years old by the time he got the courage to stand up against the Pharaoh of Egypt. God doesn’t seem to be deterred by our aging to engage us in His great work of redemption, including our own redemption!

At some point in our lives, with God’s grace, we get to welcome aging as God’s work of transformation in us —- the growing up of ourselves, getting to the place of genuine curiosity of the other and learning to love —- ourselves and the other, without strings, just love, in wonderment that we happen to be alive together at the same place for the moment.

Ajung Sojwal is the Interim Rector at Calvary Church in Stonington, CT. She lives with her husband in Stonington, CT.