‘How’s the Geriatric Doing?'

This morning my youngest son rang to see how the “geriatric” was doing.

He is forty-seven years old now, which means he is finally old enough to tease his mother without fear of consequences. I laughed, of course. After all, if you’ve reached this chapter of life, you’ve probably earned the title. But after we hung up, I found myself thinking about the word.

Geriatric.

What an interesting way to describe someone who has lived through a few more chapters of life. Perhaps that is what growing older really is — not collecting birthdays, but collecting experiences. And some lessons refuse to be taught in any other way.

My children call us geriatrics affectionately, and perhaps they are right. After living through this many years, I’ve discovered that the best lessons aren’t learned in classrooms, but in living.The funny thing about reaching this stage of life is that life doesn’t surprise you quite so much anymore. By then you’ve usually met most of its characters: love and loss, success and failure, heartbreak and joy, birth and death, friendship, disappointment, and the occasional second chance. If it belongs to being human, chances are you’ve crossed paths with it somewhere along the way.

What I have discovered is this: we can teach almost anything. We can pass on knowledge, explain ideas, and offer advice. But to truly know something, we have to live it.

Then I met a little boy who reminded me of that truth. He was four-and-a-half years old, and his parents were divorcing. Every adult in his life knew it wasn’t his fault. The courts knew. The teachers knew. His parents knew.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he had created his own explanation. He believed the divorce was happening because he had been naughty and had spent too much time in the naughty corner. His little heart had reached for a reason and found one.

It broke mine.

Not because children think strange things; they do that all the time, but because I realised that no amount of adult reassurance can completely remove the pain from a life that is being lived. Some things have to be experienced before they can be understood.

I learnt that lesson long before I met little Sammy. At thirteen, I was sitting in a convent boarding school telling Sister Bernadette that I had absolutely no interest in becoming a saint. The nuns were horrified. I, however, had a different plan. I wanted to find the love of my life, marry my Prince Charming, and live happily ever after. That seemed far more interesting than sainthood.

Looking back now, I smile at that little girl. She understood almost nothing about love. And yet, somehow, she understood all that really mattered. Leaving home so young left me carrying questions I never quite found the courage to ask.

Why was I sent away?

Did they miss me?

Did they love me?

Did I do something wrong?

When I returned home briefly after years at boarding school and discovered I now had a baby brother and sister, I didn’t have the language to understand what I was feeling.

Children create stories in silence.

Adults do too.

Sometimes those stories travel with us for decades.

Marriage has a way of teaching its own lessons. Plenty of people are willing to tell you how to make it work. Books offer advice, counsellors share their wisdom, and families rarely hold back their opinions. But sooner or later two people, carrying all their hopes, dreams and baggage, step onto the stage of life together and begin writing a story that belongs only to them. Sometimes it survives. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Chris and I have been married for nearly sixty years now, and those years have taught me that love looks very different from the fairy tales I believed in as a girl. It isn’t perfect, and it certainly isn’t effortless. There were times when life felt wonderfully ordinary, and others when we wondered how we’d ever make it through. Perhaps that’s why I smile when I think of that thirteen-year-old dreaming of happily ever after. She couldn’t possibly have known that the deepest kind of love isn’t found all at once. It’s built, little by little, over a lifetime. Lessons that only reveal themselves over time.

Business had its own classroom, and experience was always the lecturer. I learnt plenty about entrepreneurship, accounting, marketing, leadership and management. Those were the easy lessons. The harder ones began the day I unexpectedly lost my job and had to discover whether I had the courage to build something of my own. Losing a job unexpectedly and building something of your own from the ground up changes you in ways no textbook ever could. Resilience grows quietly while you’re simply trying to survive.

Looking back now, I can see where life was quietly leading me. For more than ten years, I wrote children’s books inspired by my grandsons. Like so many little boys, they dreamed of being superheroes, so naturally my stories were filled with adventure, courage, and imagination. At the same time, my working life was spent teaching adults. I ran colleges, developed courses and helped people build careers. It was rewarding work, and I loved watching others discover what they were capable of.

When little Sammy came into my life, his questions made me ask different ones. They reminded me that children aren’t only looking for adventure. Sometimes they’re looking for reassurance. Sometimes they’re trying to make sense of fear, anger, belonging, divorce, grief, friendship, or simply feeling different.

That’s when Little Hearts, Big Feelings was born.

I am not saying I have all the answers. Quite the opposite. It was born because I realised how many questions children quietly carry, and how often adults underestimate what they already understand. We assume they are too young to grasp life’s difficult moments, yet they are often living them long before they have the words to describe them.

Little Sammy’s pain became the seed from which Little Hearts, Big Feelings grew. Sometimes a story can’t provide the answers. But it can remind a child they are not alone.

Perhaps that is what age eventually teaches us. Not that we know more than everyone else. But that life itself is the teacher. The lessons arrive when they are ready, often disguised as heartbreak and sometimes as joy, and usually as ordinary days.

These days, I have what I once spent years chasing without even realising it.

Enough.

A home filled with love. Good health. Friends who have walked beside me for years. Family, I wouldn’t trade for the world. And grandchildren who can get away with almost anything, although our own children might argue that point. I can still dance. Give me some rock ’n’ roll, a tango or even a limbo bar, and I’m in. I can almost still do a headstand at yoga. It’s usually the next morning that politely reminds me I’m not twenty-five anymore. More importantly, I still wake each morning wondering what life might teach me next.

My heart is full these days, but not because I’ve finally worked everything out. If anything, the opposite is true. Time has a quiet way of changing what we think we know. It has taught me that the most important questions in life rarely have simple answers. They can’t be mastered in a classroom, found in a textbook, or handed to us through the well-meaning advice of those who love us most. Each of us writes our own chapters, discovering the lessons we need as the story unfolds. What we can do is share our stories. Reach back and offer a hand to those still writing their own story. Tell the truth about what hurt, what healed, what mattered, and what didn’t.

Because if these years have taught me anything, it is this: some things can be taught.

But the most important things in life…

They have to be lived.

—

This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

***