Pat Bean's blog

Aging My Way

If I were to think about some of the important milestones in my life, I could start with an incident that happened during the early 1940s, when as a young child, I destroyed the family’s ration stamps. Issued by the government during World War II, the stamps allowed families limited purchase of such items as sugar, gas and meat.

The incident is not something I actually remember doing, but the story was told to me numerous times growing up. That I survived this family trauma has to mean something.

But not nearly as much as the milestone that I now look back on in disbelief. I survived raising five children at a time when disposable diapers were not easily available. And because the first four of my children were close in age, I once had seven years of uninterrupted cloth diaper changes.

Somehow, today, that seems as much of a milestone as giving birth to those five children. Perhaps it’s because after changing a few of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s diapers, I came to the conclusion that disposable diapers might be one of the world’s best inventions.

I think my next milestone, which happened when those five kids ranged in age from two to 11, was going to work for a newspaper, and getting promoted from darkroom flunky to reporter. It changed the entire direction of my life and gave me a career I loved for the next 37 years.

Looking back now, I feel that was the life I was meant to live, and I can’t help but wonder if fate played a hand in letting me find it. What would my life have been like if I hadn’t answered that newspaper ad?  Or, if at 25, I hadn’t decided I wanted to be a writer?

As I sit here reflecting on these things, I realize how very thankful I am for the life I’ve had. But I also wonder how different things could have turned out, especially since all the milestones – and wrong decisions — I’ve survived in my life were not all that great.

There were a few experiences I wouldn’t regret having skipped. But then I wonder if I hadn’t experienced them, would my life have turned out for the better – or the worse?

Who knows? Certainly not me. I guess pondering about disposable diapers, and where your thoughts go from there, is just something you do when you’re an old broad.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.