Those of you that follow me, or know me, know that I adore
my husband. We don’t fight; beyond the usual squabbles of a couple sharing a
home and a life, and we are typically pretty good at staying out of each
other’s way enough to let the other person have some personal space.
My husband is prone to obsessive patterns. He knows this. If
you look back into his past, you will see a string of passionate encounters
with various sports. Climbing, kayaking… just to name a few. And he practices
them well, well enough to get pretty good. Then life takes a turn, or he loses
steam and it becomes a thing of the past.
I tell you this, not to poke fun at him. I tell you this to
understand him.
Birthdays are not his strong moments, much like many other
adults. The prospect of aging is not comfortable for his sense of eternal youth.
When he turned 30, shortly before I met him, he let the local bar ease his
suffering. And now he’s turning 40… and is none too pleased. I reminded him it was
better than the opposite. You know, NOT turning 40. He was not amused. Go
figure.
My age related crises, while equally present, tend to be
brought on by events as opposed to birthdays. I had no aversion to turning 30
and I suspect 40 will be equally peaceful. Sitting on the parent side of a parent/teacher
conference made me seriously contemplate my age, however. Me, the parent in a
conference? Didn’t that make me, like, old? Sigh.
I remember the first time I drove across one of the enormous
New York bridges by myself, alone in the car. Every time before that, I had
been the backseat passenger with my parents. They were the adults. This time,
however, I was the adult driving the car. Pretty surreal in a bizarre sort of
way.
So, my dear husband is smack dab in the middle of a pretty
good mid life crisis. And how has this crisis manifested?
In Lego. Yes, you read it right. Lego.
As a child, my husband loved Lego. He and his brothers would
spend hours playing with them gleefully. As a grown man, he is effectively an
engineer in his job and I credit that, at least in part, to the brain development
of his youth spent building Lego. It’s creative engineering at its finest.
Present a child with building blocks and ask them to create. Seriously? How
cool is that? And they call it playing? Fantastic!
In the black Friday sales this year, he scoured the online
ads looking for good deals on the really impressive Lego sets. He scored some pretty fantastic, and
economically sound, purchases and plans to display them in our basement when
they are fully assembled.
One of my friends jokingly asked me if I minded and my
response was immediate and sincere. Absolutely not. We all hit our age crises; it’s what makes us
human. What matters is how we respond. Some men hit a mid life crisis and have
an affair with a younger woman. Other make insane purchases that put the family
budget in jeopardy. My husband… he buys engineering toys that transport him back
to his youth.
Could be worse.
