JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

When the girls saw my old toy excavated from the closet during a recent cleaning expedition, they asked: “Do you have any more CDs for it?”

Last year, I gave the kids the boom box I had bought for college. It’s now 17 years old and finally stopped playing tapes this past week. The loss of my college stereo highlighted the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. When I was my daughters’ ages, my siblings and I danced and sang along to Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street tunes spinning on the living room record player. Next came cassettes I collected in adolescence and then passed on to my kids for them to enjoy as toys. Soon all my girls will recognize are CDs. I had to tell them what a record was. I wonder what stories they will tell their children. Soon they will use CDs as toys too, along with these plastic records and cassettes. I feel old.

Our family has entered birthday season. Considering that a year has twelve months and 365 days as potential possibilities, we five were born relatively close to each other on the calendar. Mine comes first but Ted’s follows a few weeks later. We have a break until the girls birthdates which mark the start and end of Seattle summertime.

On my birthday morning this year I slathered my face with extra Oil of Olay in a vain act of resistance. I feel old. Why is it, I wondered, while examining the contents of my medicine cabinet, that teeth whitening and skin whitening are accepted, even desired in our society, but hair whitening is not?! (Okay, replace “whitening” with “bleaching” and both teeth and hair are acceptable, only the coiffure is then blond instead of gray.)

I’ve now lived long enough that I’ve known Ted half my life. When we met I was a teenager. I was a first year student at college the year our friendship started. Life had begun.

Now I find myself wondering if life is half done. Of course,we do not know when our last day may be. However, statistics tell me that I may not live past 80 or even 70. Death is waiting. Half of my days, or more, may be past me. Where am I going? What’s left of my life?

This year also happens to be the year our passports need to be renewed. I look at the Julie who had her picture taken ten years ago. She looks younger and thinner. Compared to me today, she looks like a model: imperfections invisible. Her hair is styled differently with long bangs covering her forehead and the rest bundled into a braid. This Julie looks calm and carefree and Californian. She’s preparing for a trip to Italy with her husband who got out of school and got a job. Life in Cupertino is sunny and sweet so far. Yes, I can remember. I can read it in her eyes.

My new picture has a strange expression. I look startled because I was. My long hair is loose, the way I wear it now, except tucked behind my ears so the photographer can see my face. I look like I didn’t comb my hair. I look like I’m about to speak my mind. I look like I tried to get my passport photo taken while my three girls were playing with toys in the ten minutes before my eye doctor appointment. I look like I’ve lived through battles.

I wish I still resembled the 1995 me. But that seems silly. After all, shouldn’t I look like I’ve lived another ten years? Since that first passport picture was taken, Ted and I have moved three times. We’ve bought two houses and sold one of them. Cars have come and gone. So have jobs. And some relationships. We went from living in the middle of the maze of Silicon Valley to living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean’s Puget Sound. Journeys have started and ended. We exposed ourselves spiritually, emotionally, physically to others, sometimes retreating in tears. We submitted ourselves to the infertility doctor. We’ve let our insides be scrutinized by specialists. The Julie in the old passport photo had never held her brother while he was dying. That Julie had never held her baby, first inside her and then outside on her chest, in that miraculous moment of meeting someone you already know.

Ten years from now I’ll renew my passport and take another picture. I wonder what that Julie, a decade older than I am now, will think of the Julie who posed for a photo last week. Where will she be in life? What will she be thinking? What song will she be singing?