I recently celebrated my 44th birthday. My forties are treating me well. I’m as flexible as I ever have been, and this has been the happiest decade of my life.
I have noticed one interesting change - I’ve been having impulses to match up young people. In other words, I’ve had an urge to baba.
My idea of a baba draws heavily from Lois McMaster Bujold. I can just see myself as a hunch-backed, crook-nosed Russian grandma with her head wrapped in a scarf, cackling as she arranges a marriage. There’s something about moving past the age of childbearing that makes me take a keener interest in seeing someone else take up the task. Genes must go on. Then I spot a young man and a young woman with shared interests, and who each have virtues that would mend the other’s weaknesses, and matchmaking becomes as tempting as a bowl of fresh fruit.
Of course, that’s not how we do it these days. In fact, it was probably never like that. And as a young woman, I would have resisted anyone’s suggestions for my fiancé.
We leave eligible men and women to sort themselves out. They have far more resources than the youngsters of a medieval village. They meet more people. They have more education. They can even divorce and try again. It’s good to be living in a modern nation of the twenty-first century.
Most importantly, young singles know their own hearts better than I do. So I don’t act on the impulse to baba. I’m simply intrigued to find myself feeling it.
Life does go on. I make my contributions where I can. Even if I was asked to make a match, I’d likely advise on strategies to find one to suit the questioner instead. That’s too big an adventure to give into someone else’s hands.
Are there places in your life where you are letting someone else run the show against your true desires? Is there some way you are shielding someone too much from the adventure of their lives? Think about the baba, and why our culture doesn’t arrange marriages any more.
May you have freedom and adventures,
Anna