WANTING THE OLD LIFE

My sister and I were loading our SUVs with boxes of items Mom wanted us to have. Dried flower arrangements she’d made with stems from her garden. Small flags she used to hang from a pole by her front door above the concrete geese she dressed for each season. Extra garden hoses for my yard. Blankets and Afghans––most too stained or threadbare to keep––and a myriad of other household items.

We didn’t really want any those things but accepted all of them on the advice of someone from Senior Moves, a company specializing in helping seniors leave long-time homes for senior housing. With confidence and compassion, our coach had told us, “Let the items sit in your car for a day, maybe a week, and then decide whether to keep, donate, or toss.”

During one of those downsizing sessions with Mom––helping her sort through the nearly ceiling-high stacks in her basement and hauling things to our parked cars––she uttered words under her breath that still haunt me.

“I want my life back.”

I remember sucking in my breath and glancing at my sister. She stared at me, her eyes wide. A small grimace tugged her lips downward, as if gravity pulled them into place. She and I didn’t need words to communicate; we never have. I knew what she was thinking because I felt it too. We both felt bad about Mom having to cull the things she’d spent a lifetime collecting in order to downsize from a standalone home to a two-bedroom apartment in a senior living complex.

My sister and I had tried to placate her: “I bet you do, Mom, but this new place will be better for Dad since this last stroke.” Such platitudes were, of course, the right thing to say. The woman from Senior Moves had coached us on this: validate her feelings, express empathy, help with as much as you’re able. But throughout the entire experience, I kept wondering: how would I feel, if this were me?

Twenty years later, Mom is still in that senior complex––a very plush one I should add. (Think posh hotel, rather than smelly matchbox-sized rooms and sterile hallways.) But without Dad. He’s been gone nearly ten years now, succumbing to cancer and old age at 84. Mom still lives in the same two-bedroom unit. Sunlight filters through fancy sheer curtains, casting rainbows across her favorite belongings, the ones she moved with her: a pink-hued oriental rug, an antique walnut sideboard, a cream damask sofa, and matching side chairs. Mom claims she is happy there, and from my frequent visits, I can tell she is well cared for by the staff. They tell me about her frequent participation in bingo, arts and craft classes, movies, and sing-alongs.

But every so often, Mom’s statement, “I want my life back,” pops into my head. Maybe because I am nearing the same age she was when she first moved there with Dad, but more likely because, like my mother, I am a widow living alone, wishing my own circumstances were different. I do not want the life back that I had before my husband passed––he was riddled with cancer––but I find myself asking a version of Mom’s old question: What part of my life would I want to go back to?

As a mother, I know the answer immediately. It is that tender time when all my children still lived at home and I was busy caring for them––prepping breakfast, bagging lunches, stuffing ingredients into the slow cooker for dinner, running carpools, basking in their successes, buoying them through disappointment. Those are the days I’d go back to and live over again. Yes, they were filled with chaos, frustration, and an unrelenting pace, and certainly I was often so fatigued that I didn’t know what day of the week it was. But with the responsibility of parenting came so much purpose. And during those years, my husband was in good health. Cancer was something that happened to strangers, not us. The future still beckoned bright and shiny like a copper penny.

While I understand the pull of those days––the routines, the purpose, the unquestioned richness of them––I realize that I don’t want my old life back exactly. What I wish I could reclaim is the feeling of it: the fullness, the urgency, the sense that life was moving forward in a meaningful way.

So perhaps what my mother really meant when she said, “I want my life back,” was not that she wanted the past returned to her, but that she missed how it felt to be the woman living that life. I think that may be true for me, too. Maybe we are all like that. Not longing for the exact circumstances of the past necessarily, but craving the love, hope, and sense of identity and belonging we carried with us so naturally.

Julie Ryan McGue is an American writer, a domestic adoptee, and an identical twin. She is the author of four award-winning books: Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging (She Writes Press, 2021), Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship (Muse Literary, 2023), Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood (She Writes Press, 2025), and Jack and Lulu Go to the Tree Farm (Muse Literary,2025).

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