I was born at 7:36 A.M. forty-four years ago today. That - is a long time ago my friends, and yet if you asked me if I feel old or to define “old”, I don’t know if I could. Sure I recently berated a poster on my DM-Register blog about the delusional tendencies we “boomers” have about age and how that relates to us (not at all if you were wondering), but 44 is a considerable number of years. I don’t feel wiser though I am a bit creakier of joint and stiff of muscle at times. I have gray hairs (I may have mentioned this before) and I have wrinkles (of which I am not fond but I deal).
The celebration of me and my birth has gone through changes since that first birthday, a bittersweet day for the 17 year old who bore me and gave me up, I am sure. Over the course of my childhood it was duly noted by my immediate family and some extended with just three parties ever been held in my honor - my 1st birthday, my fifth and my thirteenth. I would not have another birthday party until my 37th. Will, my late husband, gathered our friends for a dinner celebration out at a new restaurant in Cumming, which is no longer there and where he is now buried. Throughout my teens and twenties my birthday was a hit and miss affair. During my college years it always fell during finals and no one could be coaxed away from books and notes for even the tiniest party. Once I was teaching, I might sometimes be feted by a class or a group of coworkers but the day was by and large just another day. I haven’t celebrated my birthday with my mom since high school, but I do remember one year in college when she actually got my gift and card to me on the very day of my birthday. The book was a fictionalized biography of Henry the VIII by Margaret George. Mom inscribed it even and I still have it. It’s sitting on the bookshelves in our living-room. Will always made a big deal of my birthday because he loved me and because he knew how much I still resented the birthday slights of the past when I had gotten combo birthday/xmas gifts and usually neither one was very nice. It made me wonder if anyone I knew had any idea at all of who I really was.
Today, Rob surprised me at lunch with a carrot cake (it’s the only kind I can eat without getting sick) and presents from Katy that he had picked out for her to give me. Books. Ken Follett’s World Without End which I had requested from the library about a month ago already and was still 43rd in the queue. I also got Helen Humphrey's The Frozen Thames which is a collection of short stories whose setting is the River Thames during those times it has frozen over - something it doesn’t do anymore. Rob is getting me a rebounder which he thought was an odd thing for me to want for my birthday but that’s me. I received three phone calls. One from my friends Meg in Iowa and then a call each from my parents. There were birthday greetings and wishes on my Facebook wall as well today from friends and my two wonderful step-daughters. And I have to say, that 44 is suiting me but that’s not a surprise. Age in general has always seemed a better fit than youth did.
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Really Old
If 32 is old than I am on the verge of becoming Abraham's wife when I turn 44 next week. I say this because I just finished reading a blog piece by reallyexcited at the Des Moines Register, where I also blog (as anniegirl1138) these days though it is more topical stuff. He was lamenting his loss of youth (and hedge-like eyebrows, I think). I understand what he means about gauging one's own mortality by measuring it against the relative youth, or lack thereof, of others. As a firmly planted in middle-aged woman, I am painfully, at times, aware of the fact that I am considered "day old" or worse in terms of my appearance. When I am not being assaulted every other page of Oprah the magazine by remedies for my sagging skin and paunching belly, I am running across article after article in the life sections of the Globe and Mirror or the Daily Journal advising me on the proper attire for someone "my age".
I shouldn't wear my hair long. Nothing gives off more of a desperate odour than a woman who doesn't crop her locks with the birth of her first child. A symbolic shearing to remind her (as if everything else that pregnancy and nursing do to the body isn't enough) that she is not a girl anymore. Tight clothing is out. Form-fitting is permissible, but only if a woman maintains a form that won't offend with rolls and curves and less than perky boobs.
Personally, I don't think anyone is truly ever old. On the inside anyway. I still marvel at the fact I held down a job for twenty years and no one questioned my ability to do so even once (to my face and that I know of). I've owned two pieces of property in my own right. And I drive. Right out in the traffic with everyone else. Funny but this last is the thing that most signifies the beginning of the end in terms of youth for me. The day the state of Iowa, in all its wisdom (and it's way older than I am) deemed my old enough to drive. I was telling my younger step-daughter not long ago that I still sometimes am as amazed that I can drive a car as I was on the very first day my father let me take the car out on my own.
Nothing tips the scales irredeemably into "old" as becoming a parent.I remember the first weeks as a mother to my now five year old and wondering how it could be that I was being allowed to raise her. I wasn't grown-up enough yet. Surely someone would notice any time and come and take her away. Give her to some grown-up woman who didn't still walk the Barbie aisle at Target with longing. Someone who cut her hair short just in anticipation of motherhood and took notes during the birthing classes. Someone who didn't forget her just learning to speak in sentences baby was in the backseat while she was listening to Eminem (though to my credit I did quit when she began requesting the "stand-up song").
It's an eye of the beholder thing like nearly everything else. I have never longed for my teens (and my recent 25th high school reunion reminded me again why) or my twenties. I was smooth and grey-less and my knees didn't creak like the stairs, but I wasn't nearly as strong or confident or happy with myself. Why go back? Why even think about it? Life is meant to be lived in a forward progression with each birthday finding us a wee bit closer to the enlightenment or at least the wisdom to recognize who we truly are behind the wrinkles that block our morning views.
"I'll be old until I die" is what I think reallyexcited said, but the reality is that you will be old when you think you are and how near or far that is from your ending days is up to you.
I shouldn't wear my hair long. Nothing gives off more of a desperate odour than a woman who doesn't crop her locks with the birth of her first child. A symbolic shearing to remind her (as if everything else that pregnancy and nursing do to the body isn't enough) that she is not a girl anymore. Tight clothing is out. Form-fitting is permissible, but only if a woman maintains a form that won't offend with rolls and curves and less than perky boobs.
Personally, I don't think anyone is truly ever old. On the inside anyway. I still marvel at the fact I held down a job for twenty years and no one questioned my ability to do so even once (to my face and that I know of). I've owned two pieces of property in my own right. And I drive. Right out in the traffic with everyone else. Funny but this last is the thing that most signifies the beginning of the end in terms of youth for me. The day the state of Iowa, in all its wisdom (and it's way older than I am) deemed my old enough to drive. I was telling my younger step-daughter not long ago that I still sometimes am as amazed that I can drive a car as I was on the very first day my father let me take the car out on my own.
Nothing tips the scales irredeemably into "old" as becoming a parent.I remember the first weeks as a mother to my now five year old and wondering how it could be that I was being allowed to raise her. I wasn't grown-up enough yet. Surely someone would notice any time and come and take her away. Give her to some grown-up woman who didn't still walk the Barbie aisle at Target with longing. Someone who cut her hair short just in anticipation of motherhood and took notes during the birthing classes. Someone who didn't forget her just learning to speak in sentences baby was in the backseat while she was listening to Eminem (though to my credit I did quit when she began requesting the "stand-up song").
It's an eye of the beholder thing like nearly everything else. I have never longed for my teens (and my recent 25th high school reunion reminded me again why) or my twenties. I was smooth and grey-less and my knees didn't creak like the stairs, but I wasn't nearly as strong or confident or happy with myself. Why go back? Why even think about it? Life is meant to be lived in a forward progression with each birthday finding us a wee bit closer to the enlightenment or at least the wisdom to recognize who we truly are behind the wrinkles that block our morning views.
"I'll be old until I die" is what I think reallyexcited said, but the reality is that you will be old when you think you are and how near or far that is from your ending days is up to you.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
From Here to Eternity
There was a commentary piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday stemming from the recent death of Deborah Kerr. The author talked about scrutinizing a recent photo of the eighty-something actress trying to find traces of the beautiful woman she had been so long ago. She went on to wonder why it is that male actors are allowed to basically decay in the public eye via their film work while women are considered used up commodities when they reach their forties. As an example she used compared actors like Jack Nicholson being a leading man still despite the fact that he is physically an old man whereas Ms. Kerr “retired” from acting essentially when she turned forty. It gets back to, naturally, the double-standard when it comes to men and women and aging. A standard that exists, I think, for two reasons. One being that it is a man’s world. They have always made the rules and the rules have always favored them. The second reason is that we women go along with this by willingly buying into the notion that as we lose our youth to the years and the mileage, we become less beautiful. The latter, and the former really as well, is crap.
If I could, I would show you a picture of myself at eighteen and one now and you would have to admit I am much better looking now. I am the proverbial ugly duckling that age and wisdom have transformed into, if I must so say myself, a damn fine swan. I can’t pretend that I am happy with wrinkles or gray hairs or the fact that I must work longer to get into a healthy physical state, but I am much better looking than many of male peers. The article I read talked about how advances in cosmetic surgery have helped women stay at par with their same age brethren, and though I am grateful for the advances in medicine that help those people who have been ill or badly injured avoid some of the physical stigma, I am not so sure that cosmetic surgery has been a good thing overall for my gender or that without it we wouldn’t be “at par”. There are exceptions, of course, but I don’t think that the majority of men fare any better against the ravages of time time than women do. They get just as fat. flabby, gray and wizened as we do when we don’t take the time ti eat properly and take care of ourselves. Having just been at my 25th high school reunion I can say that by and large the mid-forties is not what it was a half-century ago when people that age seemed to look so much older than we do now. Hair coloring has something to do with this as does the advent of birth control which allowed women to control to some extent the ravages of childbearing on their bodies. Mainly though, we live less physically demanding lives.
Still, it hasn’t changed the perception that forty is old for a woman and prime for a man. Not fair but we women don’t do ourselves favors by buying into such nonsense.
If I could, I would show you a picture of myself at eighteen and one now and you would have to admit I am much better looking now. I am the proverbial ugly duckling that age and wisdom have transformed into, if I must so say myself, a damn fine swan. I can’t pretend that I am happy with wrinkles or gray hairs or the fact that I must work longer to get into a healthy physical state, but I am much better looking than many of male peers. The article I read talked about how advances in cosmetic surgery have helped women stay at par with their same age brethren, and though I am grateful for the advances in medicine that help those people who have been ill or badly injured avoid some of the physical stigma, I am not so sure that cosmetic surgery has been a good thing overall for my gender or that without it we wouldn’t be “at par”. There are exceptions, of course, but I don’t think that the majority of men fare any better against the ravages of time time than women do. They get just as fat. flabby, gray and wizened as we do when we don’t take the time ti eat properly and take care of ourselves. Having just been at my 25th high school reunion I can say that by and large the mid-forties is not what it was a half-century ago when people that age seemed to look so much older than we do now. Hair coloring has something to do with this as does the advent of birth control which allowed women to control to some extent the ravages of childbearing on their bodies. Mainly though, we live less physically demanding lives.
Still, it hasn’t changed the perception that forty is old for a woman and prime for a man. Not fair but we women don’t do ourselves favors by buying into such nonsense.
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