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. 

Expectations

Got an email from my oldest friend today. Not old in the chronological sense, but from the years we have known each other sense. She and I go all the way back to the fifth grade and The Church of the Resurrection Grade School. That’s thirty plus years now. Aside from family, I don’t think I go back farther with anyone else. Despite a few breaks in contact here and there over the decades, she could probably tell anyone who was interested in just how much, or not, I have changed over time. She was inquiring about our recent 25th high school reunion, which she missed, and to fill me in on her mother’s recent surgery. It seems her mother needed knee replacement and was under the impression that replacing a major joint was on par with most day surgeries. In, out and home to be all comfy snug as a drugged up bug for a day or two and then back to one’s normal routine. Alas, it was not the case. Apparently one cannot receive a new knee and go to the gym the next day and begin abusing it in spin class or on the treadmill. There is the whole pesky recuperation thing to deal with first. For my friend’s mother this means purchasing a walker, acquiring a toilet seat heightener and being eligible for a short term handicap parking sticker. I knew without her having to tell me that her mother would be horrified at the prospect of any one of those things, but all at once probably sent her over the edge. I know this because even though I haven’t seen either of her parents in many years, I have parents of my own who reject anything that hints at the fact that they might not be as young as say, my friend and I are. Which is not that young by the way.

She marveled at the differences in expectations patients can have about procedures like knee replacement. Being a doctor, she has seen these expectations run the gamut from Monty Python crowd of “It’s just a flesh wound” to those who believe there is never a good reason not to be put completely under. Expectations. And pity the poor doctor, or teacher or barista at the nearest Starbucks who can’t live up to them.

One of the reasons I was glad that immigration forced me to prematurely retire from teaching was the unrealistic expectations that were being forced on me by superiors and lawmakers and the media. A job that once beckoned me through the school days an hour or more before my students, and most of my colleagues, arrived every morning has been sucked dry of its joy the ridiculous notion that schools should be run like businesses and that educating children was no different from putting together appliances. I am sure the same could be said of medicine and the damage that has been done there by insurance companies who feel their true purpose is to enrich shareholders. Expectations. One of those eye of the beholder things, eh?

As a widowed women I found a veritable rule book of expectations I was expected to adhere to with the conviction of the newly reborn. One of my favorites was the one year rule. The widowed are expected to put off any major decisions until the first anniversary of their spouse’s death has been duly mourned for all to see. and maybe hand them certificate suitable for framing afterwards. Who knows. It sounded a bit iffy to me. Put off? What does that mean exactly? I had a master’s degree to finish. I was actually in the middle of my thesis when Will died and was preparing for my final seminar class that coming July. Selling my house perhaps? I wasn’t in dire need of that but if I had been, would it have been better to wait a year and hope a foreclosure wasn’t the result? I did reach the conclusion it was time to start looking at other career possibilities, but I was going to stick with teaching until I had things lined up. Would waiting a year to start planning my move have given me more clarity or simply thrown cold water on my momentum?

Expectations are about reality but sometimes reality bites a bit too hard to be given all that much credence. If my father hadn’t the lofty expectations he did after his strokes and being diagnosed with plumonary fibrois, he would be dead already. Expectations might inconvenience and cause us to shake are heads a bit in wonder, but in the end they are subjective thing. Better to be a square peg than one of the numerous round holes.