I have developed a whole new respect for my elders - who are, by the way, also now my contemporaries. I never thought I'd be middle aged. A decade was spent living in a kind of bizarre denial: a timeless place of suspended animation. In this surreal existence I was busy raising children and figuring out my life's calling, returning to academia and starting over, again. In the last few years life has stabilized into a predictable routine of daily duties and I've had time to assess not just what I'm doing but the person behind all the doing.
Over time the rude tide of reality slowly crept up and washed away all those years of kind denial. In effect, I woke up one day and realized I was no longer young. Not old. But definitely not young. The nail in the coffin came about a year ago when a friend innocently mentioned that, of course, at my age, I would no longer be having any more children. Now let's be clear, that is a true statement. But the implication is that I have surpassed the child-bearing age-range norm. Wow, I never thought I'd be looking back on my childrearing days in the past tense. My mother recently reflected on her view from age 86. She told me she never thought she'd have a daughter who was 47.
But this tide of age-awareness has churned up more insulting plumes then BP oil in the Gulf waters. I'm aghast that my memory, once nearly photogenic, is a quite a bit less reliable these days. The simplest words elude me without warning. Hunger, thirst and lack of sleep acerbate the problem like never before. Misplacing items is a daily occurrence. The only condolence is that I am not alone. Every woman I know in my demographic is in the same boat. I've been promised that in a few years my memory will return again; I'm hardly reassured. I used to ignore the advice about picking up exercise, doing crosswords or learning a foreign language to improve memory. Those certainly are good ideas for people a lot older than me, I glibly thought. But in recent months, and not so glibly, I've picked up two of the three aforementioned items. And yes, I'm relieved to report that they do help a bit. If I'm wrong, well then I'll be the most in-shape, bilingual cotton brain you'd ever have the pleasure to know.
I'm also coming to terms with the reality that the body I once simply wanted to relieve of a few pounds, will not, ever, return to pre-pregnancy-double-c-section bikini worthiness. And yet, that's been THE GOAL all these years. Though I never realized it as much as I do now. What are women who are continually bombarded with lots of beautiful younger women in magazines and on TV expected to do now, at the age we have now so gracefully acquired? I look at pictures of myself taken 20, or even 10 years ago, and I wonder why I was so critical of myself. Heck, from this side of the time-line that looks pretty good.
The other day I opened a fortune cookie and read that I would soon "come into perfection." Given the issues of agin' and the ensuing changin' that has so rudely invaded my reality: I doubt it. But it was certainly an amusing fortune to crack open for the author of this particular blog! If there is perfection to be found, it is in those ever-so rare moments in which we find ourselves blissfully, surprisingly content to be exactly who we are in that solitary, fractional frame of time and space.
