On Aging

Jesus, I complain a lot, right?

I know. I'm not going to even try to make excuses. Sometimes, I'm just a glass half empty kind of gal.

Take this whole aging thing. I've ranted on about it several times before and I know you are wondering why I would bring it up yet again and the truth is, I just cannot wrap my brain around the fact that the woman staring back at me from the mirror is...well...ME. When did I get that old? I recently had my passport renewed and my photo was reminiscent of a Cold War era, female Soviet gulag prisoner. All that was missing was the babushka.

There is nothing that really prepares you for the slow decay of your body. For me it seems that one minute, I was being carded for beer and the next, the clerk was calling me ma'am and asking me if I needed help carrying my purchases to the car. Sadder still is that I often accept because I'm tired, dammit!

There was a time when I was codger bait. Older men LOVED me. Now, I'm the coug. The other day, I was having a conversation with a much younger friend and she happened to mention that her mum was forty eight years old.

Forty eight.

Four years older than me.

I am always surprised by how young women are when they start having their babies in this part of the country. Before the age of twenty five, I couldn't keep a cactus alive let alone a child.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love being in my forties. For the first time in my life, I can walk by the romance section at the bookstore and not sneer. I've got a great family, a bit of cash and I'm self-employed. Generally, life is very, very good. What I don't like is the downward slide of just about everything else.

Finding a bra that is not a Playtex fortress nightmare is impossible. I am forever adjusting the straps and pulling down the back in an effort to hoist the mams up and frankly, I'm losing the battle. The girls are exhausted. They want to lay down.

Those surround mirrors that you find in dressing rooms are a fucking blight on society. If I wanted to look at my arse, I would have been born Jessica Biel. Enough said.

And then, there are the wrinkles, the furrows and the grooves that assemble themselves into a physical depiction of the years that I have lived, like the rings in a tree stump. Who cares if my dimples and crow's feet are deeply etched? Who cares if my eyes are sinking into my head? I do. Shamefully. Vainly. Botox-lovingly. Do.

The most jarring thing about aging is the morning you wake up and come to the slow realization that there are likely fewer days ahead of you than behind you. That's the light bulb moment upon which I still spend time. It has changed the way I process information and make decisions about everything but most especially, it has sharpened my relationship criteria. Simply put, I try to limit my exposure to toxic individuals. The truth is that some people, (and this includes family), are just not emotionally well enough to hold front row tickets in my life. I have found that if I let them, they can suck the soul out of my existence.

I often wonder what the view will look like from ten or thirty years from now. I'm curious as to how my priorities will shift and evolve. I am in no hurry to get there but I can't help but think that there will be a time when I will look back upon my forties and reminisce about how young and stupid I was back then.