Yesterday was my birthday, and I turned 49. My last birthday in my forties! I have really loved my forties, and I hope this last year before I can say that I’m nifty and fifty will be just as great.
I love birthdays. This isn’t news to anyone who has known me even tangentially – I love my birthday, of course, but I love everyone else’s too. I mean, it was the day you arrived on the planet (and blinking, stepped into the sun). I hope we all have THAT song running through our heads now. Mind songs aside, birthdays are a wonderful time to celebrate people for just existing; you don’t need to do anything, you just need to be here.
I get more ponderous about life than I typically do around my birthday, which is to say very ponderous indeed. Years ago, in one of my senior yoga classes, a student said something about how this aging thing is for the birds, and another countered with at least we’re on this side of the grass. I would say that not being dead is a pretty excellent part of aging; that sounds sarcastic, but just last week I heard that a very beloved and popular yoga teacher in Calgary passed away at age 52. This is just one more example in a long line of examples of people I know whose lives have been cut too short, and I for one will never not be grateful for just being here.
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the interviewer said something that really stuck with me: When we say “I don’t feel old,” what we are saying in essence is “I don’t feel irrelevant,” or “I don’t feel invisible.” The language that we use around aging is absolutely fascinating to me, and I thought about this all week. Our culture uses very positive language around youth, and negative language around aging – “antiaging” products to obtain a “youthful” glow, for example – and I don’t want to subscribe to that. Let’s put a little pin in that for now.
Something that is very interesting to me is how we ascribe a certain look to a certain age; for example, one will frequently hear the refrain “She doesn’t look X years old” or “She doesn’t look a day over X.” But how do we know what X looks like? There are just so many variables. Let us never forget that Rue McClanahan was 51 when she played Blanche on The Golden Girls. So who is to say how old someone looks? There are no rules anymore.
A key characteristic of being young is being unaware of the beauty that is present in ourselves, merely by being young. It is a fact of life that one does not realize just how beautiful they are simply by possessing that special glow of youth; instead, we realize it much later, at some point in the future. We are just so socialized to be constantly unhappy with our physical appearance: our weight, skin, hair, clothes, and features are all subject to criticism and are a source of deep unhappiness. How many of us were satisfied with our looks at 16, 18, 22? I would say probably none. And yet, and YET we were all beautiful, in the way that the young are always beautiful, and in twenty years we will be looking at photos of ourselves as we are right now, thinking how young and beautiful we look. I mean, why wait the 20 years? Why not appreciate ourselves right this minute?
I have been having a bit of an epiphany over the past several months; I have tried to condition myself to really lean in to the physical signs of aging. After all, I’m in a different life stage, no different from when I was pregnant and was constantly fascinated by and in admiration of my own body. Now I’m just on the other side of the fecundity spectrum, and why should that not be a time of fascination and admiration? Have I started developing jowls, and do I have loose skin under my chin that can only be described as a wattle? Yes. But short of surgery, there is nothing to be done about it, so why not appreciate my kind of melting face? Sure, I’m discovering why ladies of a certain age prefer elastic-waisted pants due to my figure becoming rectangular, and sure, my neck is rivaling Nora Ephron’s, but this is my stage of life, and I am just going to lean all the way in. Look at my beautiful grey roots!
Okay, maybe I’m not leaning THAT far in. I’m still going to colour my hair. I’m still going to use my retinol creams, my products to prevent hair thinning, all my makeup. But the point is I’m on the right side of the grass, and I’m not going to waste one more moment of my wild and precious life being unhappy with my looks.
A few months ago, someone – with, I’m sure, the best of intentions – told me, very helpfully, that every Thursday at Shopper’s Drug Mart is Seniors’ Day, and I could therefore receive a 20% discount on all purchases. I am not exactly sure what my facial expression looked like, but the person quickly said not to worry, the definition of senior is someone over 55, not 65. Now listen, there is nothing stigmatizing about being over 55, but a person wants to actually BE over 55 to be assumed that they are over 55, even for those of us working on our positive language around aging. It took me a moment, but I managed to say that I was not actually eligible for this discount, and then the conversation took what can only be described as a weird and awkward turn: they started to guess my age, going backward from 54. I stopped them when they got to 51 and said I was 48, at which point they said “Oh wow, really?”
So.
Maybe that’s when my epiphany started. Because believe you me, this conversation was not at all pleasant to me at the time, but looking back on it, it’s pretty funny. It’s also interesting, circling back to stigmatizing language, and how we assign an age a person looks versus the age that they are. This is what 49 looks like!
It looks different for everybody, of course – one woman’s 49 is another woman’s 55, evidently – but I for one am celebrating another turn around the sun.
Weekly Reading
The Whispers. I could NOT put this book down. Wow, what an incredibly told, compelling story about a child who suffers an accident and his mother who feels intense guilt about that accident. There are so many twists and surprises, and an intense, gloriously satisfying ending. This book is a real statement on the incredible complexities of motherhood, about neighbourhoods and relationships. I read and enjoyed this author’s first book, The Push, but let me tell you, this book leaves that one in the dust. It is SO well done and I am obsessed with it. What a ride!
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I’m very mixed. On the one hand, the author’s research and intelligent points about time – how it’s measured, what is a clock and where did it come from, how do we utilize our time – are impressive. On the other hand, the writing style is very thick and tedious to me. It was a drag to read, honestly, and I don’t feel like what I got out of it was worth the time it took to read this. It was a slog.
Pete and Alice In Maine. When I heard this premise, I thought “Lucy By The Sea!” But friends, this is definitely not Lucy By The Sea, even if it is a story of a couple whose marriage is in trouble who flee New York with their two young children to their summer house in Maine, in early 2020. Now. A couple of things. It is a very real portrayal of the actual things people went through – children suddenly isolated from their friends, the inability to get toilet paper, the massive fear and sudden loathing of other people who are not behaving in the same way we are. So it is very realistic, except for the dialogue, which is ridiculously unnatural. Ridiculously. Every time a character spoke, it took me out of the story. The characters are all completely unlikeable – maybe a commentary on how people were at that time, I don’t know. The social commentary is pretty heavy-handed too. The ending is ambiguous which I usually like, but in this case it just seemed abrupt and strange. All in all, not an enjoyable reading experience for me, but who knows, maybe it will work for you.
I had a really wonderful birthday; we planted the garden, with the exception of tomatoes and peppers, I had a nice morning hike with Rex, and then the guys and I went out for dinner, coming back home for an epically delicious cake afterwards. I am so lucky.
In other news, I am taking a bloggy break for a couple of weeks, and when I’m back I will have lots of adventures to share with you! I look forward to catching up with all of you then, and so for now, take care of yourselves, my beautiful friends. xo
