All posts by 40sarethenew40s

Such is the Irony of Life, I Suppose

Aging Parents, Reflections,

This past Fourth of July holiday was probably the weirdest one I’ve ever experienced. Shortly before that weekend of obligatory celebration, my father had a back operation. Minutes before my father had a back operation, my mother fell into his gurney outside of pre-op and broke her knee, requiring her to check in for a knee replacement. So I spent the week prior to the Fourth of July weekend in and around a hospital in Philadelphia.

This hospital, being the oldest in the U.S.A., was situated in the heart of Old Philadelphia, just blocks from early Americana like the Liberty Bell and the American Philosophical Society. In the other direction were the pleasantries of your typical well-moneyed urban neighborhood–a Whole Foods, a juice bar, cute couples on foot, and a ton of charming architecture.   When I wasn’t tending to my parents’ post-op struggles, I spent a lot of time just drinking in the environment around me.

I should add that neither I or my parents actually live in or around Philadelphia.  The city attracts patients from unfortunate towns all over the state, places where waiting room stays last for hours, choices for medical services are few, and doctors routinely misdiagnose patients, causing infections to worsen or sickness to death (I am convinced that these dying industrial towns are the new third world, but that’s another subject entirely). My elderly parents live in one of these bankrupt places, routinely driving two hours to the nearest big city for their medical services.

That’s how I ended up spending a week in the nation’s first capital, in a hotel at its old Navy Yards, occupying a room that my mother had intended to stay in during my father’s recovery from back surgery. My father had been stationed at those Navy Yards in the fifties. I wandered miles of the now industrial complex after visiting hours ended at the hospital, studying dormant officers’ houses, barracks-turned-art studios, abandoned docks, and gigantic retired war vessels.

During my days I wandered in and around Pennsylvania Hospital. While my parents napped, I walked through a street fair where I saw a pogo competition. At the American Philosophical Society I saw a page from Lewis and Clark’s journals and a bust of Thomas Jefferson. At the hospital I saw a lot of the first-floor cafeteria and my mother’s nakedness (I hate hospital gowns). On Broad Street I saw an old furrier—not sure if it’s still in business—with faded bluish glossy pics of women in fur coats on otherwise empty walls behind dirty windows. I saw an old restaurant and lounge—definitely no longer in business—with a florescent tube light sign boasting air conditioning. I saw a strange little BMW, met a crazy lady with bright red lipstick. I tried a new Cliff bar. I took the stairs at the hospital, seven marble flights. I remained occupied.

That is what you do when you have nothing else to do but wait and watch.

I’d been in that position before, in a hospital, cringing at the sight of my parents’ bodily fluids and frailty. But this time around I was a better hospital, in a better place, which was in a holiday spirit. I was able to cope with the mess and the sad fact that my Mom and Dad are falling apart. Every night, from my hotel window, I could see brilliant fireworks displays. I took pictures of them and of everything else I described above and showed them to my parents in their matching hospital beds as they came in and out of post-op pain.

Such is the irony of life, I suppose.

Giving It Your Half (or Maybe Your Three-Quarters)

Reflections

I never understood career drive. Even now, now that I have found a niche in my career that I like, I still don’t have trouble finding other things to do during my unscheduled time.   I don’t think I was born with a personality that thrives on action and accomplishment in the workplace, envy and adoration of my colleagues or what-have-you.

I am glad that I have a part-time job now because I dedicate as much time to my two or three classes a semester as I dedicated to a full-time teaching load in a public school. In my present job setting, however, that time spent accomplishes a lot. And it pays off—I am organized and entertaining, and my students can measure their progress and accomplish their goals. I can effectively teach, and also I can spend a good amount of time in my own head, entertaining thoughts that have nothing to do with teaching. I’m going out there, and I’m facing the working world, and I’m giving it my half (or maybe my three-quarters).

Unfortunately, the amount I was able to sink into my role as a public school teacher didn’t cover the time I needed to be a great success in that field. My students suffered—I suffered—and if I had a do-over… well, if I had a do-over… I wouldn’t go into the profession at all. I was wrong. I made a big, fat mistake resulting from relative youth and lifelong depression and alcohol abuse and the junk pile of all the prior mistakes I had been sitting on when I made that big one.

If I had a do-over, I know I wouldn’t do that. But what would I do? Be a lawyer? A park ranger? Who knows. Who knows what I was meant to be. I’m 43. Are questions like these even relevent?

My mom is a half to three-quarters woman herself. She was the “me” of her generation, kinda drifting around, working various jobs that offered varying levels of responsibility, botching up and then patching up her marriage (my father, I believe, helped with the botching part). She daydreamed, had a couple kids, had me.   She listened to me about half the time. But she made it to place where she can feel satisfied. I wonder if she ever wonders about do-overs? If she ever blames herself like I blame myself for where I am?

Although, maybe “blame” is not the right word. I didn’t “end up” where I am now as much as I made it happen, the good and the bad. I can trace that accumulating pile of choices from the bottom up, from my foolish twenties into my experimental thirties, into my wiser forties. When I scan the vistas from the top of my mountain, I am satisfied with what I see—a rare breed of husband, “my winnings” from a high-risk gamble; the opportunity to live well, to write this. Yes, I am satisfied with what I see, so satisfied that I almost have forgotten how I got here, how many tough decisions I had to make. And now, with so many of my past struggles behind me, I can stop blaming myself for what didn’t work. I can even feel pride for what did.

Get Ready to Join the Grandmas’ Club

Reflections

My little cousin, the girl who convinced me that eating green bananas was healthy, who talked me into shaving my belly button thatch (which then grew in black and wiry), who insisted that we wear matching purple dresses for an entire weekend; the girl I used to catch lizards with, fight with, chase boys around Disneyworld with, get caught smoking cigarettes with; this girl became a grandmother yesterday. My little cousin.

She hasn’t been my “little” cousin in years. We’ve always lived apart, and her world became serious much sooner than mine when she had her first baby while I was still dawdling around with that guy I’d called my husband. She grew up long before I did. She’s tough, quick-witted, and stone-cold practical like our Scottish grandmother had been. She’s a matriarch in a man’s profession, and a mother who can father. And she’s gorgeous. And now she’s a grandmother. Fuck.

I gotta say, I thought I had it all figured out. I was growing accustomed to friends getting cancer, to parents getting feeble, to nieces and nephews growing up and having kids of their own. Hell, my brother has been a grandparent for thirteen years. But I wasn’t prepared for my dearest childhood friend to introduce a tiny granddaughter to the world.

It’s sinking in now. It makes sense. I knew this baby was coming. I just needed a minute to breath, to regroup, to remember that we’re grownups now.

This Could Be Our Last Decade of Hotness

Reflections

Remember John Cusack in Say Anything? Probably not.

What I mean is, you probably remember Say Anything (if you were alive then, and over the age of ten), but you probably don’t remember the ripped, youthful, smooth-faced John Cusack in that film. You might remember Cusack, but what your memory sees is a more recent image of him. Say Anything was a long time ago, in the eighties, when we all looked just as youthful. And how well do you remember that?

I recommend seeing the film again, especially if your only remaining impressions of it are a forty-something John Cusack and a memory of your then boyfriend sitting rigidly in the theater, tight-jawed and fuming and refusing to hold your hand because, earlier in the parking lot, you’d made some humorous remark that he didn’t think was so humorous. He was the first of many, you would later learn, whose egos could be smushed by the smallest of observations…

…anyway, forget old boyfriends.

I caught a few minutes of Hot Tub Time Machine last night, and Cusack was still quite delectable in 2010. At the time of the film’s premiere, he was exactly my age now, 43. He was in his youthful forties. I could see that adorable young actor under the lines around his mouth and eyes, under the thinning hair and emerging paunch. I think that’s what makes some men in their forties so attractive to women and men of all ages—they’ve got their shit together, and they’re still hot. Chevy Chase, on the other hand, the clairvoyant hot tub repairman, was starting to fall apart. Chase, a comedian that I and John Cusack might have enjoyed in our youth, was well past his forties.

Five years later, having completely shed that delusional aura that allows us to still see what we want to see, a youthful version of the person under the white hair and the extra pounds, Chevy Chase stumbled on the Saturday Night Live’s 40th reunion set. He tripped on a small step, on nothing basically, the way a 72 year-old man or woman might do. Twitter fans were all abuzz with concerns for his health. Without any sort of professional degree to back me up, I’ll contend that his health sucks. It certainly sucks in comparison to his kamikaze Saturday Night Live days, or his Vacation decade, or even his cameo appearance in the first Hot Tub Time Machine, and that’s because he’s old. And that’s what happens when you get old—you take funny meds, and you gain or lose weight, and you trip on shit, and people start treating you like you’re old, start tweeting about your weight gain and over-enunciating when they talk to you. Chevy Chase is lucky that it took this long for viewers to notice his age.

These days, when I run into someone I knew in high school, the encounter can go one of two ways: I might see the person through my memory lens, superimposing taught skin and big hair over the present image until I’m comfortable with the adult standing in front of me, or I might find the person to be completely unrecognizable. Either way, we’ve aged. And when the old high school acquaintance says something like, “You look exactly the same,” she means that she can still remember what she used to see underneath your starting-to-sag skin, your extra pounds, and your fly-away hair. And unless you’ve undergone some kind of aesthetic transformation inspired by money or fame or success that makes you appear way hotter than you ever were in high school, that’s what you want.

We want to be in that limbo state between young and old, where our accomplishments and our confidence more than make up for our once flawless appearance. That’s hot. And this could be our last decade of hotness. So carpe diem.

Home, Home in the Suburbs…

Life in the Suburbs

So many folks in this affluent suburb are baking bread and returning to the range, raising chickens and bees in their quarter-acre backyards and jarring the fruits of our local farmers’ harvests. A buzz in the community newsletter referenced Michael Pollan without providing contextual clues for readers who lack subscriptions to The New York Times. I stopped by the kids’ mother’s house, and she answered the door in a flour-dusted apron. Just baking the day’s bread, she said, while participating in a teleconference. She sends the kids back to our house with date-labeled Ball jars full of jam and pickled heirloom tomatoes, which I eat with a mix a of gratitude and mild disdain.

Members of my community appear to be initiating a revival. They’re having their milk delivered in reusable bottles, and they’re befriending the butcher who carves up their grass-fed beef.

You know where this is going, right?

Before I have my critical say about this suburban revolution, I should mention that I have nothing against homemade goods or sustainable agriculture: I’ve disliked factory farms since the days when you were labeled a socialist for doing so (These days, I think “terrorist” is the new term for any kind of real factory farm protest*). And I was raised on seasonal picks from our large, backyard garden, supplemented by informal weekend visits to various growers—some professional, some just dawdlers with a lot of land and generations of knowledge of practical husbandry. My father referred to all of them by first or last name: “Let’s walk over to Wilson’s** and see what he’s got. Let’s ride over to George’s and see if the corn is ready.” I spent my summers consuming bowls of steamed Swiss Chard and boiled corn-on-the-cob. Whenever I visit my childhood home, I try to do the rounds, bagging up as many seasonal goods as I can keep and cook.

When I’m home, that is.

See, when I’m home, I can go to a local farm, walk into a barn, collect a pile of whatever happens to be in season—if it’s fall, maybe a couple of heads of cauliflower and cabbage, a peck of apples, some cider, a bunch of winter squash, some late-season greens, some beets—and the proprietor will look at my collection of goods and pretend like she’s adding something up in her head and then throw out some absurd number like, “Twelve dollars.”

There’s the rub.

I can buy similar, locally-produced and wholesome fruits and veggies in my town-square farmers’ market, situated near a consignment shop that pedals used Fendi handbags for $600 (OBO) and a boutique furniture store with signs on all the chairs that say, “Please refrain from seating yourself.” Just multiply those twelve dollars above by, oh, say ten, and I can have my country home right here in this posh metropolitan region. You can have anything you want for a price. You can take your kids on international vacations every school break, and you can still make apple butter.

Last summer, while listening to an organic gardener’s podcast***, I learned some equation for balancing money and time and labor. I don’t remember the mathematical construct, if he even shared that, but I remember his justifications for doing what he did—he used rabbit manure instead of fertilizer on the garden because it was cheap and plentiful. He fed the rabbits with garden waste, so he didn’t need to spend money on feed (And he ate the rabbits.). And he invested no time and effort in weeding his garden because the physical energy “costs” of weeding the garden would then be greater than the fuel energy supplied by its harvest. He saved a lot of money, fed his family, and—from what I was able to gather about his circumstances—didn’t take expensive vacations or own a GPS system for his bicycle.

Here’s what irks me about the suburban farm-to-table movement—it’s so expensive, and so conscious. It’s like seeing a completely restored, pre-eighties-gas-crisis muscle machine outside a two-million-dollar home. I still appreciate the car for what it is, for the nostalgia it evokes, but I know the owner just paid someone else a lot of money to do all the hard stuff with it before it ended up in his driveway.

But I think that analogy needs some work of its own, and I think I digress.

What sets the real homespun pursuits apart from those of the suburban breadmakers is, in my opinion, a matter of necessity. A friend of mine from back home keeps pigs in her garage, raises ducks and turkeys and chickens in her yard, and trades foul and pork for beef that her sister raises on her own, substantial chunk of rural property. Another friend of mine from the city survived a six-month layoff by living on whatever she could make from scratch with a ration of flour and oil, including her own daily bread. And some of my favorite childhood memories involve making elderberry jam with my mother, using the elderberries that we picked from overgrown patches along the roadside.

Necessity. One friend lives so far from her nearest grocery store that keeping a stock of fresh meat on her property is both healthy and economical. Another friend was flat broke. And my mother just didn’t want to see all those elderberries go to waste. Whether by choice or by chance, Mr. Organic Gardener and my mom and my friends who keep pigs in their garages have more in common with each other than my neighborhood nine-to-fivers who rush home in eight-lane traffic to feed the chickens. The former live a life of practical necessity. The math adds up.

I began this post with a caveat, that I have nothing against homespun pursuits. It’s true. In the big picture, it’s probably more noble to have your milk delivered to your doorstep 1950s-style than to decorate your driveway with an immaculate, 1950s coupe.   Both acts are quite retro, but one is retro in the name of saving the earth and America’s health and the livelihood of the small farmer. The other is just fun (I salivate at the thought of owning a vintage American car with a V8 engine. I confess.). But whether we spend a lot of money in social protest or we spend a lot of money to make a social statement (Hey, this car still has the original chrome detailing…), it takes money to do it. It takes privilege. Because of the prohibitive costs of maintaining a diet of locally-produced fare, our suburban food movement is not so much a revolution as it is a fad. And unless the price of local apples plummets to something closer to that of a bag of them at the local WalMart, it will remain a fad until something takes its place.

* reference from Green is the New Red.

**all names have been changed to protect the identities of the now dead or feeble.

***can’t reference it because I can’t find it anymore.

Shame is Universal

Reflections

6:30 a.m.

My dog is sleeping in, which I think is comical. He spent the past week at my in-laws’, where no one gets up before eight on weekdays and before ten on weekends. He’s experiencing his own form of jet lag. I pay a lot of attention to the dog. I’m able to diagnose his ailments before taking him to the vet. My husband says he won’t question my keen power of observation concerning this dog because I’m always right.

I wasn’t so attentive with my last dog, and I think the guilt and shame of that semi-neglect inspires me to pay particular attention to this one—my forties dog. In my thirties, my pet was just another prop in my drama, a reflection of the fuck-up I was making of myself. In my forties, I have become aware that the world consists of other beings besides myself.

But I think it’s a bit reductive to blame my dog neglect on age, as if one can cross some sort of invisible line and become a mature person on her fortieth birthday. If it were that simple, then the world could be saved by thirteen year-old Jewish boys when they become gallant and responsible men on the day after their Bar mitzvahs. Maybe I would have reached my epiphany via cotillion. We cross hundreds of invisible—and not-so-invisible—lines to become what we are.

***

On the subject of reductionism, a very brilliant friend of mine wrote a not-so-brilliant comment in a recent letter. I had told him about one of the more visible lines that I believe has marked my character in this decade—a suicide in a family I am very close to—and he asked me why she did it. “Was it shame?” He asked. Then followed up immediately with, “I think it was shame.”

I replied (rather diplomatically, I think) that “shame” is probably involved in every mess we get into, suicide included, and that—of course—this event was much more than that. If we went around offing ourselves at the onset of “shame” then nearly every sentient woman in the world would be dead. Men worldwide would be like they are right now in China, looking around and wondering where all the women went and hitting up anything with ovaries in a desperate attempt to couple before they die. Here is where I separate women from men.

I’m in the middle of reading Lena Dunham’s memoir right now. In this memoir, especially in the first section titled “Love & Sex,” she reveals some of the sources of her own shame*. I’ve highly regarded her HBO series, Girls, for representing young relationships and sexual encounters as they really are—underwhelming and confusing at best, often disgusting and shameful.

I’m thankful that Dunham put herself out there.   Now I don’t have to. And I wonder now how many other women should be thankful that Lena Dunham was creative enough or crazy enough or young enough to put herself out there, to share those secrets that never make it to print because they’re the real, the shameful, kind of secrets that victims of low self-esteem or women who lived through adolescence never tell anyone.

Dunham is making me think differently about shame.   I’ve felt it before, acknowledged that shit happened, that I was once a complicated girl and, later, a complicated woman (and by “complicated” I imply a level of fucked-up that isn’t so much funny as it is sad). I’ve thought about my transgressions, but not in the way that I’m thinking about them now.   Since Dunham cracked herself open and let me view hers, I’ve stopped thinking about my secrets as shameful tales that only I am stupid enough to be privy to. These are collective tales, like the 800+ recorded versions of the Cinderella story that permeate every culture and time period in the world. Shame is universal.

But I digress, again, into reductionism. And before going even further with some maudlin thoughts about death being the only universal that there truly is, I will stop myself. Maybe take the dog for walk. I’ve spent enough time in my head today, and it’s not even 8:00 a.m.

*reference from Not That Kind of Girl.

I’m Taking Over Now

Parenting, , , ,

The cool thing about being a stepparent is that I can opt in or out.  Today I’m in.

See, I went to bed early (for a Friday), and dragged my ass out of bed even earlier (for a Saturday) only to discover all the lights on in the rec room, one kid planning his next move in Seafarers of Cataan, and another playing games on the iPad. At 6:15. I’m taking over for a few moments today and declaring an across-the-board 8:30 bedtime. If they’re going to get up at six anyway, they’ll have to be forced to go to sleep earlier. I don’t want miserable, unrested kids on my watch. My husband’s last words to them last night, around ten, after “I love you,” after they’d watched the entire NHL All-Star Fantasy draft and a couple episodes of Seinfeld, and then played one more round of Seafarers, was, “No need to get up early.” Uh huh.

You can’t give little people who aren’t programmed to sleep-in your permission to sleep-in. What he was doing, crafty adult male that he is, was giving himself permission to sleep in, while I spent my precious, still-dark early-morning writing time listening to Cataan scenarios and cheers of victory over whatever rigged team was losing on the iPad. Well, I foiled his plan and sent the kids back to bed with the option of reading under their book lights if they still insisted on being awake before daylight (Let’s organize a return to reading books while we’re at it, before their brains turn to Jell-o.).

I’m holding my ground until 7:00. Even though I hear their voices downstairs, probably discussing how crazy I am for making them sit in the dark for 45 minutes while bacon is probably sizzling over there in the alternate reality, I’m not budging. It’s the adults in this world who are burdened with crafting order out of chaos. The children in this world need it, crave it; although children can’t always express that need except in poor performance later on in the day after a short, sleepless night. My sweet husband had his chance, and he blew it with a no-need-to-get-up-early. I’m taking over now.

I’ll Take a Good Compromise

Parenting, , , , , , , , , ,

I grind my teeth.

I don’t know for how long I’ve been doing it. I just know that when my teeth began to fall apart (after forty, of course), my dentist’s hygienist told me quite bluntly that I had the teeth of a seventy year-old.

Neither my dentist nor his candid hygienist explained to me why I grind my teeth. It isn’t their job to explain why. There is no room for preventative psychoanalysis in the straightforward dental profession.  That part, I’ve learned, is my job. And I blame kids.

Here, I could try to go in the direction of one those sadly amusing Mommy blogs, but I’m not a mommy. I’m a stepmother, and that’s a very different experience. I didn’t carry these kids to term, I didn’t breastfeed them. As I neared the big 4-0, I just became a parent to two human beings who had already traveled with their biological parents through the delirium of those early months.

As a consequence, I don’t have a parent’s delusional filter that spares me from taking a child’s behavior too personally. I don’t have that inexplicable love coupled with guilt for bringing them into my mess, the emotional combo that ultimately engenders forgiveness. I feel and think every bump and pothole on the road to these kids’ maturation. And I dread the end of it.

I tried writing about this topic last night, in the heat of my frustration, and the result was just embarrassing. I just can’t do it at night. Correction: I can’t do it well at night. I wrote something, but it wasn’t an idea. There was no resolution. I just vented and then went to bed upset. I still am. I don’t need to explain the action that brought me here. I just think that kids, by virtue of their immaturity and confusion about life, are capable of being hurtful in all kinds of creative ways. You don’t need to be a stepparent to know that.

So I’m doing poorly today in general. I have a slight headache. I didn’t wake up feeling refreshed and thrilled about the daybreak. Rather, I woke up sick and tired from odd dreams, probably a result of the sixteen sandwich cookies I ate in lieu of an alcoholic bender (my trusty, thirty-something method of solving these problems).

One positive spin on this morning, though, is that there are no kids to wake up with me at 6:15, no little people milling around helplessly while I try to process my coffee and bring whatever I’m writing to an abrupt end. I’m not for sharing in the morning, at least until not until I’ve drunk that coffee and sat in the dark in front of a glowing monitor (That’s a side of me that I’m sure the kids’ll remember well into their eighties.). Meanwhile, in an alternate reality about three blocks down the street, their mom is cooking them a wholesome breakfast and showering them with her guilt-love.

Actually, they are good kids. One is a particularly agreeable little soul, sensitive and polite and highly empathetic. The other one, well, he’s a little more “complicated.” But he behaves well, and he plays the part. Whether he’s feeling the love or not (and who knows what he’s feeling), he usually acts like an obedient child. And you know what? That’s something. That’s a lot, in fact. Kids all around us these days, from the store to the soccer games and into our TVs, are acting like disrespectful, entitled little turds. I’m glad to be half-raising kids who don’t act like that.

I’ve often heard from parents and teachers that children at certain stages in their development don’t have to like you, shouldn’t like you, in fact. They just have to respect your rules and your wishes, your sometimes batshit ways of achieving order and routine around the house. And these kids do. They accept me and my vision, even tease me about it. My husband insists that they even like me, even love me, but who knows.

I can’t have it all, so why complain about what I do have? Anger and protests are for those decades past. Mine is, I suppose, for compromise. Because everyone likes an agreeable little soul, even if she is sometimes playing a part. And grinding her teeth.

Falling

Aging Parents, ,

Mom fell today.

I had been dreading an incident like that.  She’s hearing-impaired, easily distracted, and clumsy.  I spent the first twenty years of my life hearing a “thump” and then “Owwww!” and then “Shit, shit, SHIT!” (Mom never said anything worse than “shit.”)  She was always walking into doorways or falling up stairs or bumping her toes on the furniture.  So I just knew that one of these days, on my watch, she was gonna fall flat on her face in public.

And so she did, at a busy intersection in front of a bus stop.  Fifteen seconds earlier she’d decided she wanted to walk the six blocks back to my car rather than sit on a bench and wait in a nearby park.  She’s stubborn like that.  Then, right in the middle of a conversation about what a great day we’d had shopping…  Blam!  Her bags fell out of her hands as she tried to catch herself, and I threw mine in a half-assed attempt to catch her.  Our stuff rolled all over the sidewalk. A guy in full Navy sailor regalia picked up her canister of silver cupcake topping and stuffed it back into the wrong bag and handed it to me.  Two ladies gave us their packet of tissues and stared for a second before shuffling off.  Another man ran into a nearby restaurant and grabbed a bunch of napkins for her bleeding nose, which turned out to be her bleeding lip.  Someone even offered to call 911, but there was nothing anyone could really do.  I knew by her reaction that she looked worse than she felt. Nothing was broken, or she would have been screaming, “Owwww!  Shit, shit, SHIT!”  She wasn’t broken, just embarrassed.

Later she said she felt bad for me.  But I wasn’t embarrassed.  I don’t give three shits how I looked on that sidewalk, cradling a seventy-something’s head in my lap .  The moment was all hers.  And apparently it made a lot of bad memories surface because she had never told me before that her own mother had caused her anxiety by doing the same things–by falling or getting sick or just losing her life-long poise.  It must suck to get old.

And that brings me to my purpose:  I’m not there yet.  I’m 43, and I’m not young, but I’m not old.  I’m not old old.  I’m in that place where my memories of the first twenty years of my life are a bunch of blurred images of random events; and my memories thereafter are just the highs and lows of adulthood, the boring stuff.  I’ve been “lucky” enough to have taken a bit longer to mature than your average adult and consequently burned through a marriage and lived a sort of renaissance for awhile–which added to the color and texture of my adult memories–but ultimately my adult memories consist of a few highs and lows and a whole lot of static.  Ask me to recall the most exciting moment at my job of twelve years, and it might take me a moment or two to scrape up an insincere answer.

I’m at some new stage in life that I know I didn’t experience in my thirties.  In my thirties, I was busy contemplating why I’d dated most of the men I had.  And in my thirties, I was looking for better.  In my thirties, I started looking at myself through a different lense.  In my forties, I just sit around and wonder random things like what it would be like to sit in my childroom bedroom, or to hang out with my parents when they were young.  I get a chill just thinking about what a conversation with my mother would be like if she could actually hear what was being said to her.  I think about the frailty of human life, and I think about death.  You know.  Stuff.

I appear to be a little younger than I actually am–some of that comes from my aforementioned late-blooming maturity, and some of that comes from decades of moisturizer and sun screen, and good genes–but at the end of the day today, I’m still 43. My mother falls on her face.  My father carries a cane around with him everywhere he goes that expands into a seat.  I’m facing retirement, cancer, kids making bad choices; and a  workout and some revitalizing face cream isn’t gonna wipe that away.

I call my forties the “new forties” because they’re new to me, just as they’re new to any woman who just spent her day in roll-reversal, sitting in a plastic chair in a doctor’s examination room while Mom sits on the table looking uncomfortable.  This kind of stuff didn’t happen in my thirties, or my twenties, or ever before now.  These are the forties, and women’s magazines and the beauty industry might help us to look younger, to act younger; the economy might force us to recreate ourselves again and again, to compete with younger, to think younger; our freedom to make choices for ourselves might allow us live a lifestyle that our mothers’ generation and every one before that couldn’t have imagined. But we’re not  younger.  We’re women in our forties, pragmatically staring at age and death.

Before this decade came along, I thought I really could live in whatever age I managed to sustain.  My thirties were the new twenties, with a few revisions.  But this decade, the forties, it’ll never be the new thirties.  I’m getting old. My knee hurts, I chipped a tooth, and my mom has started falling.  These are the new 40s.