Monthly Archives: September 2018

Midlife Perfection

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Recently I have noticed something peculiar about my 40 something peers – many seem to have braces and are getting teeth whitening in the quest for a perfect smile.  When did this happen?  I guess, in retrospect, I did see it coming.  I was a gen-xer and child of the 70s.  I was also working class, which meant one word: snaggletooth. Braces were a luxury, one not afforded to us.  I had an overbite and probably a crossbite, but you made do.  The only perfect teeth I saw as a kid was my grandmother’s, in a cup, by her bedside.  Perfect teeth just weren’t the norm.  When I get fed up with the chasing of perfection today, I sit down and watch 70s television.  There we were as God made us:  yellow toothed, curvy with a little tummy and very few above a B cup.   We couldn’t hide, you had good genetics or you found another source of strength.  God just didn’t give with both hands back then.

Now, however, it seems we can have it all.  We can be wrinkle free, with a beautiful smile, a Double D cup and a perfectly flat stomach – all at the age my grandmother was passing down her famous Sunday roast recipe to her grandchildren.

I struggle with this expectation, especially as I reach my 50s.   At a recent dentist appointment I was told I needed a slew of work – in the dentist’s words I should “start saving my denaros.”  I kind of tuned out as he rambled on about receding gums, cracked fillings, veneers, crowns and, yep, braces.   I still don’t understand why I need any of this, my teeth work fine, thank you. Why is everyone so bothered that I am ok with my mouth the way it is?   I think his boat payment must be due soon.

Even at the nail salon the other day while just getting a simple manicure – no color, just buffed, I was asked if I had ever thought of getting lash extensions and permanent makeup.  Um, I just wanted my cuticles cut, but thanks.

At my dermatologist, while getting a mole checked out, I was offered Botox – just to keep me “looking as young as I feel”.

And as I am getting AARP materials in the mail, I am simultaneously getting plastic surgery postcards.

When did it become expected that as soon as I start to age, I will frantically try to be one step ahead of it all?  That I will have nips and tucks and shots and extensions.  All for what?  I have seen the 20 somethings out there – they are cute and they mean business.

Even talking with people my age has become a challenge.  I was talking to a woman I had not met before and when she left, I turned to my friend and said I didn’t think she liked me very much.  My friend replied “oh no, that was just the botox, she can’t move anything above her nose.”  Oh.

As I ponder middle age and how I want to enter into the next phase, I am not sure this is the route for me.  I am all for bettering yourself and if it makes you feel good then go for it.  But please don’t judge me when I choose to age and own every one of my wrinkles and grey hairs.  I have seen my saggy skin on my legs in downward dog – I don’t need double D breasts next to that.

What is perfection anyway?  Is it so we feel good about ourselves physically, that we are never rejected, we are always admired?  I think I will forgo perfection for authenticity.  That will be my quest in the next stage of the game.  Oooh, I think there is a rerun of Charlies Angels on again.

 

Midlife Mud

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Midlife is that time when your ego is strong enough to handle the dark side.  Like, when Luke Skywalker goes into that cave and cuts off Vader’s head only to realize it was his face in the mask.  That is it, midlife.  We are strong, we have been training and we start to feel another kind of Jedi power, we also know we must follow it even though we don’t know why.

We are ready to handle the darkness- or at least step into it – another threshold.  Not because we are less scared or more brave, but because we know we cannot turn back and there is no other way to go.  There is a call deep within us – another hero waiting to emerge and we must listen to it or we will start a cycle of learning that will continue to bring the same things back to us again and again, leaving us wondering why the same things keep happening to us.

It is such a confusing time though, life goes forward, kids grow up, parents age, or worse, die and we are left to search – search for meaning in a world that seems meaningless and yet absolutely brilliantly perfect at the same time.  Maybe for the first time we can see it as it is.  It does not need us to change it.  We need to change ourselves.  It is our thinking, the ego,  that has gotten us thus far.  We must challenge the demands it has placed on us and let go – reach for more.  When we let go though, we often feel the rush of a current that sweeps us downstream – turmoil.  But really, we are just in the middle of things.  We are no longer being strapped into the ride and have the excitement of the tick-tick up the track, we have dropped and are twisting and twirling and screaming.  If we let go and trust that our journey is deeper than the external world we have worked so hard in, we will find ourselves reaping the harvest of this.  Not in the way that our culture tells us: a nice condo in the new grey haired Margaritaville community with a too-big car and trips with the grandkids – although nice, that is not enough to sustain us in the evening of life.  If we have done our work, perhaps we will find authenticity, integrity and wholeness.

We become who we were meant to be all along.

But what do I know?  I am still in the mud.

Midlife Liminality: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

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Liminality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In anthropology, Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”[1]) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rites, when participants no longer hold their preritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold”[2] between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the rite establishes….

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.[5] The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.[6] The term has also passed into popular usage, where it is applied much more broadly, undermining its significance to some extent.[7]

In Carl Jung’s stages of life, midlife is seen as the Summer/Noon of our lives, where “what has been is no longer and what is to be has not yet come into focus”  (Nancy Millner, PhD)

Jungian analyst and author Murray Stein names three stages of mid-life transition in his book, In Mid-Life: A Jungian Perspective.  Stein suggests that as people move from the accommodation of early life, they go through the rites of SEPARATION, LIMINALITY and REINTEGRATION on their way towards fuller individualization.

What happens to us when the sun shifts and shadows are different, and all we know is bathed in a new light?  When our stories need to be retold, when we make room for others at the table who are younger and fresher.  How do we handle that threshold?

For many of us, we question our relationships.  Maybe the spouse with whom we have lost the feelings we once had,  the job or career that no longer engages our souls and gives us a sense of purpose,  maybe our mortality as we almost audibly hear the click of a generation moving up in the cue of life.

This is such a vulnerable time as we call into question our choices, our values, our place in the world.  How do we find time in this culture or do, go, be to just relax, sit and ponder?  You can start by asking yourself these three questions:

3 Questions to Ask Yourself During Liminality:

  1. What does my soul require?   – The next stage in life will come with the understanding that it is a personal connection with self that will aid us in becoming our true self.  We let go of the need to please others.
  2. What do I need to know now?  – This is where we get in tune with that quiet, authentic voice that has been there all along, but has perhaps taken the back seat to responsibilities, expectations of others and life in general.  Take some time for yourself, sit quiet and ask yourself that question.  See what comes up.
  3. What should I explore?  – Often in our younger days we may have explored socially accepted  or expected pursuits and maybe it is some of those that you can go back to and explore through the lens of your new life viewpoint – finding a renewed sense of connection and purpose in them, but in our later phases when our personality is secure enough to explore the underdeveloped side of our personality, we may also find ourselves drawn to areas that we would have never given ourselves permission to explore in earlier life  but where there is passion and growth available for us (for example, a very “masculine” man taking up knitting later in life or a very “doting on husband” woman taking up intercontinental solo trips).  Chances are it is a very real part of yourself looking to express itself.  Give it some light.  

Asking yourselves these questions can start you looking at life in a new way.  I know I am going through this right now.  I have struggled with who I am and how I fit in.  I have left a job and am still on the threshold of something, not sure what yet though.   Let me know how it goes for you.