Tag Archives: mid-life

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.

Hello world!

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Hello World, this is my first blog post, ever. Let me tell you why I am here:  I used to love writing.  I always wanted to be a writer.  While other kids were playing kickball on the playground, I was that girl on the edge of the field scribbling furiously in my “field book”.  I wrote two “books” by the time I was 12 (a sad mix of total innocence and pre-teen crushing) and I wrote to Judy Blume four times (she never wrote back).  I dreamt of getting out of our working class town and traveling to some big city to write more. Then it all changed: in 9th grade I left a notebook in a classroom by mistake.  This notebook was full of thoughts and musings and a young girl’s thoughts.  When I went back for it, the squat, middle aged, mustached teacher leered at me as he made it known what he thought about my innermost thoughts (he seemed partially concerned, partially aroused).  I was humiliated.  That day was the last time I put anything from inside me out there.  It was the last time I wrote.  I was 14.

Here I am 47 and I am in midlife.  I am trying to connect to that piece of me that I gave up so long ago – given up because I was shamed, judged and (what felt like then) violated.

So here I am, ready to write again and trying to make it through midlife.  But rest assured, this blog is not about me rehashing old wounds.  It’s about being fabulous in mid-life and claiming those things we left behind because others couldn’t handle what we offered and sent us messages about who we are – and we believed them.

What did YOU give up?