My daughter and her best girlfriends wrote a best seller, The Bestie Code (insert registered trademark symbol here) (buy it on Amazon); the lifestyle of best friendship; where choices, respect and camaraderie abound. I’m a woman of a certain age and I have a new friend as well. Her name is Old Age.
Let me tell you about Old Age. She did not gradually creep up on me, oh no, she made a grand entrance and announced her arrival. She showed up in my hair, my behavior, my memories (or the lack thereof). She came across my Netflix and through my mailbox. For instance, chillin, chillin, minding my business … flipping through the Netflix options, I find a list of shows - thee list. ‘My List’. Quite naturally I scroll said list, all the while wondering who created this list for me? Certainly not a child of mine. Grandchild maybe? Doesn’t seem likely, so I resign myself to the option that maybe I did it. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around why I would have put these shows in my queue. This list contained titles like Africa – not hey check out the Motherland Africa, but a 5 part nature series with an ostrich on the cover. Jeopardy? Really? Reruns of Jeopardy. Pretty sure I didn’t do this; I like spy/espionage shows. I digress. The mailbox is also a horrible place once you realize that joining AARP might not have the best thing after all. I mean, why am I getting mail about funeral and cremation services so often?
And I’m wondering why nobody passed on knowledge of what to expect when aging. They do it for pregnant women and they are in a temporary situation. This old age mess is here to stay. Maybe they want you to be as surprised at the things to come as they were. When I was a young girl I thought that 25 year old people had one foot in the grave. When I turned 25, 40 had to be the step before the nursing home. At 40, I couldn’t wait to be 50 so I could give the world a piece of the mind that was surely slipping away from me. At 50, I am mostly asking the age gods WTH was THAT?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sitting in a rocker waiting for my kids to decide if they are putting me in a nice home or a granny pod in the backyard. I work 10 hour shifts at my job. I hang out with my friends and stuff. I am as lively as I always have been. However, I’ve begin to notice things, like did you know that you can throw your back out and be laid up in bed for a few days from putting on mascara? You can. I can remember assisting my mom with her old lady grooming, plucking the hairs from her chin, thinking wow she might just be old; you can now almost always find tweezers in my cosmetic bag. As an older-ish woman I begin to notice things like, yeah I guess I’ll go pee since there’s a bathroom here. Speaking of, there’s an adult diaper company that makes thongs. Yup. For the old lady who’s not going down without a fight. And why do those things have a lace pattern? Newsflash, you’ll only be sexy in them once, I would hope. We spend a lot of time in denial too. Like how did our same age friends get so old; how did they just let themselves go like that? Because certainly I still look the same as I did in high school. But the times we really notice that we’ve join The Club are times like going out for a night on the town with our raucous causing friends and sleeping it off requires 2 days. Or babysitting for a work shift amount of time requires a 2 day stay-cation away from humans under the age of 40. Another indication of your induction into the club is when you and your friends begin to discuss ailments and aches and prescriptions. Yes, the dust has been bitten.
But don’t fret my pet. With all of the “we are going to look back and laugh” moments, remember, growing old is a inevitable privilege, and so are those awesome discounts we snag!