Finally, I'm FIFTY!!!

A pillow I made my eldest for Christmas the year he graduated from high school. It now sits in our den as I workout, a daily reminder of the space in which I now reside.

I’ve always wanted to be an old woman. Since I can recall, I’ve looked upon the matriarchs of this world with extreme reverence, longing to be in their shoes. I was blessed with a strong grandmother who ran the show like the Queen of Poland, minus the servants. Yet it wasn’t just her, I loved watching the older women at church in their Sunday best; beautiful hats, with purses and shoes that matched. Even though it was a priest who said the mass, those women were the ones who made the church function. My husband’s grandmothers were also stunning to behold. To be in their presence was to be near women who knew who they were.

Being a young woman was work for me—wanting to grow up and leave home, then having to worry about career, mating potential, getting into the right sorority and eventually the right networking group. Finding true love. Hating my size four body while the other females in my life wore a two or even smaller. Motherhood wasn’t much easier, though I found waaaaay more pleasure in caring for the boys and the home than I ever did trying to impress the world with my brains and bottom. Still, it was an exhausting few decades.

Now, all of that has passed me by, in the blink of an eye it seems, and I find myself empty nested, without a nest and accidentally retired (a topic for another essay), but best of all—I’m finally fifty. No longer a young woman, nor a mother, I’m something else. My Auntie Susan says I can’t join the Crones of Anarchy yet (grr, but at least I have it to look forward to), however, for the first time in my life, I finally feel the right age. No longer am I yearning to be something I’m not…I am now that older woman I’ve longed to be.

Bikini Body

Older woman have often told me that fifty is the decade of no longer giving a fuck. The last fuck has been tossed out into the sea of life. Our careers are in their twilight—either we made it big and now we can rest on our laurels or that dream of ruling the world has passed us by, but damn who really cares anymore. Moreover, our bodies are what they are and rather than condemn them, there’s a certain sense of appreciation for a body that can jump, dance, twirl, and keep the heart beating. I’ve long hated my body, it was always too thick, built more like a Mac truck than the willowy women that grace the covers of our magazines. My boobs were too small to be noticed by the boys when I was in high school, my thighs too wide. Things only got worse after the kids, when stretch marks from hell were added to my otherwise 4-pack abdomen. I was never, ever satisfied. I know I’m not alone, 99% of the women in my life have body issues. Even the beautiful ones, who now face aging and wonder where all that beauty has gone.

In the last three years, there’s been a shift in my mind. It began when I fell from a rope swing at age forty-seven and fractured my hip bone. Rather than make me feel feeble, the process of observing my body heal amazed me. I’d never said a kind word to my body my whole life, yet each day during my twelve-week recovery, it did things I never knew were possible, and I found myself thanking it on a daily basis. From knitting bones and punctured lungs back together, to building muscle, I took a back seat and let it do what the goddess intended it to do. Coming out of that time of helplessness, I realized I loved my body for what was inside of it. My consciousness resides within a miraculous vessel, and the time had come to show it some respect.

I started with food. I hated myself for needing to eat because eating prevented me from the skeletal body type I so desired. I began to unwind this belief from my mind and learned to cook healthy, delicious, nourishing foods. I bought beautiful plates and new cooking gadgets. Slowly, I praised the need to eat and the fact that we could afford the most delicious of foods. I began to eat for my life, a life I want to last at least another thirty-eight years. After a lifetime of hating to cook, because it meant I had to feed myself, an act I saw as a weakness, I now love to cook and grocery shop. Time in the produce aisle, the farmer’s market, or the garden is a joy because I now understand that my body comes from the earth, and from the generous earth it receives its nourishment.

Exercise has also been a chore for me, because for some reason, I held this idea that needing to exercise somehow made me deficient. A woman should just be naturally thin, if you must work out to maintain the ideal weight, then you have bad genetics. I know where I learned this lesson, but that’s not the point. The point is, I would complain in my forties that it’s too much work to be a size six. People often say it’s because the metabolism slows down, but that just added to the lethargic response I had to the whole ordeal. It made me actually miss my youth. Again, it was breaking my hip that would shock me out of this nonsense; first, because I needed to exercise to get back my strength after the fall and second, because it made me recall that as a kid, my strength wasn’t for free. I worked my ass off to be strong back then, and I’d need to do it again if I wanted to run, jump, and dance after my injury.

I didn’t sit around and do nothing as a youth, I was a competitive gymnast for ten years. In order to do the things I wanted back then, like a double-back, a giant on the bars, the splits in all three directions, or an aerial cartwheel on the beam, I had to work out, A LOT. At my zenith, I was in the gym four hours a day, six days a week. You don’t get to twist and fly in the air without work. You don’t get to stand on the podium in first place for all-around without hours of strength, stretching, and practice. The body was made to move, not just as children, but for all of life. If I wanted to return my hip back to it’s proper function, which is to get me around in this world, then I had to work, just like I did as a kid. I began to swim, then I added the Peloton bike. This past January, I finally admitted that to do the things I want to do now—not double backs anymore, but handstands, backbends, and dancing till I’m ninety, I also need to stretch and strengthen, so I added core, arms, and yoga to my life. It takes an hour every day to give my body what it requires, way less than the four hours I did as a kid, and I love the way I feel.

During my birthday month, I got to visit my aunt and uncle in Cozumel. I needed a new swimsuit. I haven’t worn a bikini since I my first son was born, which was twenty-three years ago. I’ve been too embarrassed about the stretch marks. As the trip approached, I decided, fuck it, and I got the bikini. I wore it in public the whole week. Even more daring, I posted a picture of myself in it on the Peloton Facebook page I belong to. If you ever need a confidence boost and find the modern metrics of likes and comments appealing, I highly recommend finding a safe community to post a selfie. That 50-year-old woman in a bikini picture got almost 5000 likes and 400 positive comments (it’s a troll free environment). And no, I’m not going to post it on my regular social media. If you want to see that picture, you need to be a part of the Peloton cult, bitches 😉

Aging Well Isn’t Guaranteed

I do have some doubts, especially as my mother’s generation ages. The past two years have been hard on them, and their health as they approach eighty is NOT what I saw in their mothers. I’ve long had the assumption that the men will live till eighty or so, but the women will be fabulous well into their nineties. My own grandmother was ninety-six when she died, and my husband’s grandma’s were ninety-two and one-hundred-and-one. They all needed care in the end, but up till their last few years, they were continually active. My own grandmother lived alone in her home until she broke her hip, the event that would take her life. Part of my desire to be older assumes that I too, will age as they did.

This last year, as we start to visit our parents again after a long separation due to the pandemic, I’ve begun to wonder if this will be the case for me. None of the parents are doing that well, except for my father who we’ve always considered to be the great science experiment of our time. The man was in Vietnam and probably exposed to Agent Orange, drank diet soda instead of water for five decades, smoked until his forties, drinks Chardonnay like a fish, and even lives near a superfund site, yet he still plays softball with his beer league and has few health issues. But the rest are slowing down fast. I wonder if the isolation and fear of the pandemic aged them quicker than their parents had? Was it good to lock themselves up with nothing but each other and the TV telling them all day long that they would die if they went out in public? I’m not minimizing the real possibility of death they all would have faced had they caught Covid, but I must wonder what living in such isolated fear does to a person.

Or maybe their sudden decline compared to the previous generation was the fact that they were fed on the industrialized food system whereas their parents, born before WWII and the mass spraying of our food with chemicals, were raised on a completely different way of eating. If this is the case, then there’s no guarantee whatsoever that I’ll age like the ladies of the silent generation, the ladies I so admired and always wanted to be. When I begin to think this way, I recall John and Nancy, the best tango dancers in Santa Cruz County, who are also eighty years old. They are the couple that made me want to write a tango novel in the first place, and their grace and elegance inspired the timelessness in my latest love story.

Growing old gracefully isn’t guaranteed, this is for sure. Yet loving my body as it is AND my life as it is, without fear as the world spins out of control around me, is key. A friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook today of her 91-year-old grandmother, and I was inspired yet again. Dressed to the nines, eyes shining, standing tall, I felt her bravery, her delight in life, even though she’s seen her share of pain. We all have. There’s no way to live in the body without it and no one gets out alive. The age in which one passes isn’t a test, nor is it true that only the good die young. Death and ageing are just as beautiful as recovery and healing. All of it is a miracle, and even as a flower wilts, it brings extraordinary joy. As Gandalf says, all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

I may not be guaranteed to dance until my nineties, but I will appreciate every step until then for the miracle that it is. I’m grateful to be here in this space, the woman who isn’t a mother nor a crone, but something in-between—alive, dancing, wearing a bikini, retired, with no fucks left.

Best of all, I’m at home in my skin for the first time in my life, content, just as I knew I would be.