Which Old Woman Do We Want To Be? We're Too Old to Still Wish We Were Young

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Luis Machado on Unsplash

Jody Day

reposts a powerful ode to aging women, and this is what it brought up for me

I’m having a slow Saturday, having worked out hard last Thursday morning and managing to pull the hell out of a few muscles. The only response is to lie down and stop already, even when my puppy demands to go out and play. Mommy can’t right now. Gimme a day, ‘kay?

That’s not aging. That happens to us any time we decide we’re going to try a brand-new exercise and do it a few too many times. The body talks back.

So I took a rest day and read this by

Jody Day

:

Men don't age better than women; they're just allowed to.

First, what a profoundly true title.

Then, two things came to mind. Okay several things.

First, the male gaze in my case unfortunately resulted in the very worst of privileged male behavior. For my part, I am very glad to be done with it. While the pretty card, what little of it I might have had, gave me a pass now and then, these days I use humor, good manners and a high level of engagement to get some of the same outcomes.

I find that if I show real interest and curiosity in people, it’s returned, but I can’t compete with smooth skin and pert bosoms. That ship has sailed. To Jody’s point, all you can do wait is for the little brain to stop taking over the big brain and finally get attention from your waiter. He might suddenly recall that his tip depends on it.

These days I don’t have to worry that male interest might turn into danger in a heartbeat. That’s a gift. But I understand the depth of that loss. I understand privileges which come with that attention as well as the cost to the sense of self when suddenly those privileges are removed through no fault of our own but for living beyond our juicy date.

Second, I read with humor the “carefree adventure” choice of aging. I love adventure, but at least for me, as I do it for work, it most assuredly isn’t carefree. From the sheer cost of the trips to the level of work I have to put in to be in shape, to the articles I produce for my clients, it’s another career.

There are carefree moments, of course, but adventure travel as work carries a high risk of injury. With some of those injuries, long and painful recovery periods. So many people - and I am not saying that Jody is claiming this, this is a general statement- assume that I have scads of money to be able to afford such things.

I scrape by, fly at the back of the plane for 36 hour jaunts, sleep in awful hostels and buggy tents. I don’t mind sleeping on hard ground and am not afraid of spiders on my arms.

Since we all interpret the word “adventure” quite differently, it could mean living for a few months on a Greek island or hiking to the Poles. I read this through the lens of how I adventure. My kind involves a fair bit of discomfort, which many aging people are not keen to experience.

That kind of adventure has also aged my skin rapidly. If I had been determined to keep the male gaze, l’d have been well-advised to stay inside, invest in Botox and not be out in the wind and sun and desert and on mountains so much. The body tells the story of our lives, doesn’t it?

My mother, who had lost my father’s gaze in her fifties, exhorted me to never frown, be careful of smiling too much. Wrinkles. In other words, avoid living.

The other piece which resonates, although in a different way, is that I never sought to have children.

This is a wholly different kind of pain. The male gaze involves the potential for partnering; in lieu of that it could involve at least the potential for a child even if the father isn’t present. While that’s one hell of a burden for any mother, it still allows the woman to mother her own child.

If mothering is a fundamental value, then not being able to realize that goal must be devastating, as Jody writes here. Like an essential part of life not lived, when we were given the gear to get it done.

The last piece that made me laugh out loud was Jody’s description of how people interpreted her queries as fishing for compliments and validation. I’ve done it myself, it was misguided. These days I try hard not to offer that ridiculous knee-jerk YOU LOOK GREAT, YOU DON’T LOOK (AGE).

Sometimes we just want to explore an idea.

A few actresses, like Carrie Fisher, have called out the hypocrisy about being criticized for aging. As for Helen Mirren? Mirren, like Fonda, has access to all kinds of things the average 78- year-old doesn’t, such as plastic surgeons and all the rest.

When people single out an actress who has “aged well,” they don’t point to the great Judi Dench. See her here in her Oscar-winning performance for Shakespeare in Love.

Deposit photos

Dench keeps getting better and better. Isn’t it interesting that when we refer to “aging well,” we almost exclusively mean, they don’t look so damned old.

Carmen Dell’ Orefice is now 91. You do not have her face without plenty of work. She’s lovely, but I wouldn’t want to live in a prison where regular surgeries and injections were absolutely required to keep working.

Even if you did have that face at 91, what does it get us? Really? I know what we imagine. But what does it really get us?

We catfight over the stupidest things, usually concerning men and whether or not one of us has more of the male gaze than another.

My god what a waste of energy.

We are manipulated by such things when we can take care of ourselves better than most men can. That’s my observation and frankly, in many cases I’m likely wrong. But among the older women I know, they have risen into a whole different kind of power as the demands to be and look young have sloughed away.

I can relate. The less I worry about the length of my lashes, the blush on my cheeks or whether or not this dress makes me look fat, the more life I have to live on my terms. The last time I tried to put on mascara, it had been so many years that the mascara dribbled into the sink in dry little grains. I went without.

Good. Because I rub my eyes and look like Rocky Raccoon.

We as aging women aren’t going to change how society feels about us. Ageism and gerascophobia run rampant and are supercharged by social media. Too many of us compete when we would all be best served by nurturing those very connections. We’re going to need them when the inevitable happens.

The last place I lived in Denver, my aging neighbor got in her head that I wanted her husband. We’d had great conversations and friendship. Suddenly one day she told her hubby he was no longer to help me with the occasional house issue. He was embarrassed.

I had no interest in him that way at all, and had cherished our friendship. Such fears tear us apart. I was not allowed to help them when she deteriorated badly.

As we age, we can bolster ourselves with powerful friendships, do good work, find community, company and great purpose. For those of us who have the skill, we can write our truths. In doing so, like Jody, we also give voice to the millions who can’t write, and who can’t find the words to express the grief that accompanies loss of youth and all the privileges we take for granted until they are gone.

Including being childless, when such a dream does indeed get eclipsed by age.

Photo by Caroline Veronez on Unsplash

When I was young all I could see in the mirror was what was wrong with my body, my face. It’s vastly worse now with social media.

Now that I am in my Goddess years, which I believe begin at sixty, I see the person I have wanted to become. I’m far less worried about my looks, smooth skin, pristine fingernails, pretty toes, a super-slim body and all the rest of it that I either never had, struggled to maintain or which never did me much good anyway if I did ever have any of them.

I would vastly prefer the gaze of the sun, moon, stars, whatever gods and goddesses there be hiding in the clouds, animals watching carefully in the deep dark. Let me gaze back without fear, with great gratitude for the life I have, for what has been taken and for what is yet to come.

I want to stare into the abyss and not be the slightest bit frightened of what stares back. After all, it’s only me.

I am terribly sore today because I dared do some really hard exercises. I just want to keep daring. The costs of those dares are etched in this face, the scars on this body and the crosshatching of scars on my soul.

They’re earned. By god I have earned them. As have we all. Who are we to be ashamed of proof of life?

An ageist society hates power.

An aging female face is powerful, because we’ve earned it.

I’ll take an aging face any day, if that’s the cost of owning my own life.

Let’s play. Life is too short not to.

Deposit photos

With heartfelt thanks to Jody for inspiring this article. If this piece gave you some meat to chew on (or celery if you’re vegan), please consider

If you have people in your life who are struggling with ageing, as do we all, please also consider

Age touches us all, if we’re lucky. If we’re wise, we welcome what the waters carry away, for something invariably comes next.