If our “second
adulthood” had a jumping-off point, it seems to me it would be the year we turn
50. Up until that point, I think, we often carry on as a version of our younger
selves, still bound to the ideals of a culture bent on youth. We get smarter
about how we spend our time and have a stronger feel for who we are, but we’re
not quite at the point where we’re counting the years we might have left. If we
choose to, we can still deny the process at hand, and unless we have terrible
genes, we can fare quite well.
But our 50s are a
whole new era. It gets a lot harder to play make believe. Yet if our eyes are
open, we gain access to a new pool of wisdom, and we can start to get our feet
wet. Pretending loses its appeal. We begin to let go and enjoy the freedom that
comes with aging.
At least, that is
what many women have told me, and what I, in turn, believe, in the most
visceral sense one can have. I am about to turn 50 in ten days; the beginning, as
a friend of mine calls it, of my “second wind”.
I am aching for a
revolution. More than that, I am aching to relax, in every conceivable way. And
nothing brought that home more than my mother, just out of the hospital, set on
a regimen, unwilling to consult a second opinion. Without going into details, let’s
just say that what I saw in her scared the daylights out of me. Because it was
a blown up version of something I’d been witness to my whole life: an
unquestioning loyalty to an authority outside herself, and a “pulling in” – not
the kind of pulling in we do in introspection, but a pulling in that involves
tightening, holding in or holding on.
I know she is doing
the best she can with what she has. I know she is fighting the only way she
knows how – her “pulling in”, oddly, is also a form of protest. But it doesn’t
help, because I want to see her happy, and because of what it triggers in me. I
am deathly afraid of becoming rigid as I age. In my experience, one of the many
challenges of getting older is a tendency to resist change, even when our
sanity, or peace of mind, depend largely on the contrary. Living in a society
where elders are so grossly undervalued, it’s easy to hold our emotions in as
we tell ourselves, nobody wants to know anyway. If we become bitter about
society’s disregard for us, we would often be wholly justified.
But do we want to
sacrifice our quality of life to silent protest? I certainly don’t. Nor do I
want to become set in my ways – yet I have already seen signs that this is
where I am headed. And it’s chilling. I remind myself that my stress levels are
high; that seizing up is all I’ve known, and that I am actively working to
unlearn it. Then my mother re-enters my consciousness, and the haunting
resumes.
In many ways, she
and I are polar opposites in our personalities, priorities and character. We
would never be friends if we weren’t related. We have worked hard to find
common ground over the years, and to focus on the love we have for one another.
And I do love her – fiercely, desperately, and without bounds. But her way of
coping; of dealing with her emotions, really fucks me up. I can’t be around it.
I need fluidity. I need to learn how to really relax into life, and to court
change. And I hope as I enter my 50s, I can find the strength to do just that.
