THIS BODY AGES

Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

~ Jenny Joseph

It’s been two years, almost exactly, since I started jotting notes for this piece.  So much of what this body has been writing has had to do with aging.  Growth.  Change.  Learning.  Living a lifetime in this body.  And yet this has been the hardest piece to write so far.  I’ve been stuck and stalled and most of all shamed by what I think about this aging body.  I’m a feminist, for god’s sake!  

My brain knows perfectly well that an entire beauty industry has all been constructed to make us hate our bodies, to make us shop for more solutions to every manufactured problem.  As a therapist I supported countless people on their body’s journeys to self-love.  I have built a career around teaching people to dance in all shapes and sizes of bodies and to revel in them.  I want to be able to say that I believe this and I don’t care what my body looks like.  But the truth is that I am not immune. I have absorbed and believe all those hateful messages about this aging body.  And I am tired of it.

In 60 days I will be 60 years old. And I’m bracing myself.  One day older really shouldn’t make any difference at all.  But my decade birthdays have always been marked, marred, and menacing.

• I turned “double digits” just a month before the most pivotal moment in my childhood ~ the death of my father.

• I turned 20 and slumped into a depression triggered by the fact that for the rest of my life I will have had less time without my father than with him.

• When I was 30 I had two small babies, and shortly after turned my life, and theirs, upside down by coming out as lesbian and initiating a divorce.

• At 40 I hit another depressive episode ~ I had always feared the deaths of all those I loved, but I suddenly realized, as if I’d never considered it before, that I too could die.  I decided that cutting off all my hair might be a good way to deal with this.  It wasn’t.

• My 50th birthday was just a couple of months after my mother died, leaving me an orphan.  I put my grief on hold and threw a totally surreal birthday party.  I had no idea at all what I was celebrating.

What’s coming at 60?  I don’t know.  But I’m doing my best to face it bravely.  And it’s time to confess all the unflattering things I think about this business of getting old.  And to see what this aging body has to tell me.

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The minute I turned 50, my algorithm changed.  I started getting ads for “ageless” skin care products, retirement planning, walk-in bathtubs, clothes “tailored for the mature woman”.  

It’s too late for the retirement plan.  I’m self-employed and can’t imagine ever being able to retire, except for the pension of my partner ~ an ongoing joke insuring the security of our marriage.  

But clearly lots of the advertising has worked on me. My bathroom cabinet is full of products that are marketed to make my body more palatable.  Hair ought to be shiny.  Except for the hair not on the head which shouldn’t really be there at all. Skin ought to be flawlessly smooth. Callouses shouldn’t exist.  Nails must be pretty and painted and polished.  Eyelids should be different colours and lashes should be longer and thicker.  

And yes, I am more conscious about what clothes I wear as a “mature woman”.  Except what the hell does that even mean? As a kid I was always told I was “mature for my age”. I was tall was always assumed to be older than I was.  I got offered alcoholic drinks at 15 or 16.   I had no idea what this meant then.  And I don’t know what it means now when people tell me I look younger than my age.  It’s supposed to be a compliment, right?  Old people don’t look good.  You look good.  So you look young.  And there it is in a nutshell:  we don’t think old can ever equal attractive, pretty, beautiful, appealing.  

When I was young and beautiful I didn’t actually know I was beautiful, but I did know enough that I could wear whatever I wanted and still look young (and therefore beautiful).  I had a mechanic’s jumpsuit that I wore for a while and I thought it looked cool and creative and like I didn’t care how I looked or what people thought of me (though of course I did, very much).  But if I wore that now I’d probably look like someone you’d cross the street to avoid.  (Yes, yes, I know, the meme told me.  “What not to wear after 50: the weight of other peoples’ expectations”. But this is a confessional and I keep waiting not to care but I confess I still care.)

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When I was small, I used to love playing with the prominent veins on the backs of my grandmother’s hands.  My tiny fingers enjoyed moving her thin skin across them, feeling their rubbery resistance.  Did this horrify her?  As I’m about to become a grandmother for the first time myself, I don’t feel at all the way I perceived my grandmother. She never said how she felt about the veins on her hands.  But I wonder now and can’t figure out how to love my own.  

It’s actually my mother’s hands I see now.  And I don’t love that either.  My mother and I had a relationship that was…complicated.  And as I age I look more and more like her.  Every time I look in the mirror I see some new change, something incomprehensible, but also as familiar as my mother’s body:  the small breasts succumbing to gravity, the little turkey wattle of my neck, the extra roll at my belly, the creases on my back, the dimples on my butt and thighs and now even on my upper arms.  My skin no longer feels like my own.

And my face.  I look at photos of my younger self. I used to glower into the camera and look dramatic, mysterious and stunning.  But now without a smile the resting bitch face has taken up permanent residence.  I wear makeup more than I ever have before, just to try and look a little more awake. Even the grey hair.  When it started taking root in my 30s it was cool, dramatic, uniquely salt and pepper.  But now, without a lot of extra effort, it just looks witchy.

Looking more like my mother every day, the association is with someone who was deeply lonely.  Widowed at just 35, no one touched my mother’s body when it was the age that mine is now.  And this scares me.  Dating while staring down the barrel of 60 is terrifying.  Who could love this body again? Who would want to touch her?  Who could possibly find her sexy?

(**Oh and in case you haven’t read any of my other pieces, and before you freak out about it, yes I am polyamorous, no I am not cheating, yes my partner and I are ethically open and happily non-monogamous.  Feel free to read This Body Loves.  Now carry on.)

And the truth of how much I’ve bought into the message that being old is totally counter to being sexual reveals itself:  I swipe left on anyone over my age.  I don’t want this to be true but it is ~ they taught me to hate the aging body and I always was a very good student.  As a child I was praised for being mature, to the point that I really didn’t get to be a kid. But now on the other end of the timeline, I see old people being patronized, being seen as childlike, talked down to, and definitely not considered sexual.  It took me a long time for this body to come into its sexuality.  The thought of it being taken away as it ages fills me with grief.

And I guess that’s really what I’m talking about here  ~ grief.  Aging as a process of losing things piece by piece.  Every change is a little death.  Another goodbye to a part of me that is no longer.

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So much of my life has been defined by grief.  I grieved at my 34th birthday because I would now and forever be older than my father ever was.  He never knew what it was to get old.  And of course, as I age, the funerals come more and more frequently, as everyone ages with me, as we start leaving more and more often.  This aging body a sign of the beginning of the end. So many endings.

So what is the punch line?  Am I supposed to be figuring something out here?  Is there some important wisdom that will come with aging?  Some purpose or reason for this life?

• Maybe the punchline is simply that getting old sucks.

• Maybe it’s that I’m here to fight the power, and remind myself and everyone around me that when I am old I will wear purple.

• Probably I’m supposed to cultivate gratitude for being alive and relatively healthy, for being able to see my children and grandchildren grow.

• On bad days I wonder if maybe the only logical thing is to check out early rather than witness the shitshow of a world we’re leaving for our kids.

• Or maybe stay around and learn to bask in the beauty of lines that mean a life was lived here, holding onto the truth that each line brings me closer to mortality.

Maybe it’s all of these.  Or none of them.  Or maybe I don’t really get to figure it out.  At every age it seems there’s been a moment of “I’ve finally figured it out, I was so young and stupid before and now I get it!” But then more time goes by and I look back at that moment and realize I’ve figured out something new yet again.  Maybe aging and dying are just more steps on the process and nothing profound really happens.  Do I get to figure out the meaning of life, or at least of my life?  The life of this body?  

Or maybe even those questions are just way too grandiose.  After all, this is just a body.  An aging body.  Doing what aging bodies do.  Growing.  Living.  Slowing.  Drooping.  Falling.  Dying.