My 39th birthday is right around the corner, and it hit me the other day that I am almost to a major turning point in my life: the magical, dreaded 4-0. I soon will be crossing over into middle-age wasteland, which I find terribly amusing since I don't feel like I have any wisdom to show for it. I have been reading
French Women Don't Get Fat, and was horrified to learn that within 3 years I will be in the "menopausal" age category! Is this really happening?! I feel like someone has hijacked my body and left my psyche back in the 90's. Perhaps writing down my musings on this topic will help me come to grips with it.
While I tease my kids that I was "born a grandma" because I have never been very playful or silly, I still view myself as an emotional ingenue, painfully lacking in maturity. It's depressing to me that while I am greying, wrinkling, and padding my waistline, I haven't made many strides toward garnering meaningful life experience that would bolster my credibility as an "Adult." This incongruity smacked me upside the head a while back when a young mom said to me: "I think you are so classy. I hope I can be like you when I grow up." Ha, ha, ha. She meant it as a compliment, but inside I was dying. This person has three children just like I do. Granted, they are younger than mine by about 10 years, but
I didn't view
her as being any less knowledgeable as a mother than I. I have continued to lump myself into the "younger mom" category, but evidently, that is no longer my place. Somewhere along the way I have mutated into my mother. That's frightening, but inevitable I suppose.
When I decided to embrace my grey hair and stop dying it a few years ago, I thought I was ready for this. But it is one thing to accept you are old, and quite a different animal to have a cute, perky,
post-pubescent 20-something
tell you (not in so many words) that you are. In my mind I played out the scene in
Fried Green Tomatoes where Evelyn snaps after some teenaged girls had stolen her parking space and smashes her car into their little red VW about six times:
“Face it, girls, I’m older and I have more insurance.” I thought I had laid my vanity aside, and yet it has reared its ugly head once again. So much for sophistication.
I'm not sure where I'll go from here. I suspect it is going to take some time to work through these emotions and come to grips with my station in life. I'm glad in many ways to be done with young mothering (especially crying babies, spit-up, and diapers), and hope that this new chapter will have many rewarding experiences to aid in my "ripening." It better, or I'm going to demand a refund. TOWANDA!
