Growing Old-er-ish
The child says, I can’t wait to grow up.
The adult says, I miss being a child.
The middle-aged say, I wish time would slow down.
The older and wiser say, I’m grateful to be here.
What if children were to just focus on being children and put the brakes on their urgency to grow up? What if we ignored that nagging voice inside us that wishes we could turn back the clock once we hit adulthood? What if we skip over our deep-rooted desire to slow things down all the time? What if, instead, we went straight to a place of gratitude and a mental state of just being “grateful to be here”?
The question I have had since I was a young child is the best of them all: Why should you have to wait for old age to find the beauty in life or why should you have to “Live Like You Were Dying”, as Tim McGraw points to in his hit song, to experience a fuller, richer, more meaningful life? Why can’t we learn to live more in the now—enjoying each age, each stage, each milestone, each chapter of life that we are given?
The closer I get to turning forty (which, I know is not considered “old” nowadays) the more I find myself having these thoughts surrounding age and aging. As a woman in America (and specifically living in Miami, the plastic surgery capital of the U.S.) I feel a strong societal pull to hold onto my youth for as long as possible. There is a pressure to resist aging and all of the changes that naturally comes with it. But how long can we really live in the past for? I look to woman like Maya Angelou (may she rest in peace), Betty White, Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, Barbara Streisand, Diane Keaton, and even those not that much older than me, like Drew Barrymore and Reese Witherspoon, and I have to believe that there is a freedom that comes with accepting your current state of being. I don’t think I need another decade or two to realize that life isn’t about being “ageless” or “timeless”—it’s the reverse—life is about living and growing, changing and progressing. If living a full life means that my youthful looks begin to fade and my body begins to show signs of my years, I am actually okay with that.
As a young child I remember viewing anyone over the age of forty as being “up there” or “over the hill”…they weren’t old but they weren’t young anymore either. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty-eight and took her last breath at forty-two years of age, suddenly, my perspective on life and on aging shifted drastically. As Oprah would say, I had my first real “aha moment”. The age of forty-two all of a sudden became VERY young to me. The older I got and continue to get, the more I realize just how young my mom was when she died and just how much life she missed out on. The concept of getting older and aging was no longer a thing to fight or begrudge, but rather a gift that not all people are fortunate enough to be given. Watching my mom age and change rapidly with her illness in the last year of her life was remarkable to see. When she passed away, I started to look at my life in terms of WHEN (not if, but when) I get diagnosed with breast cancer (viewing it back then as a death sentence). My hope as a ten year old “motherless” girl was to be able to live a longer life than my mom had.
Bed time cuddles with my little one this past spring break in Bluffton, SC. Love how my boys (all 3 of them) look at me.
Fast forward--I am now 38 years old; the age my mom was when she was first diagnosed, back in 1988. I was six at the time and my sister was eight-- the same ages my two sons are now. Due to my family history, I have been getting annual mammograms and breast ultrasounds since I turned thirty and a few years ago (at the recommendation of a breast cancer survivor) I started to insist on having annual MRIs taken as well. My plan is to get a mammogram and ultrasound, followed by an MRI six months later, followed by a mammogram and ultrasound six months later, and so on and so on until the day I die. It is time consuming and it isn’t fun but it’s what I can control and it keeps things in perspective for me. Sitting in that waiting room time and time again in my robe surrounded by other robed women of all ages, I can’t help but feel humbled. We sit there in silence and wait for our names to be called. We play on our phones and grin at one another whenever we happen to look up and lock eyes. Even with COVID and the wearing of face masks, I can still see their smiles in their eyes. No words are spoken, they don’t need to be—we just know we are all in a similar boat, clinging to hope and sharing the same innate desire— for more time.
For me there is no greater meter or metrics to passing time and growing older than having children. I swear I was super youthful prior to having them and back then the years seemed to last so much longer than they do now. With 8.5 years of parenting under my belt I find myself staring into the mirror some days and saying, "what happened?”
I believe that we age about ten years within the first 18 months as a new parent. Your baby grows and changes like crazy during that time and as soon as you think you found your routine or rhythm they change it all up on you. Infants swiftly move from laying to sitting up, to crawling, to pulling up, to standing up, to taking their first steps, to sprinting!!! That first year or two of caring for a baby really is an extreme sport for change because the changes are so rapid and evident. Then when you enter the “sweet spot” of parenting when things seem to get easier in many ways (for me this was when my children were five years old and up), time ramps up and the weeks and months fly by. I’ll be giving them fun “brothers bubble baths” and singing baby shark to them one day and the next day they are insisting on their own private showers with Alexa blasting Justin Bieber songs on repeat—to which they know every word. It happens in a blink—so cliché but so true. Their sweet faces mature, they lose their baby teeth and grow their adult ones, their smiles change, their little voices change, their hair color even changes, they have growth spurts where I swear, they are one height at bedtime and another inch taller by morning. And this is all in the elementary years, I’m sure I’ll have so much more to add to this once we hit adolescent years.
I woke up one day and they had discovered hair gel and spikes. Growing up before my eyes these guys!
What I didn’t realize in those early years of motherhood (or perhaps I was in denial), was that I too was aging and “growing up” right alongside my children. Off the top of my head here are a few questions my sons have asked me lately that they definitely weren’t asking just a couple years ago:
“mommy is that a pimple on your face? Aren’t you too old for pimples?”
“why do the veins on your hands stick out like that?”
“why do you have a white hair coming out of your forehead?”
“why is your belly button so wrinkly?”
Or my personal favorite, “mommy why do you have gefilte fish eyes?”— this is what my six-year-old asks whenever I’m without mascara or eye liner!
Or the questions that always start with, “mommy, back in the olden days, when you were a kid…”
Just telling my children that I was born in 1982 makes me sound like a dinosaur to them. In fact, anything with a “19” in front of it sounds like it belongs in the history books to all children nowadays! That coupled with knowing that cell phones didn’t exist when I was their age, and neither did iPads or YouTube or SmartTVs or Netflix or Alexa, or Uber, or Amazon or Instagram or Snapchat---truly blows their minds!
Like the passing of seasons, the feeling of winter gradually turning into spring, the moment where the caterpillar becomes a beautiful vibrant butterfly—I too feel a pull, a sort of shift into another dimension—both internally and externally. I see my cheekbones shrinking in size, I see my eyes looking more tired and needing makeup to make them look more open and awake (and less gefilte fish-like), I see my skin freaking out from simple sun exposure and I just feel older. I feel the change in the quality of my thoughts. I find myself seeking quiet and solitude more. I find myself being more selective with my time and how I want to spend it and with whom I want to surround myself with. I find myself placing less value on my appearance and more on my health and peace of mind. In a fascinating interview Oprah had a while back with Cybill Shephard, covering the topic of aging, Oprah said, “the understanding of who you are is necessary as you get older because as you begin to lose the external attraction, it is your responsibility to cultivate your inner attraction”—YES—YES—YES! This is what I am talking about but of course Oprah said it best!
People say, “you’re only as old as you feel” and it’s so true. I still get down on the floor to play with my kids. I still do cannonballs into the swimming pool with them. I still climb up into their treehouse and slide down their swing set slide with them. I still blast songs on the radio and sing at the top of my lungs with them. I still dance around the kitchen with them and give them turns riding on my back. I still make funny faces and cheesy jokes, and at least for now they still think I am hilarious. I still look in the mirror and like the woman I see, all thirty-eight years and 9 months of her—and I love that my children witness this. Being Conner and Hudson’s mom just keeps getting better over time. Being with my husband for the past twenty-two years (since high school) just keeps getting better with each passing year. I am only getting better with time too.
I am fortunate to be alive. I am still cancer-free and BRACA-negative. That old timeline I had convinced myself of as a child that had me only living to be a little bit older than my mom had lived, has since been thrown out the window. I am grateful that I get to participate in my children’s lives in a healthy, able body and with a healthy, able and present mind. I don’t take any of it for granted.
I know I am still “young” and I know (god-willing) that I will look back at this blog in ten, twenty, thirty, years time and will most likely have a good laugh and a million other things to add onto it. I am grateful for growing up in a house where no one ever focused on appearances, where there was no vanity and where we witnessed our parents being comfortable and confident in their own skin. I am grateful to have had grandparents who were older and wiser but young at heart, who played with me and read to me and baked with me and wrote stories with me, and showed me what aging with grace looks like. I think aging, like all things in life, is all about perspective. In a recent yoga practice my instructor said, “it’s all about progress, not perfection”, talking about yoga and not overthinking the different poses or forcing anything that no longer feels right to our bodies. The same goes for life and aging. If your end goal is perfection, you will always fall short and feel lesser. If we continue to resist natural occurring changes, we are the ones who will fall off balance and lose focus of what really matters. Anyone who has lost a loved one who was taken “too soon” knows that life is for living. If we focus on our progress with age, our “becoming”, we will find beauty in every corner of our journey and we will find inner peace and power in our spiritual growth. As I slowly start to turn the corner and get a better view of what’s to come in the next decade, I have nothing but feelings of excitement for it. Aging is about becoming exactly who you were born to be. I plan to take good care of myself so that I can age like crazy and grow like a weed…or better yet transform like a butterfly! I might not always feel like I am becoming “newer with each day”, as Emily Dickenson put it so eloquently, but I do feel like I am becoming better with each year that I am given.