Friday, January 26, 2007 Forty-something By Eldred D. Cole Shespeak
DID it start at 39? 40? 41? Don't ask me when because I'm not at all sure. But I do know that middle age is an imminent reality for me and batchmates (aminin). The baby boomers aren't babies anymore.
Oh, sure, we still attend parties, go to bars, park ourselves at some coffee shops, but we're forced to acknowledge that most of the people around us have more (or darker or even colored) hair, cellulite and wrinkles-free, and wear lesser clothes or seemingly unfinished shirts and low-waist pants that tend to show the belly buttons without the abdominal obesity.
I'm not complaining. Many of us are enjoying good health, vigorously pursuing our chosen careers and successful at it, while taking advantage of social and recreational opportunities and technical gadgetry around us.
In fact, we hardly realize that middle age has overtaken us, occasionally.
But, let's accept the fact that our society worships thinness, beauty, and youth. Thus, we tend to regard aging less as a natural process and more as a personal failure to remain young.
You see, if a woman's self-worth rests primarily in her appearance and sex appeal, this course is a landmine of nagging self doubts and insecurities.
If she was a "campus figure" when she was young, but now that the "figure" is gone and what's left is the "campus," she feels stripped of the personal power and privilege that such youth and beauty conferred on her, and daily slips into an ever-deepening invisibility where macho and not even macho young men call her ma'am or worse, "mother."
It's bad enough that women are barraged by unending theme day in, day out by television, magazines, music video clips and billboard advertisements that the only way to be attractive is to look like a size 8, high-cheekboned, wrinkle-and cellulite-free celebrities when the women in question are in their very early 20s (emphasize on the "very"), but to have supernaturally non-ageing forty-somethings held up as ideals of what a middle-aged woman could and should look like only adds insult to injury.
Look at the forty-something actresses on Desperate Housewives---they look just as attractive as today's twenty-something starlets.
But that's just the thing: most people don't look better at 40 than they did at 25. Most of the forty-something women we sit next to on the jeep to work, sit across from a foodcourt or restaurant table, or lock eyes with in the mirror when we put on make-up don't look anything like the women on Desperate Housewives.
And that's not just an accident of genetics or the fruits of near-death starvation. It's a by-product of commercialism. Cosmetics which promise to turn back "the ravages of time" and cost a third of a woman's annual salary; liposuction to make smooth and firm all the cushiony places which made pillows more like "pandesals"; and miracle diets and pills to deplete the midlife woman of those fifteen extra pounds where her body, in its infinite wisdom, is storing the reserve estrogen she just might need for a rainy, strung-out day called "menopausal."
Our social prejudice against the aging woman inclines us to view the unavoidable signs of aging - lines, wrinkles, loosening skin, extra pounds in the belly, maybe even warts - with disgust and perhaps shame.
We turn away from the image we see in the mirror, feeling betrayed by our younger self who promised never to leave, but slipped out silently in the night leaving no forwarding address.
If we struggle to "retain our youth" in ways which seek to refute our age, we run the risk of looking foolish, even to ourselves, or even die in the process. We just have to remember: to all things there is a season, and midlife is without doubt the end of high summer.
It's not that we didn't know we were going to age, it just always seemed like it would happen some time other than now. But if we had to age, it should be with style and panache - with grace, not grit. We should go gently into the autumn of our lives elegant, rested, and wise.
Let us assure ourselves that we do not have to depend on our bodies for our worth, and that we are free to redefine beauty.
We have enormous wisdom and power, which is potentially ours at this life transition to share. But we can only access this power and destiny if we have the courage to face our society's marketing demons that would marginalize us and have us believe aging is ugly, lacking in vitality and wisdom, and is best kept out of sight.
This is the power that is ours to be claimed, the power with the ability to nurture the sacred spiritual life of self-worth and aptitude to embrace life that has led to periods of great success and harmony. Know this as our birthright because of our age, not despite it.
For comments and reactions e-mail me at coi_416@hotmail.com.
