A Baby Boomer Ponders Middle Age
Posted 5/18/01
I awoke this morning to find I was 51. I sat up in bed, and there it was. Something about the way the skin hung on my face felt different and there was a heaviness that hadn't been there before, as if my cheeks had discovered some deep affection for my ears and spent the night reaching out to them. Arms slack from sleep had a slight crinkling. I've seen those arms on my mother. It's a hard reality to hold onto.
If I have to get old, I want to be an elder or even a crone, but not a senior citizen. My mother's voice inside my head tells me that's a grandiose notion, like wanting to be Anais Nin or to die in Benares; but the way I figure it, I've paid my dues and if I have to have a label, at least let it have some class. "Senior citizen" is so obviously a euphemism. The word citizen denotes residence; it's pretty meaningless without some indication of place, but at least it's a noun. Old people aren't called "citizens," though. They're called "seniors." You get to a certain age in this culture, and you start being designated by an adjective. Something deep inside me rebels against that.
I've somehow fallen out of step with my generation. More to the point, they've fallen out of step with me. I don't feel so very different than I ever did. Perhaps it's because during the 80's when everyone else was focused on career and hustling the bucks, I was in an alcoholic marriage, desperately trying to have a family. Neither one worked out.
I think, perhaps, that having children grows you up. Before your eyes, they change from infants to toddlers to kids to teenagers to young adults, creating a sense of time passing. I suppose working one's way up the corporate ladder to the corner office with the window and the secretary out front does the same thing. I never made the transition from daughter to mother and never had that kind of career. I think the lack of those things displaces me in time.
But time passed anyway. In spite of the facts that I retain a penchant for tie-dye and still think Clapton might be God, I can no longer avoid the fact that my nubile spirit inhabits a body that's a full four decades old. The signs of this, like the gradual accumulation of dust on the coffee table, have been for a while present, yet unseen. Beneath the jokes about menopause, the real thing lurks. Also, breasts are sagging, and my mind occasionally flows into time-worn tributaries that no longer feel like clichés.
For example, "It seems like just yesterday." Now, that's not something young people say, and I've heard myself say it. As a child of nine or ten, when six months back seemed light years away, I couldn't conceive of how thirty years ago could feel like yesterday; but it does seem only that long ago when I lived in a world where there reigned a generation that was long on hair, short on materialism, and high on the notion it was changing the world. Love was free, and you could get a tuna fish sandwich with a whole raft of french fries for a buck and a quarter. The future was out there waiting to be sculpted into something wild and wonderful.
Boy, this sure isn't the future we had mapped out then. Of course, we didn't make maps; and when the wisdom of the time says "Don't trust anyone over 30," you don't really think too far ahead. I have to laugh. Now it's more like "Don't sleep with anyone under 30." Not that I sleep with much of anyone these days, but there have been a few.
Lots of people of my generation blow off that time as youthful craziness -- Washington is full of baby boomers who didn't inhale. But there were a million stoned out kids at Woodstock and no violence. I wonder how many of them succumbed to road rage in the past year. The Diggers had a free store where they just gave things away. It was taken for granted that people would take only what they needed. Last night I went to Classmates.com and was so excited to find a that woman I'd known in the seventh grade and have been wondering about for years was listed; but in order to access her email address, I'd have to pay $30.
Maybe if we'd made a "Five Year Plan" like it talked about in "The Little Red Book" we wouldn't have ended up like this. I know it's crazy, but I take a certain comfort in the fact that the "me of then" wouldn't be too displeased at the way I turned out.
Back then, amidst my insecurity, I was certain about so many things; but this morning, sitting here sipping tea and eating a peanut buttered bagel, "I" is feeling a bit confused. There are clearly times when truth requires the sacrifice of grammar. "I am confused" would be a lie. The confusion doesn't define me. It's more like a costume I watch myself wear. There is such an incredible parade of selves and perspectives within me, each one calling itself "I."
When I was a kid, there was a show on television called To Tell the Truth. Three people would face a panel of semi-famous personalities, and each would say something like, "My name is Wanda Wingnut, and I am the hopscotch champion of the world." Then the panel would ask questions and try to determine which was the real Wanda Wingnut. We're conditioned to see truth as a process of narrowing down and winnowing out, identity a matter of finding the perfect adjectives to marry "I am."
"I am love" was in vogue for awhile. I am a seeker. I am a writer. I am a woman. Now I am middle-aged, and part of that seems to be realizing I haven't a clue who I am. After years of searching, I realize I don't want to know, that knowing is itself a limitation because when you think you know, you stop looking.
Aging is the process whereby we purchase wisdom with the coin of smooth skin, perky breasts, and idealism. I have to smile. When I finally got to the place where I really felt young and pretty, I wasn't anymore.
If you care to comment or share a memory from the "good old days," here is a place to do it.
