midlife (step step)

I don’t feel my age. I’m just a kid walking around imagining things that could be dreams, creating a list of ideas and then floating around deep in thought, while still having acne and too much to do.

But then there’s the truth that I do actually feel quite a lot older than my pretend thirties, or sometimes I even feel decades older than I am. Maybe this is midlife, being trapped by weird non-sensical numbers, between. And feeling like you’re living with one foot in the decades before you, and one foot in the decades that you only know about because you’ve seen other people live them. Grandparents, aunts, church ladies, and those retired guys at the coffee shop.

Mascara is the only makeup I use anymore, because for me midlife means I don’t care (in the best possible way). But I can’t do it. I mean, I can do it, but it turns out looking like I’m not capable of mascara application. One eye is always so much thicker with mascara than the other. (It’s the right eye. Apparently my dominant hand is much more aggressive with a mascara wand than the left.) Often I have that feathery imprint on the upper eyelid, from putting too much mascara on the right eye, and it therefore rubbing off with a Tammy Faye-esque imprint.

This is because I obviously have to take my glasses off in order to get the mascara up to my eyes, and I simply cannot see what I’m doing. I will notice the issues later, like when the light is good in the car and I catch myself in the mirror at a glance and get the idea that something seems off.

This is not a tragedy nor a struggle, but so much of midlife is both a tragedy and a struggle. And yet, I appreciate aging for the simple fact that I’ve gained some wisdom and I don’t have to walk around this planet completely baffled, with no coping tools in all that baggage on my back. The coping tools are actually what take up most of the space, and they aren’t all that heavy at all. They are soul things.

I love that I don’t care as much as I once did about what people think. I love that I have little trouble being honest about hard things, even when it’s hard. I love the ways I can help other humans along because I’ve learned a thing or eight.

Also, I am so tired, and my hip and leg hurt. I think I have arthritis in my left foot big toe. If I don’t have regular massages, my neck and shoulders will pay a price, which includes not being able to move them. I forget things more and more, and have become even more scattered and foggy than I have ever been. (Like somehow giving the accountant tax information for 2019 to get the taxes done for 2021.) It’s all happening so quickly, this aging thing. And just to top it off, my digestive system hates me now, more and more. It’s like it believes I’ve allowed coffee to eat away at it for too many years.

In other words, I cannot pretend nothing is going to catch up with me anymore, but I’m still living with all the sandwich generation demands on my body, soul, and mind, and I sometimes forget my healthy tools.

I can forgive myself for that at this age though. That’s the difference.

I hear the best is yet to come, but do I believe it? That wasn’t true for my parents as they entered their “golden years” now was it? At just sixty-seven and sixty-nine, they received the news of Alzheimer’s and Leukemia. One month apart. This news and its aftermath pushed our family into a “get-older-faster” situation. Stress does that, and so does deeply caring.

Deeply caring both keeps you young and ages you, which I suppose is one of life’s magical struggle gifts.

It’s April 7th and the snow is coming down and staying on the ground in this moment. This is possibly making me cranky and changing my perspective. But I know now that change is always coming, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Therefore, I don’t stay cranky, I get back into gratitude and all that. I can do it. I can do it. I will do it.

I also know by now that the other shoe really is about to drop, but it won’t surprise me and turn me upside down like in my younger years because we’ve had it happen so many times before, and here I still am, okay-ish. The shoes dropping won’t feel great, but we’ve learned that we are made of something quite sturdy. And when we don’t have strength or tools, we do have each other. It is a very good idea to keep kind and connected people in your life, and to give them help and snacks when they need it, too.

I would also like to remind you today, since I’m cranky, that the old destructive coping skills we’ve been using in previous decades to cover up our discomfort are melting like the snow inevitably will. They aren’t working, let’s face it. You can’t deny that you are harming yourself when you start to feel rickety and bent over all the time, or short of breath, and so so exhausted. Therefore, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, midlife is an opportunity to begin again, like spring.

The things buried under the snow through dark and crackling winters come to the surface in midlife. There’s nothing we can do about it.

We can have patience with our process, it’s happening no matter what. I may as well stop with the denial. I’m bored with it, really. Playing a game of whack-a-mole with old memories or things I’m ashamed of, trying to keep them at bay. That’s for the first half of life, I think. Some people take it into the second half and become miserable “old people” but who wants to do that?

Midlife is a time of breaking free and no matter the aches and pains, the memory issues, the menopausal hormones, the caregiving, the self-destruction…we can stand there with one foot in the younger years and then (step step) cross over, to the “later years”, without hesitation. We’ve learned how.

This is all cyclical, of course; the actual seasons, and the seasons of our lives. We are ageless in the end, and we were ageless at the start, and we have cycled through thousands of seasons of the soul. We are gone, and then we return, to move forward with a deeper sense of who we are, step step.