No Old Ladies!

Somewhere in my sixties, I started experiencing occasional surprise and befuddlement in conversation with some of my women friends. Although my body forcefully begs to differ, mentally I still feel 27, so I was floored to find that while some of us were blissfully forging ahead with business as usual, others were, consciously or not, shrinking their lives.

You’re doing WHAT?

I could never do that.

I don’t want to do that alone, so I don’t do it anymore.

Oh I’m done with all that.

Perhaps not surprisingly given our patriarchal paradigm, further observation (of my admittedly limited sample) and research revealed that this self-abandonment was a fairly widespread, almost wholly female phenomenon. Thank God it wasn’t contagious. Because suddenly they seemed to be everywhere (and, contrary to my initial hypothesis, it wasn’t only heterosexual women who had been partnered forever). The ones who couldn’t do anything alone. The ones who felt compelled to dress or act or wear their hair a certain way. The ones who dithered about the smallest decisions. The ones who nattered on endlessly about their ailments and whose “news” in the alumni magazine was signing up for Medicare. The ones whose minds were slammed shut like a paint-encrusted window; who were incapable of changing their opinions in light of new information.

WTF is happening? Who are these people? (Cue the Twilight Zone music.) Do they even realize what they’re doing?

Was it just me? I have been known to have a bad attitude; to go a little heavy on the snark. Plus, I might justifiably be considered a singular case of arrested development. After discussion with a couple of more responsible but like-minded friends, however, I realized that my concerns were real; that a scary number of my contemporaries have mindlessly accepted the low expectations our society has for those of us who’ve been around for a while. In case it’s not yet clear, I found this both disheartening and repellent and vowed to avoid it at all costs. Which led to the development of my mantra “no old ladies!” (The exclamation could be heard in the button-activated voice recordings I gifted those in my inner circle.)

Being a recovering overthinker, I wondered if I was being ageist or unkind. After serious consideration I decided, nope. My blanket rejection of the dominant culture’s notions of how one should be when they’ve reached a certain age is the antithesis of ageism. And while I can have empathy for women who have robotically adopted and complied with these notions (and am working on toning down my antagonism), I am resolved to fight against this current until I take my last breath. Which I hope will involve a blood orange martini and maybe a little dancing. And a cute outfit.

And I get it. I’d be the first one to agree that age is inevitably going to bring some changes, not all of which are necessarily positive. Joints are going to wear out, organs are going to run down, senses might diminish a bit. And emotional maturity and experience are likely going to result in somewhat tamer lives than we lived in our twenties. But what if instead of accentuating that and sliding into inactivity and incuriosity, or being pissed off about it and giving up, we accepted it without dwelling on it and continued to live? To grow? What if we let go of the fear of loneliness and loss and the unknown and embraced the possibilities instead?

We have a choice. We can open up. We can try new things. We can laugh at ourselves and the indignities of aging. (I have a hard time imagining people who’ve gotten to this age and still care even a little bit what others think about them.) We can focus on crafting a fabulous life in the time we have left. We can welcome the exhilaration of possibility. Our spines might be shrinking, but our lives don’t have to.

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Let’s talk! Are you fighting against being confined to the senior box? What are you doing to remain young at heart?