Getting Older

I turn 40 this year. Surprisingly I'm not as fussed about it as I was when turning 30. I guess I've had a decade of becoming used to being in my thirties...and so the forties do not seem all that bad. In some ways, I like me better now. In some ways I don't. But then if I were perfect there would be nothing to strive for. Or fall into. Or merge with.

Feelings rise and fall. Maybe not with the same breathless intensity but I'm far from dead.

I love my dogs. Arnold is stretched out on the floor next to the cupboard, post-bath. He is keeping me company. Maggot is stretched out in the hall. He is a sensitive doggie and senses that Arnold doesn't like him in the room.

The two of them are getting on surprisingly well, in any case. Better than I expected. And that's always good. I need to go out soon and do some shopping. I want to take Arnold for a walk but it's too hot. So I'll do the other stuff first. Dog hair covers everything. I'm scruffy and dusty and I need a shower. But then I think...this is what the living do. This is how the living live.

Today, I want to share with you an essay by one of my favourite authors, Anne Lamott. About getting older. I think it's relevant. For me. And for some of my bestest friends. I can't believe I've gone all these years without reading Lamott. Thank you Patti Digh for introducing me to her.

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I was at a wedding the other day with a lot of women in their twenties and thirties. Many wore sexy dresses, their youthful skin aglow. And even though I was twenty to thirty years older than they, a little worse for wear, a little tired, and overwhelmed by the loud music, I was smiling.

I smiled with a secret smile of pleasure in being older, fifty plus change, which can no longer be considered extremely late youth, or even early middle age. But I would not give back a year of life I've lived.

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it was given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don't love - until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach - but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.

Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory?

You bet I would. That is why it's such a blessing that I'm not left to my own devices. I have amazing friends. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I've learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I'd give up all this for a flatter belly? Only about a third of the time.

I still have terrible moments when I despair about my body - time and gravity have not made various parts of it higher and firmer. But those are just moments now - I used to have years when I believed I was more beautiful if I jiggled less, if all parts of my body stopped moving when I did. But I know two things now that I didn't at thirty: That when we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was the 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth. And that I am not going to live forever. Knowing these things has set me free.

I am thrilled - ish - for every gray hair and sore muscle, because of all the friends who didn't make it, who died too young of AIDS and breast cancer. I'm decades past my salad days, and even past the main course: maybe I'm in my cheese days - sitting atop the lettuce leaves on the table for a while now with all the other cheese balls, but with much nutrition to offer, and still delicious. Or maybe I'm in my desert days, the most delicious course. Whatever you call it, much of the stuff I used to worry about has subsided - what other people think of me, and of how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least, eventually. It's a huge relief.

I became more successful in my forties, but that pales in comparison with the other gifts of my current decade - how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I prepare myself tubs of hot salt water at the end of the day, and soak my tired feet. I run interference for myself when I am working, like the wife of a great artist would - "No, I'm sorry, she can't come. She's working hard these days, and needs a lot of down time." I live by the truth that "No" is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act.

I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don't think that if I live to be eighty, I'm going to wish I'd spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I'm going to wish I had swum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had desert. So this informs how I live now.

I have survived so much loss, as all of us have by our forties - my parents, dear friends, my pets. Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built. If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life, you dance to the minuet of old friendships.

I danced alone for a couple of years, and came to believe that I might not ever have a passionate romantic relationship - might end up alone! I'd always been terrified of this. But I'd rather not ever be in a couple, or ever get laid again, than be in a toxic relationship. I spent a few years celibate. It was lovely, and it was sometimes lonely. I had surrendered; I'd run out of bullets. I learned to be the person I wished I'd meet, at which point I found a kind, artistic, handsome man. When we get out of bed, we hold our lower backs, like Walter Brennan, and we laugh, and bring each other the Advil.

Younger women worry that their memories will begin to go. And you know what? They will. Menopause has not increased my focus and retention as much as I'd been hoping. But a lot is better-off missed. A lot is better not gotten around to.

I know many of the women who were at the wedding fear getting older, and I wish I could gather them together, and give them my word of honor that every one of my friends loves being older, loves being in her forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. My aunt Gertrud is eighty-five and leaves us behind in the dust when we hike. Look, my feet hurt some mornings, and my body is less forgiving when I exercise more than I am used to. But I love my life more, and me more. I'm so much juicier: And as that old saying goes, it's not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often. And that feels like heaven to me.