<p>In a magazine I was reading at the dentist’s office there was an ad featuring a grey-haired woman, buck naked-- and really beautiful. </p>
<p>I showed it to TSFS, commenting, well this older woman sure looks good, huh? </p>
<p>His reply? </p>
<p>“Photoshop.”</p>
<p>Well, I think I’ve made my peace with this stage of aging - from the looks perspective. I find aging to be like bumping down the stairs on my butt, thump there go the upper arms, thump there goes the neck, thump here comes the little vertical line or two on the upper lip. I seem to have reached a landing, stabilizing for a little while.</p>
<p>But I just can’t soldier on like I used to. Now, I think I was an extreme case. People always used to be surprised that I didn’t drink coffee, given the amount of energy I exhibited. I was always the woman who raised her hand when the question was asked in the office, “Who can help lift the boardroom table…” If I got enough sleep, I could slog through anything that required physical stamina and emotional endurance - with the only symptom my increasing irritability at those around me. While the scratchy feel of polyester sheets could bring me to my knees, the prospect of yet another cold call in my sales job, yet another airport to haul my luggage through, yet another day of two small children nursing, well, I could almost handle it all without physical let up. Let down of course, but we nursers know that’s another story altogether…</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m not fat now. I weigh 5 pounds more than I did in college but I REALLY wasn’t fat then.(BTW, huge congrats to you SBMom). I exercise, albeit not often enough. (And huge congrats to you too cheers for the hill climbing). I’ve been thinking it is just my adrenal gland saying, “OK honey, I’m done!” and retiring to the back of the cafe like an old waitress to sit in a plastic-seated chair and smoke a cigarette with crossed legs, all the while examining the veins in her legs surreptitiously. They say that happens when menopause begins. Which, BTW, I am still awaiting having reached that big 5-0.</p>
<p>But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just need some small kids. But that’s not a solution:). Maybe I need a dog? Naah. Maybe I need more exercise? Yes, certainly. If only sleep didn’t seem like such a priority. However, sneakingly, I suspect cheers is right and it’s all the other private life hogwash acting as noise-dampening headphones in essence. And anyway, to assume there is light at the end of the tunnel is a good thing. And if that light includes the eventual capability to pick up tables again, well all I can say is Hoo yah!</p>
<p>And perhaps another pair of Ferragamos? What do we think girls and boys. How do you all avoid going gently into that good night? And don’t tell me to buy a sports car because they make my back hurt. </p>
<p>Ha ha. Making myself laugh. All is not close to lost. Move 'em out platoon…Soldier on. And look for new fairies…Speaking of which, where is BHappyMom? Out buying XL sheets perhaps?</p>
<p>I think 50 year olds were meant to be grandparents. We are very good at interacting with small children, but don’t have enough stamina to put up with them through the night. Trouble is, many of us delayed our childbearing with copious education & “finding ourselves” and our children are doing the same. We’ll be lucky to have grandchildren at 60. :(</p>
<p>My attitude is–keep on keeping on, as long as you can. Don’t exercise enough? Find a class to take. Brain atrophying? Find something you always wanted to learn & study it. Volunteer, work, or otherwise stay too busy to sit around contemplating your crows’ feet & varicose veins. And creaky joints. And…the list keeps getting longer, doesn’t it? :D</p>
<p>Crikey! TG Alumother invoked my name and I was able to escape from the magic lamp…and just in time I might add; had to wrestle Alu’s ‘Stamina Fairy’ off of my ‘Sexy Fairy’ (sister to the Pretty Fairy & Funny Fairy).</p>
<p>In fewer than 3 weeks I shall have to wear a swimsuit, on a beach, in the company of my 17 year old, who is one of those “extreme” people whom if she wasn’t kith & kin, I would probably detest …“feel my bi-ceps, look my four pack is a six pack now etc…& I slept on my hair when it was wet and look at the curls (think Shakira)” …grrrrr…</p>
<p>anyway I have peeled myself off the exercise bike and mini tramp long enough the check in…I swore I wouldn’t sneak back into the Alley until I could drink the hard stuff…now I’m back to my warm skim milk with stevia and rum extract…BURP Whishhh me luck!..;)</p>
<p>Also concur with the other Wise Women Who Post (WWWP), losing weight and exercising really does help the <em>Energy</em>. In a few short months I will be 52, and I feel better now than when I was 50…</p>
<p>Cheers you are an inspiration in many ways!! :)</p>
<p>Don’t let any shade of green tint that mountain of inspiration–I am as eccentric an old bat as they come. I load my zippy road bike on the back of my car and drive up into the hills to start so that I don’t have to ride on the heavily trafficked-no-shoulder dangerous bits. Imagine the looks as I motor past the seriously sexy cyclists sputtering up that massive first hill. </p>
<p>Beep beep! Old lady coming through! If they knew I was American it would all make sense, LOL.</p>
<p>I make the trainer weigh me every week because I am trying to lose weight. If the results aren’t where ‘we’ want them, I give him a disappointed look–you know the one–well-crafted from 21 years of motherhood. He’s now like a man obsessed. Very entertaining.</p>
<p>As for avoiding the abyss Alum…I have walked that tight-wire a few times in my life. If I were a better tight-wire walker I would have been a painter or sculptor. As it is, I have kept my visits to the abyss to a few distinct points in my life.</p>
<p>In my experience, (and according to Dante, Melville, Hegel and Sartre), when the fabric of your life comes unravelled, it often heralds the beginning of a higher set of metaphysical weaves. Others may turn it all around in a matter of weeks, but it takes me months to accept the unravelling, to accept that “all that is solid has melted into air”. I’m stubborn. And bit thick. </p>
<p>Once I’ve let go of the old way of looking at life, it then takes me many, many months to reassemble a new framework. To survive that process, I try to cut myself some slack, ie “See the new you in a year or so? Rightio!” I try to put some serious cardio in my week–spinning in the winter, running, biking. I do some big blabs with my best girlfriends (although I have noticed more reticence in this last decade. Do we get more self-preserving as we hit 50? Girlfriends were the best help through the 20s, 30s and 40s. Less so now, surprisingly, for me anyway). I read. I see movies. I go to the Theatre. I might take a philosophy class or hire a philosophy tutor. I work. I keep busy.</p>
<p>One of the best sparks for me has been travelling and/or relocating to new cities. It is easier for me to see metaphysical threads against a ‘foreign’ background. I’ve experienced instant ‘cures’ in a single move or single long trip to some favored destination.</p>
<p>Recently, a couple of my dearest 50-something friends found themselves in the abyss, Absolutely Alone in the Empty Nest, through death or THFS. Three years on, they are both madly, desperately…happy and in love. </p>
<p>Cut yourself some slack. Feed yourself endorphins. Take a long trip. Mark your calender for this time next year. You’re probably going to feel like a different woman. The abyss is a way station for 95% of the population.</p>
<p>Can I hire you people to send me a “get off your butt and do something pep talk” every morning? I am caught in the abyss previously mentioned and can’t seem to find the energy or the interest to even look for the way out. CC (and a couple phone friends) have become the lifeline. It doesn’t help that the phone friends feel the same way–so we feed each other!!</p>
<p>Ah cheers. You are a doll.</p>
<p>A famous Dutch Psychic told me when I was young, that my life would be a series of high mountains and deep valleys (read Abyss here), and boy has it ever…when I’m in the Abyss I tell myself that there is another mountain waiting to climb, and when I’m on the mountain I enjoy the wind, the sun, the rarefied atmosphere…always cognisant that at some point in time I’ll “come a cropper” and begin my descent…after years of this I’ve begun to liken my life to the journey the stylus of the Eternal Etch-a-Sketch makes, twisting, intricate, sometimes laborious…and every now and then it gets shaken up and I’ve got a blank slate again…Yes, my life is a series of Mulligans :)</p>
<p>Alu: It may also be possible that you were amazing and strong and unusual, and now you are experiencing "normal.’ My FIL, at 87, is very depressed at having to give up playing tennis. He is an amazing physical speciman, but the bumps & aches that normal people experience are an affront to him, a betrayal by his body. He is dealing, but it hurts his head more than his body to have ot give in to old age…finally.</p>
<p>You may have been a truly remarkable woman, physically, and you may still be more amazing that most people our age, but it still hurts to give up what we were so noted for. I was always that strong girl who didn’t need the guys to lift and tote for me…lately I have noticed I will accept assistance, but I don’t have to like it!</p>
<p>A famous Indian astrologist (hired by my big time record industry client) told me I had one of the luckiest fortunes he had ever seen–and he thought it was criminal how much I worried about every little thing.</p>
<p>cheers, </p>
<p>That reweave concept is soooooo right on. I am just about done with about a year of unweaving and I am crossing over to the pull-it-together part about now. </p>
<p>And I do the EXACT same thing as you, I hunker down. I am VERY gentle on myself when I’m down. And actually, I am rarely down. But baby, when I go down, I do it right. I revel in it.</p>
<p>Once a very smart woman told me that I had to stop treating myself like a machine. Look at the earth, she said, and look at the seasons. Fields must lie fallow for a while, so they can be fertile again later. And look at the moon, waxing and waning; you wax and wane too. She was so right! I expected a full-tilt-boogie output level from myself, all the time, like a machine. Ever since I embraced that concept-- I AM NOT A MACHINE!!-- the down times or confused times, or lazy times when I fell like going on strike? Now I give in to those impulses. </p>
<p>My personal theory about midlife and why it is so effing hard is that the other life cycles get tossed at you so fast that you’re basically constantly destabilized and changing. You are never really cruising until that age 25-50 run when raising a family. Think about it, from birth to baby to kid to teen to young adult… all that gets done in 25 years! But the same length of time, from 25 to 50, is one long sustained marvelous glide. You FORGET that this stage is ever going to go away. You get comfy. Then WHAM! The next cycle hits you, and it is so shocking!</p>
<p>Anyway we are not machines. We need to lie fallow every so often. New growth will happen in the right season.</p>
<p>You guys are great. Cheers - Love your biking story.</p>
<p>Special to Alu and others on the shy side of 5-oh. And not having reached the Pause. And tired. </p>
<p>Two things: remember how embarrassed we used to be at age 13 (or 11 or whatever) when we first had to go to the drug store and, blushing furiously and trying to appear blase, purchase “feminine supplies?” We got over it. </p>
<p>Well, as I found myself on the shy side of 50, and then on its shady side and then several years <em>past</em> the shady side… I, too, had not yet reached that Pause. But I had most assuredly reached the Tired. I began to wonder if I would still be heading to drug store counters at age 90, still in need of said “feminine products.” And would that be equally as embarrassing as needing them as a pre-teen? And, as to stamina and energy? I had them for a solid 5 minutes per day. If that.</p>
<p>Never fear. YMMV. But at the self-same moment that I stopped needing those products, I ceased to be tired. Made it through each and every day without the deep yearning for a nap. Like SB says, there will be a new season. With light - and energy - at the end of your tunnel.</p>
<p>Take it from the, perhaps, eldest <em>mom</em> in the Alley. But, remember, jmmom <em>looks</em> young.</p>
<p>See, we’re all on the same page here.</p>
<p>YMMV? translation?</p>
<p>YMMV = your mileage may vary.</p>
<p>::::when did <em>I</em> get to be the Internet savvy one in the Alley? Scary.</p>
<p>You were elected, because you look the youngest!</p>
<p>Claro que si.</p>
<p>I forgot to add: 60 to 90 minute deep tissue massages at least once a week. Let somebody who knows what they are doing plow through the thistles in your muscles.</p>
<p>As for gliding, I had a Bring-a-Joke ladies’ dinner the other night. I invited seven women. Criteria? Funny and smart and extroverted (only because I feel bad for the quiet guests). Big fun.</p>
<p>Out of eight, I had one surgeon, one illustrator, two school administrators, two accountants and one rancher who is running a small B and B. One had lost a baby to cot death and her older child never got over the image of her shaking the dead baby trying to revive him, one had lost a husband to heroin first and then divorce and then early death, one had lost a husband to depression and then a suicidal hanging in her garage, one was only 30 when she lost her mother overnight, literally, to cancer and then been investigated by the police because they didn’t realize sthe poor dear had cancer when she keeled over and died at her daughter’s and one has an anorexic 70 year old mother.</p>
<p>If you got to glide from 25 to 50, consider yourself blessed but I have to say, many women have visited abysses the likes of which I only read about. And years later, they are back on top, with a vengence, telling jokes about matching knickers and loving life with the best of us.</p>
<p>SB…look forward to the new you in a year or so. Good on you for going into the Abyss full tilt. Is that your H with the dazed look on his face?</p>
<p>Jmmom – your words are keeping me going. That’s part of what I’m going through right now. So tired. So damn tired all the time. Though the adult ADD thing that I’ve been experiencing the past few months seems a little better lately. A little . . .</p>
<p>SBmom – I’m right there with you, lying fallow. I mean, going through a reflective phase of life . . . Aw what the heck. I’M LYING FALLOW!!! Yes!!!</p>
<p>And I am making so many typos, and I’m not even drinking anything. DANG. G’night all. I tried to fix 'em folds, er folks, but I have the feeling I may have missed a few . . .</p>