That Certain Age

Once upon a time, there was a girl who could keep her belly flat and her skin fresh by eating whatever she wanted - mint chocolate chip icecream, cheeseburger, fries, chips - and going out to the clubs til 2 to dance it all off. 

Yeah, that girl doesn't exist anymore. 

She's been replaced by me - a woman of a "certain age" who only has to look at food, apparently, and calories leach into my skin. Sand bags seem to have been sewn onto my thighs and butt at some point. I am itchy, cranky, grumpy, and sleepy - a veritable compendium of the worst of the dwarves. 

As I battle age and the mirror, I'm most annoyed by myself. I LIKE the idea of age. I think wrinkles are marks of experience, and gray hair is lovely, like strands of silver. I just didn't bargain for the fuzzy feeling in my brain that stops my thought processes, nor the gradual slipping away of things that I used to do without thinking.

OK, we can't all be Jamie Lee, but I do love her hair.

Example: water skiing. When my husband taught me to waterski, years ago, I loved it right away. I was able to stand right up on the skis and jet around the lake on my first go. It wasn't pretty, but it did happen. This past summer, I went to try waterskiing again. Holy incompetent arm muscles! That awkward moment when the handle slips from your grip again and again and the boat has to circle back a gabillion times to pick up the old lady in the water...

Here are a few things that I've done to combat all of this:

1. Embraced my wrinkles. I really don't mind them at all. 

2. Started taking iodine supplements, which have erased the fuzzy feeling in my brain and made my husband quite happy. (And, no, I'm not adding more details for that last point.) Do check with your doctor if you start taking any supplements, but mine - I take natural Gaia thyroid support as well as iodine and seaweed - have seriously changed my life.

3. Taken up weightlifting. I always worked out with weights, but I've added pounds to what I used to lift to compensate for disappearing muscle. I WILL get up on those skis next summer.

4. Given up sugar. It was an easy way to modify my diet. Sugar is a serious addiction, but when you replace it with fresh fruit and agave, it's not so bad. Oh, all right - Halloween sucked. Ok? Ok. And I'm not looking forward to Christmas Cookie season. Goodbye for ever, homemade pizzelles.

Buh Bye.

5. Doubled my workout time. I do work while I'm on the treadmill, so it doesn't eat into my productivity.

6. Started eating a lot more raw greens. A LOT more. And I don't drown them in processed dressing, either. Goodbye, Ranch and Blue Cheese. (PS - Olive Oil makers, if you put EVOO in little takeaway packets like ketchup, that would really come in handy. Just saying.)

7. Eyed the frozen mini hotdogs and tacos wistfully as I pass them by with my cart. Edamame is a somewhat / not really / ok they're good but they're not mini hot dogs, now are they sort of substitute.

8. Replaced my large, frozen drink cocktails with ultra Lite beer, white wine, Skinny girl margaritas (love them) and, at times, green tea. Cut down on all of the above (except the tea) to one or two a weekend. Yes, this has been a very important point for me. 

While I'm grousing and carrying on, I must point out that age has brought some very good things into my life:

1. A fantastic family

2. Friends who are settled in their own lives, and we can all be settled together

3. No more of those exhausting dating issues

4. My writing career

5. Peace with myself and my world in general.

Power Outage

Saturday evening we were out by the pool. It was an ungodly hot day, and the air still steamed even though it was nighttime. My kid and I played Otter in the water and my husband watched lazily from the side, beer in hand.

NOT our pool.

I began to notice that my kid was getting harder to see. I looked up, and the sky had turned a weird, greenish-black color. We realized that one doozey of a storm was about to erupt.


We rushed inside, leaving a trail of drips behind us. The sky got blacker and - twistier - and all of a sudden - it struck.

Wind slammed the house along with a deafening clap of thunder. Rain blasted the windows. The dark sky lit up with forks of lightning, and when they passed, the house stayed in darkness.


The power was out.


When you lose electricity, the house moans a defeated "Ahhhhhh" as it settles into silence. The storm had been so violent and fast-moving that the sun came back out.


Our reaction was one of disbelief when we looked out the windows. Everything had been blown down - chairs, umbrellas, tree limbs, our cool little fig tree... It was amazing how much damage had racked up in less than ten minutes.


Time to hunt for candles! I pulled out jars, old birthday candles, anything I could find. My husband and I told each other, for the fiftieth time, that it really was time to get a decent flashlight. 

We settled in the family room and played Uno by candlelight. Our kid won both games. Up to bed, since she was yawning by this time, and she insisted on sleeping with us in the deep darkness (can't blame her.)


Hub and I went out again to survey the wreckage. It was still hot, and I jumped back in the pool to cool off. He joined me and we swam in darkness lit only by the little reading lamp I usually keep by the bed.


The woods are "dark, and deep" and they have a lot of noises going on when there's a power outage, let me tell you. All kinds of things rustle around in there. Without AC units going or the hum of TV's, nature gets really loud, really fast. 


I was refreshed but creeped out. We dried off again and headed to bed.


And that's when it got HOT, and not in a good way. Keep in mind that 


a) I'm a menopausal woman and don't deal with heat well anyway
b) We had a kid in our bed who seems to heat up to lava temp whilst sleeping
and c)No AC, no fan


and you can perhaps imagine the misery. My husband fell asleep right away; I was not so lucky.

I got up and went down to the basement. It was cool down there, but I could hardly sleep among the boxes. Plus, weren't there spiders and bugs down there? Yeah, not happening.


Ended up on the couch with open windows, gasping for a breeze. Eventually I did drift off.


For those who live without power in the heat, I salute you. My mom was pregnant in the summer - TWICE - in Arizona. In the sixties. Which means that there wasn't any AC happening in that house. And she had just moved from Ireland. How the hell did she manage that I'd like to know?


Because I couldn't even make it one night.

"The Change"

I heard about it all my life, and here it is now - The Change. It came right on time, too - at fifty, when I had confidence issues anyway just by virtue of that number alone. My rebellious hormones decided to kick in a little extra action of their own, I now find.

And it's so cliché. I wake up at night, heart pounding as I rush to throw off the covers / turn on the fan / gulp cold water - anything to banish the night sweats. And can I go right back to sleep? Noooooo. Apparently that luxury is now denied to me; thank goodness for natural sleep aids.

I notice that I am a lot crankier these days too. And I hate it. I want to be the pleasant wife, the nice mother - the one that kids run to and hug. Instead, I find myself yelling like a banshee because my daughter insists on twisting her head from side to side as I try to put her hair up in a ponytail. What will it matter in ten years if she wen to school for one day with her pony askew? I ask you? That makes sense right now, but it didn't at 8:13 this morning. The Daylight Savings Time Change didn't help either.

Let's see. What else? I knew there was something....something to do with memory....

Not to mention the whole unexplained weight gain, which of course is coming out of nowhere. Because of course I exercise just as much and eat vegan. Of course I do!

However, I must say that The Change and that whole fifties thing has lit a fire under my ass. I'm realizing that if I want to accomplish anything, it had better be now. I can't tell myself, oh, I'll write that novel next decade, because the next decade is the sixties. Not the cool Beatles sixties, either.

Age is just a number, and people do amazing things in their fifties, sixties and seventies. Women are beautiful with wrinkles. I prefer men with a touch of gray.

But that night sweat thing is real.