Middle Age

Forty is the old age of youth.
Fifty is the youth of old age.

Yes.

a French proverb

found in Jan Karon's 

"A Continual Feast"

I Can Brush My Teeth

When a teenager asked Pastor during the quiz today, "Can you read question 3 again?" he grinned and winked at the adults in the room and said, "Yes, I CAN....   ...  ...   Oh -- would you like me to?"

I can brush my teeth.
I can go up and down the stairs to do laundry.
And if I forget to toss in a pair of socks, I can run downstairs again to add them to the load.
I can get myself a drink.
I can pick up my fork and feed myself supper.
I can even drive a car to the store and do an errand.
I can see well enough to read a book.
I can stand up in the shower.
I can kneel by the sink and use my neti-pot.
I can pick up my glasses and put them on my face.

This weekend I am particularly thankful for what I can do.  I so seldom realize what a great blessing these tiny things are, and how difficult life can be when these simple things are daunting tasks or even completely impossible.

My mom had surgery a week and a half ago.  Now she's recuperating and trying to get her meds regulated again and trying to get her hands & feet to DO what her brain is telling them to do.  It makes a person thankful for patient and tender CNA's and nurses.  And when I whine at Gary because I "only" accomplished laundry and bread-baking and mopping and vacuuming and supper and a half-day at paid work (and there was so much more that "should've" been done) I should be slapped.

I can brush my teeth.
And I can shower.
And I can go potty by myself.
That right there is a lot to be grateful for.

And if those were impossible, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. He shall be my salvation" (Job 13).

"I believe that God has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them....  All this He does out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me."

The Rocking Chair on the Front Porch

Chapter 10 of To Kill a Mockingbird starts with the line:

Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty.

Then the paragraph goes on to explain how all the other kids had parents who were much younger, parents who could play football or go fishing or hunting or work in the garage.

"Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty."  I busted a gut laughing when I saw it.  Why?  Beats me.  Sympathy, maybe? 

Would it be so bad for people (including me!) to think we CAN'T, instead of expectations that we should keep up the energy-level and accomplishment-level of younger folks?



Several weeks ago I was having hamburger cravings alongside a recognition that I was trying to accomplish more than was accomplishable.  So I gave myself permission to serve hamburgers every night for dinner.  Not interesting hamburgers -- no.  Just plain old boring patties on a slice of bread.  Wow -- what a relief!  Now, as it turns out, we haven't had hamburgers every night, even though we've had them a lot.  Somehow, the lowered mealtime expectations have relieved some stress.  The next step is figuring out how to connive myself into lowering other expectations of myself.

Measuring Cups

When all the contents of a house have to GO [due to down-sizing or moving to a nursing home or because of death] ... the stuff has to go someplace.  To grandkids?  To a resale shop?  To the dump? 

What about pictures and once-treasured possessions?  What happens when the next generations don't cherish the things I cherish?  What will become of those items?  And should it matter?

A bunch of stuff is finding its way into our home these days. I can't cherish everything that could arrive here from grandparents, parents, and in-laws.  What's odd is the things that I do enjoy.

For all my adult life, I have owned one set of measuring cups and one set of measuring spoons.  For someone who cooks and bakes from scratch, that's been a little inconvenient.  Now I have my mother-in-law's metal measuring cups and spoons.  If my 1-cup measure is floury from baking bread, I have another cup [gasp] to measure sugar for kombucha.  Whoa -- this is nice.

Valentine's Day

So, I anticipate seeing Facebook posts and blogposts about the wonderful dinners y'all ate and the fun things you did to celebrate.  Our Valentine's Day solidifies the proof that we are aging and practical fuddy-duddies.

I was planning to take Andrew* to urgent care, but was lucky to find our doctor had an opening in the morning.  This was followed by a trip to the pharmacist.  Gary had a bad day at work.  I fell asleep mid-afternoon reading schoolwork with Maggie.  Supper was beans and cornbread.  No chocolate, no cake, no cookies, no treats -- we can't being doin' sugar when we're still fighting off the germies.  (When will this end and we're no longer treading on the edge of the cliff?)

We did, however, go to our dance class.  Dancing.  For Valentine's Day.  At least that 50 minutes of the day sounds decidedly romantic.  Truth be told, it was more exercise than beautiful dancing.  But we'll go with romantic.  It sounds better that way.


* Footnote: Nasty ear infection.  It's improving, and he probably will have managed to avoid a ruptured eardrum. 

Babushkas

I think those Russian women had it figured out.  They got old and wore their babushkas.  Who would see their thinning hair turning grey?  It was covered by the ever-present scarf.  They didn't have to figure out what to do with their old-lady hair.

Somehow, I suspect wearing a head scarf at work would not be part of "professional attire."


(Can you guess that I'm still trying to figure out whether to let the hair grow long again, keep it as is, or try something even shorter?!!)

Saturday

Maggie and I decided to take Gary to Discovery World before our membership runs out.  I love the aquarium there. 

Things I noticed:
~ I hate how tired I get at museums these days.  The kids and I used to enjoy spending a whole long luxurious day at a museum.  Now, two hours and I'm done.
~ When we walked past the heat sensor, my nose was blue.  Seriously?  Maggie's and Gary's noses were, y'know, alive and warm.  My nose showed as blue (thus, COLD) as my glasses.   Gary put his hand on my nose and said, "Oh, wow, your nose IS cold!"  Also, my finger with nerve damage and poor circulation showed bluer than the rest of my fingers.
~ We went in "the Hive" (which shows 3-D images-in-motion of different things) to see the Roman Colosseum.  The narrator explained how, with these computer models, it's better than being there in real life.  The reasoning that a) we can replicate what it was like originally instead of what it is now, and b) we're not adding wear-&-tear to the ruins that remain.  Okay, I see the point.  But c'mon, "better than being there in real life"???
~ I spent more time noticing women's hair styles than I spent investigating science.
~ Children at the museum seem more well-behaved on Saturdays (with their parents) than on weekdays (with their school classes).


While downtown, we used a gift certificate to eat at Buca di Beppo.  Phenomenal food!  What surprised us was the decorating.  So many pictures of Italian guys, singers and ball-players and actors and the pope.  But also photos of women that we were embarrassed to see: boobs, boobs, cleavage, and boobs.  Yikes!  The grievous part of the dining experience was that we left our doggie-bags on the table.  Argh!  That food was so awesome, and we didn't bring the leftovers home.  Woe!


I fell asleep on the couch by 8:00.  When I crawled into bed, I set the alarm for 7:15 "just in case."  I knew I'd be up early.  I wasn't; the alarm woke me.  We had to skip first service and go to late.  Maggie caught the stomach-ick that has been going around; she was up sick through the night and stayed home from church.

As nice as our day together was, I'm thinking that it was more than our bodies were ready to take.

That's pitiful.
 

Consternation over Hair

Do you scan the bookshelves of people you're getting to know?  When you're visiting a friend, do you check out the front of the refrigerator door?  If there's a scheduling calendar or a to-do list prominently displayed, do you notice it?  

What we see tells us a lot about who that person is.  



So, I've lost a lot of hair over the past year or two.  A lot.   My ponytail looks thin like a rat tail.  My bun is tiny and flat.  My hair looks scraggly when it's down.  I need a haircut.  Not 6" trimmed off.  But a completely different haircut.  A haircut that works with old-lady hair.

And I don't want one!    [waaaaahhhh!]

Everybody says, "It's just hair."  
Everybody says, "You can always grow it back."
Everybody says, "It will be fine."

But my boring hairstyle that I've had for 20+ years says something about who I am.  It reveals who I am just like my refrigerator door and the contents of my bookshelves.

Okay, so gazillions of American women change their hairstyle and their hair color every few months or every couple of years.  That's great.  But it's not me.  So I'm, like, having this identity crisis over the upcoming appointment for the haircut, fully anticipating a week or more of mourning.

And everybody thinks I'm silly. 
    
 

Make-Up

Not like I wear make-up very often.  But I did want to look a little special for Gary's Christmas party at work on Saturday.  I might've spent a whole minute-and-a-half applying make-up that day.  Maybe even two minutes!

So Sunday afternoon my eyes started itching.  By bedtime they were beginning to be goopy.  This morning I headed off to work looking as if I'd been crying for hours.  After many trips to the bathroom to wash my eyes today, the redness has subsided and the itchiness is nearly gone.

Good-bye make-up.

I can't wear earrings anymore.
Pretty shoes are impossible.
My hair is thinning.
And now make-up is off-limits too.
I guess it's time for any remnants of vanity to be destroyed, eh?
Time to embrace the aging frumpiness....

Offering to Help

As my mom's health began taking a turn for the worse last year, she mentioned one of her regrets.  She says she wished she'd done more things to help her parents as they got older.  At the time, Mom heeded the advice of the social workers and the nurses and the therapists, who all say not to do things to help an elderly or disabled person, if that person is capable of doing the job for himself. 

This makes sense.  Right?  If we cater to a toddler, that child will expect to be waited on.  That child will not grasp for independence.  We will thwart the child's motivation to "Do It Myself!" when we overhelp.  So would it not be the same for a person who's had a stroke or other health impairment?  Are not those multitudes of little, daily tasks sort of like "therapy" practice?

And yet, how much frustration do we allow to crowd in on a person's life?

When we're raising our kids, there's a question we continually bump into:  "Is he ready for this?"  Is Joey wetting his pants because he's not developmentally capable of using the potty, or is he just being stubborn about peeing in his diaper?  Is Susie refusing to stay in her bed at night because she truly needs company and comfort, or is she just being manipulative of her parents?  When your homeschooled 9-yr-old cannot read and cannot memorize his times-tables, is it because he's a lazy so-and-so (and will not do the work), or because he's a late-bloomer (and cannot do the work)? 

But that question doesn't go away when the kids grow up!

We end up with sore muscles.  Do we keep up that exercise regimen we just started?  Or do we give the sore body a rest to recuperate?

Do we give help to the neighbor who's struggling to return the grocery cart to the cart-corral?  Or do we let the man do it himself, as it is his day's exercise? 

Do we help a teenager straighten out the jumbled words coming from a brain that struggles with auditory processing?  Or do we leave her on her own to figure out why we don't understand her question?

I am capable of coming into the kitchen while carrying a bushel of tomatoes.   But I am glad when someone opens the door for me.  Just because I could do it, doesn't mean they should let me.  Or make me.  It's polite to offer help.  It's kind.  It's a courtesy that we should offer to one another.

Those of us who teach children have watched as our students reach the saturation point in their learning.  A fourth-grader wants to read a book for fun that's easy enough for second-graders. Isn't that okay?  Or do we make him read up to his ability level all the time?  A teacher lectures, but must give the students an occasional break to get out of their seats, walk around, chat for a couple of minutes, etc.  When our brains are taxed by new concepts, or hard skills or ideas, we may need a short break.  We need time for the new information and new skills to gel, to settle, to become part of us and our thinking.  That goes for post-stroke therapy, or learning to walk again after an accident.




It keeps coming back to "I can't" versus "I won't."  When someone can't, we respond very differently from when they won't. 

But how do you know which it is?

Comfort Foods

Oh, they tell us not to give a kid a cookie to cheer him up.  They say it's bad to find comfort in food.  Depressed?  Don't you dare have a bowl of ice cream.  In a cranky mood?  Don't find your solace in making your favorite supper.  M&M's when life seems overwhelming?  Shame on you.

BAH.  Humbug.

Personally, I like taking comfort from comfort foods.

But then you get older.  Pizza may make your mouth happy and lift your spirits.  But your stomach says, "Excuse me?  Pizza?  It's 9:30 in the evening, you fool!"  Snickers make you feel better for 10-20 minutes, but then you pay for it later.

So where do you find comfort when you know that you really really really ought to exercise self-control, and not have that rum&coke, not have that 8 oz bag of candy bars, or not have that third slice of pizza?  (Did I say "third"?   Uh... I meant "second."  Well, no.  I meant "first."  Shoot.  You're never going to believe me, are you?)

The chocolate cookies on the counter are calling my name.

Facing It Again

In theory, if you've already been through something bad once, you should know that you managed to survive it. Then why is it that the prospect of enduring the same thing again (such as the death of a loved one, or a toothache) is so daunting? Why does the fear of having to face those pains again seem even worse than having faced them the first time?

It's dumb. It's just dumb.
But that doesn't mean it's not real.

That Calendar

Maggie connived me into watching an episode of Psych with her. (Bad Maggie! Naughty Maggie! Bad girl!) (Boy, it seems I have no power to resist that show.) To quasi-redeem the time, I hauled out the 2012 planning calendar and began to pencil in birthdays and tax payments and symposia and other reminders. Of course, to do this necessitated consultation with the 2011 planning calendar.

That was when we saw the eye doctor? But I thought it was just a couple of weeks ago.

The calendar says Nat & Sarah's wedding was back in July, but they just got married.

Look at all those doctor appointments for Maggie in January. How could that have been nearly a year ago? It was so recent.

The last time I went downtown for training at work was in March? It couldn't have been that long ago!





I'm getting old.


Will time keep going faster?
Or when we get old enough and feeble enough and frail enough, unable to fill our days with too-much-to-do, does the time slow down again, like when we were little kids and the days dragged?