“We Are A Welcoming Congregation!”
2434 East Battlefield, Springfield, Missouri 65804-3980
phone: 417-883-3922 fax: 417-883-7680
e-mail: springfield@springfieldunitarians.org
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First Unitarian
Universalist Church “We Are A Welcoming Congregation!” 2434 East Battlefield, Springfield, Missouri 65804-3980 phone: 417-883-3922 fax: 417-883-7680 e-mail: springfield@springfieldunitarians.org |
Aging Well by Nancy McShane
“She has aged well.” How many times have we heard that phrase? Sometimes we say it about a high school classmate that we become reacquainted with at the twenty-five year reunion. Sometimes we utter it about an “aging” movie star, which these days refers to an actress older than Julia Roberts but not quite as dead as Katherine Hepburn.
However we apply it, we are almost always referring to the way a woman looks: the color of her hair, the lack of fine lines and wrinkles, the tautness of her belly. This is, after all, the way it should be, at least according to those ultimate arbiters of taste: television, movies and magazines. As Billy Crystal’s old Saturday Night Live character Fernando says, “It is better to look good than to feel good.”
That’s what we want to hear, isn’t it? “You look Maaavelous!”
Well we’re not buying it anymore. We’re Unitarian women. We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, no matter how old, how gray or how wrinkled. We believe in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning and the truth we’re talking about here isn’t “Does she or doesn’t she?” We’re talking Meaning here, with a capital “M.” The Meaning of Life! Personal worth! Dignity! You’re just not going to find that in the glossy ad-filled pages of Cosmo magazine.
Meaning is discovered. It is passed on to us by those who have come before us: mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, friends and yes, even men. Meaning evolves over time. We uncover clues as we climb up the steep path of life.
We learn to love life during our younger years, when we are in the stage the ancients celebrated as maidenhood. We climb a little higher and learn to love others during the years we dedicate to serving others, those years known as motherhood. It’s not until we are high up on the hill that we gain the perspective needed to assemble the clues into something called the bigger picture. That’s when we learn to love ourselves, when we reach the pinnacle of female wisdom, when we become a crone. It’s a wonderful state of being with a name that unfortunately reminds us of snaggle-toothed old witches with pointy noses and warts on their chins with hairs coming out of them. So why don’t we just refer to being a crone as finally achieving womanhood. Total womanhood.
It’s only when you are that high on the hill, in the full bloom of your womanhood, that you understand that the hill doesn’t end. There is no such thing as “over the hill.” The hill keeps going, and as each woman ascends, if she takes care to reach back down to the next woman, one a little younger, then she brings everyone up with her.
That’s how it’s done! That’s how we gained the vote. That’s how we got to the Senate and will one day make it to the White House. That’s why we are now supported in our choices, whether it is to be a working mother or a stay-at-home-mom or not to become a mom at all.
“She has aged well.” That’s a wish I make for all women. That we learn to become, and love, being 30, or 50, or 70; not to wish we were still 18. Let’s face it; 18 wasn’t that hot. 80 rocks! You go crone!
Today we’re going to hear from seven women, aged 24 to 58. Their views on what it is like to be their age appeared in the pages of the October issue of O Magazine. The entire issue was dedicated to helping women age well and contained plenty of Oprah’s signature advice to “live your best life.” Let’s listen to the voices of maiden, mother and crone, as read by the women of our church.
24: Still Tripping Over Life by Gina Hamadey,
read by Autumn Gonzales
There came a time when everything my parents said sounded like blather. One day I was buying everything they were selling; I would use “my mom said so” as hard, unequivocal evidence. The next, they were full of it—mere telemarketers with nothing of substance to proffer but clichés: No excuses; watch your mouth; send a thank you card.
And at 15, I had it down. I did what I wanted. Nothing terribly irresponsible; I’d just maybe head to my hometown cliffs of Palos Verdes, California, watch the moon reflect on the still water, sip cheap beer, giggle and flirt shamelessly, hormones ping-ponging. I’d forget to show up or call past curfew. Protected by the walls of “I forgot,” “I didn’t mean to,” and “I didn’t know,” I could get out of anything. I grew an opinion, ill-informed but insistent. I sauntered into my senior debate class thinking, “What can you possibly teach me?”
When I arrived at college I realized I had not only just begun learning but would never know as much as I thought I knew in high school. I clocked in hour after hour at the undergraduate library in a desperate attempt to catch up (and, okay, to flirt shamelessly.) My parents’ faults became glaringly apparent. They were real peopled, after all, and it was not looking pretty. I considered myself a feminist, which I defined as brash, loudmouthed, and unapologetic. I read Hedda Gabler and thought, “She isn’t nice, but is she ever interesting.” That’s how I wanted to be—interesting rather than nice.
Now, two years past graduation, it seems the SATs begat college exams, which in turn begat the real test. Here’s what I’ve gathered:
· Success will not come because I’m ambitious and desire it, but only after much, much, and more hard work.
· Mistakes I make have weight, and my fallback phrases of “I forgot,” et al., don’t count as sound reasoning. (No excuses.)
· A strong woman can—and should—be tactfully honest rather than brutally blunt. (Watch your mouth.)
· It’s imperative to recognize people’s needs, return calls, be trustworthy, and show appreciation for the regular outpouring of love I’m shown. (Send a thank you card.)
I’m sometimes overwhelmed by the excitement of having it all before me, unknown but wonderful because it’s mine, a product of my own making. I feel vibrantly alive and glad to be young. But still tripping over life, I look forward to the time when lessons won’t be in such rapid succession. I’m anticipating passing hard-won nuggets on to kids who, covering their ears and yelling a tune, will ignore me but, perhaps, still hear.
32: You Are Confused and You Are Searching by Danzy
Senna,
read by Jocelyn Cogswell
A decade ago you scribbled a list on the back of a napkin: “The Ten-Year Plan.” You were like that back then: always making lists.
This one involved a marriage to your college sweetheart, a brownstone in Brooklyn, two adorable children, a Land Rover with mud on the tires, a California hideaway.
Those were the years you moved a lot, from apartment to apartment, as if you were running from the law. Temporary living spaces for a temporary girl. You did not believe in roots. You preferred sublets, being surrounded by other people’s tastes and smells. You survived on take-out: a steady supply of moo shu pork and falafel.
You wore cheap shoes and drank too much and prowled the city till the wee hours, yet somehow were able to drag yourself to work the next morning You assumed all love affairs ended; that was built into the arrangement. Everything seemed disposable.
It is ten years later. You are 32. Somewhere along the way you forgot to get married, forgot to invest in property, forgot to have some kids. You are in therapy. You have fine lines around your eyes. You wear comfortable shoes because you have to. When you drink too much you feel it for days. You simply cannot stay up all night.
When you look back over your shoulder you see all the mistakes you made. Breaking up with the boy who made you laugh for the moody artist who later dumped you. Twice. Maxing out that credit card. Making a fool of yourself in public that night in the bar on Lafayette Street. Your 26th birthday bash. (You were the life of the party who almost killed herself with martinis.) Mangling your feet in shoes half a size too small. Burning your skin to a crisp in hopes it would reveal your hidden ethnicity. Not saying thank you.
These days you attend a lot of baby showers and weddings. Your gynecologist, on your last visit, said, “You have three years before you have to worry.”
You can’t wait three years to worry—and so you do worry.
But sometimes you still feel 22. Other times you just feel lucky. It seems a miracle to survive one’s 20s with body and soul somewhat intact. And then there are those moments you are filled with the thrill of being an adult woman with nobody to answer to but herself. In these moments you are happy you didn’t get what you wanted on that list by the age of 32. Because for now, in this moment, you have what you didn’t have when you were 22: youth and experience, freedom and a sense of limits.
You have not gotten around to making a new Ten-Year Plan. You are not as certain about anything as you were at 22: what you desire, who you will become. You are confused and you are searching. There are new mistakes to make. Your sadness is deeper and your happiness feels richer. You are 32. Everything matters.
38: The Life You Live May Be Your Own by Diane
Cardwell,
read by Michelle Bradley
I remember my mother saying on one of her birthdays, “When I look in the mirror, I always think, ‘What’s happened to me? ’ I can’t understand why I have all these wrinkles, all this gray hair.” She was laughing, as was her way. “Because I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 19.” She was probably 53 then.
I was 3 by the time my mother hit my age now. Married for 12 years, with two children, she was, at 38, fully, irrevocably, an adult, and had made most of the choices that would define—or is that confine?—her abbreviated life. And yet there she was, in her early 50s, just a dozen or so years from her death, still giddy and full of hope, not really accepting how much of her life she had already lived and how few doors she had left to open.
I think of this now because suddenly that disconnect between now old she felt and how old she actually was is easier to understand. I grew up during the upheavals of 1970s feminism, the sexual revolution, finding your bliss—absorbing all those ideas about having it all, the importance of self-fulfillment and the option to delay childbirth to get a firm grip on a career.
Accordingly, I spent my 20s finding bliss, at cocktail parties and clubs, while bouncing from job to job, vaguely zigzagging up a ladder of sorts, only to make a difficult though rewarding shift in my middle 30s to a job often undertaken by people much younger. I am happily, recently married and beginning to consider children, but I can’t seem to shake this nagging feeling that I’ve wasted too much time getting here and that I’ll soon be too old to get anywhere else.
There is nothing inherently wrong with 38, but I haven’t taken to it very well. It is one of those transitional ages with little identity of its own: a pit stop you make as you barrel along the interstate toward 40. Thirty-six or 37? Well those ages were just fine, still solidly mid-30s, not yet late, not yet unable to ignore the cold breath of 40 hovering like a cruel mist on the horizon. And 40 is the age at which you must begin to answer for your choices, because in a very real sense you’re stuck with them. For most of us, at least, it’s far too late for medical school or a budding fashion empire.
As one friend put it, 40 is when you realize that your life is your life and that you probably won’t be making anything radically different out of it. The anxiety that creates is new to me. For the first time, I recognize the possibilities for reinvention are narrowing. Like my mother on that long-ago birthday, I feel like a teenager, full of ambition and dreams about the future, but lately that has been tempered by the creeping suspicion that these could be fantasies I will never make real.
But I tell myself just to get over it. I am lucky to be healthy and loved and to have figured out the little I have. And besides, my friends who are just a tiny bit older report an enviable sense of self-knowledge, confidence, calm, and inner peace. I can only hope to get there, too.
40: The Calm After the Storm by Cathi Hanauer,
read by Laura Caruso
As a person who has always craved life’s extremes, I wasn’t thrilled about becoming middle-aged. But then someone told me your 40s are the best years, when you finally coast after years of pedaling uphill. This piqued my interest, though I couldn’t give it much thought: I was too busy getting married, having babies, and working—writing whatever I could to make ends meet.
And then I was 40. And—this is the truth—my life really did seem to shift into cruise. Right after my birthday, my second book, an essay anthology I’d conceived and edited about contemporary women, became a best-seller. Longtime financial worries diminished as the phone rang: Would I speak at this luncheon, talk to this radio host? I felt that maybe, finally, I had something valuable to say, that the decades of self-struggle, yearning, learning—of living—had given me a certain wisdom.
Meanwhile, after moving 11 times in two decades, I’d put down roots. My daughter was 8, my son 4, and suddenly, it seemed, they were people, not babies wailing around the clock for my milky breasts. And my marriage—thank you, therapy; ten years’ experience—was at a mostly easy, loving place. I was comfortable with my body, which, after years of morphing (weight fluctuation, pregnancy), was now a stable, familiar thing. My breasts were no longer pert, and my legs sported spider veins, but I had two awesome children and the knowledge that, despite what society and Hollywood might imply, I wasn’t supposed to look 18 anymore, even if sometimes I wished I still did.
There’s one more thing: Just before turning 40, I began a mini-dose of the antidepressant Celexa—something I’d contemplated for years but hadn’t done, mostly because I’d never felt “depressed,” only anxious, obsessive, frantic. But then I read that this Prozac cousin sometimes calmed anxiety, and I thought, at 40, why not try it? Within days, that wired hyper-exhaustion I’d come to feel was “just me” disappeared, replaced by a subtle but palpable calm. People stopped asking whether I’d just run in from somewhere. I slept deeply, stopped whining about how tired I was, and didn’t obsess over what people thought of me.
And so, at 40—was it the biochemical boost, the being done with babies, the power of my newfound wisdom, the long-awaited spare cash, the calmer, gentler marriage, or (hello!) all of the above?—I felt a renewal of passion. I began to write another novel, a sensual story that thrilled me to work on. I thought about things I hadn’t allowed myself to: traveling to Italy, lightening my hair. I bought a pen at Tiffany’s because now that I was 40, damn it, I deserved one.
No, not everything’s perfect here in the middle. (Who was it who said “Forty is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart?) Menopause lurks, and there are still days aplenty when I’m shrieking at everyone. And I’m a lucky 40: I have a healthy family, a house, good work. I am wise enough now to know that—like everything—this bliss is surely temporary and I’d better embrace it while I can. So I’m coasting. And I no longer disdain the middle. In fact, I’ve become a big fan.
44: I Get Hit On More Than I Ever Did by Karen Karbo,
read by Karen Prescott
As ages go, 44 rocks. The number itself beguiles. There’s the obvious symmetry. That classy Hollywood renegade Dirty Harry carried a .44. Marg Helgenberger, sexy star of CSI, is 44. What’s not to like? I know women who pine for their 20s, and I feel fortunate not to be one of them. It should be noted that when women talk about wanting to be younger, they’re talking about their bodies. Few people wish they didn’t know now what they didn’t know then, to quote Bob Seger.
For me, to yearn to be 20 years younger is tantamount to wishing to be someone else entirely. When I was 24, there wasn’t one thing I liked about myself. I came of age in the Southern California seventies, where the feminine standard of beauty was Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton. She was wistful and lithe, with a great curtain of center-parted blonde hair. I was 5'9" at age 12, flat of chest and wide of shoulder and hip. I had a head of curly/wavy reddish brown hair that refused to cooperate despite my heroic application of the round brush and the blow-dryer. I was not a thin, quiet blonde with skinny legs, but a strapping brunette with a big mouth. I was named class clown my senior year in high school. I suffered. When I was a younger teenager, my mother predicted I would come into my own at 35. She said I’d be glad for my height and all this hair. I wanted to slit my throat.
Now I look back at pictures of myself and wonder why I was so miserable: I was tan and pretty. I wore string bikinis and not one person shouted, “Whale on the beach!” I was the wisecracking best friend of the homecoming queen. But there is something tentative and unhappy in my face, even when beaming with apparent joy. I wanted to be anywhere else but in my own skin.
I have few fond memories of being the object of anyone’s desire, so there’s no use wishing for a spin in the way-back machine. Indeed, maybe my mother was right: I get hit on more now than I ever did as a younger woman. I have a boyfriend of three years, 15 years my junior, who assures me this is because I’m hot. Who knew? It probably helps that the culture is now officially wowed by the likes of Venus and Serena. Girls are magnificently tall and strong these days. I was ahead of my time. Every year I do a three-week stint teaching creative writing at a local public high school, and I’m just one of the crowd.
My mother died of a brain tumor when she was 45 and I was 16. This tragedy has had its unexpected benefits. Friends who bemoan their age often try to shore themselves up by saying, “Well consider the alternative.” I saw the alternative firsthand and know it’s not just a platitude. Kimono-sleeve arms and a line or two is infinitely preferable to perishing bald and bloated before menopause.
If I could trade being older and wiser for being young and wise, I would, but I don’t see that as an option. I see glorious young women striding down the street and recognize their expressions of displeasure, their self-consciousness and discontent. They’re perfect and they don’t know it because they can’t. The irony of this cracks me up, for which I’m unaccountably grateful.
And Mom, you were right about the hair.
49: Age Has Given Me What I Was Looking For My Entire Life—It Gave Me Me
by Anne Lamott, read by Marilyn Day
I was at a wedding Saturday with a lot of women in their 20s and 30s in sexy dresses, their youthful skin aglow. And even though I was 20 or 30 years older, a little worse for wear, a little tired and overwhelmed by the loud music, I was smiling.
I smiled with a secret Cheshire-cat smile of pleasure and relief in being older—49 and change, which even I would have to admit is no longer extremely late youth. But I would not give you back a year of life lived.
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life. I fit into me now—mostly. I have an organic life finally, not the one people imagined for me or tried to get me to have or the life someone else might celebrate as a successful one—I have the life I dreamed of. 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 get cellulite on your stomach—but I not only 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?
On some days. That’s why it’s such a blessing I’m not left to my own devices. Because the truth is I have amazing friends and a deep faith in God, to whom I can turn. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I’ve earned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I’d give up all this for a flatter belly? Are you crazy?
I still have terrible moments when I despair about my body. But they are just moments—I used to have years when I believed I would be more beautiful if I jiggled less; if all parts of my body stopped moving when I did. But I believe two things now that I didn’t at 30. When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and skin was 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth. And I know the truth that I am not going to live forever, and this has set me free. Eleven years ago, when my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37, we went shopping at Macy’s. She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live. I tried on a short dress and came out to model it for Pammy. I asked if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly, “Annie? You just don’t have that kind of time.”
I live by this story.
I am thrilled—thrilled-ish—for every gray hair and achy muscle, because of all the friends who didn’t make it, who died too young of AIDS and breast cancer. And 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 mid-40s, but this pales compared to the other gifts of this decade—how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I get myself tubs of hot salty water at the end of the day in which to 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 downtime.” I live by the truth that No is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act.
I have grown up 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 80 I’ll wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I think 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 dessert. So this informs how I live now.
I have survived so much loss, as all of us have by our 40s—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 the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of a beloved person. But this is also the good news. They live forever, in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather is cold—but you learn to dance with the limp. 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 I might not ever have a passionate romantic relationship—might end up alone! I’d been so terrified of this my whole life. But I’d rather never be in a couple or never get laid again that to 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. But I learned to be the person I’d wished I’d met—at which point I found a kind, artistic, handsome man. We have been together 20 months now. When we get out of bed, we hold our lower backs, like Walter Brennan, and we smile.
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 at the wedding fear getting older, and I wish I could gather them together again and give them my word of honor that every one of my friends loves being older, loves being in her 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. My Aunt Gertrud is 85 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’m used to. But I love my life more, and me more. I’m so much juicer. And, like that old saying goes, its not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often. And that feels like heaven to me.
58: You’d Have to Shoot Me
Before I’d Put On Stilettos by Molly Ivins,
read by Jane Waschick
A friend of mine who got married in middle age honeymooned in Paris. One beautiful day, she and her new husband got a picnic and went to the Jardin des Tuileries for a romantic interlude. After lunch she lay with her head in his lap, almost melting with love. “Sandy,” he said, peering down at her, “you have a really long hair growing out of your chin. You might want to do something about that.” Sandy said later that it wasn’t the advice she minded, it was the timing.
Well, there you are—chin hairs, wrinkles, droopy boobs, creaky joints, and those noises we start to make when we get up or sit down. It ain’t romantic and it ain’t glamorous. But it is funny when you look at it right. It’s also fair: Each year everybody gets a year older, no exceptions, despite Botox, lying, and other desperate measures. (When I was a zit-covered teenager, though, my mother used to console me by saying, “Someday, dear, you’ll be grateful you have such an oily complexion because you won’t get wrinkles.” Now I’m 58, and I get zits in my wrinkles. Mom, there is no justice.)
I think most of us become nicer as we get older, less judgmental, less full of certitude; life tends to knock a few corners off all of us as we go through. Cancer, divorce, teenagers, and other plagues make us give up on expecting ourselves—or life—to be perfect, which is a real relief.
In fact, I like being this age. Having been through breast cancer, I’m conventionally happy to be here at all. Come clichés take on special meaning: “As long as you’ve got your health (and most of your marbles), you’ve got everything.” I like letting vanity go. I’d rather be comfortable than chic, and you’d have to shoot me before I’d put on stilettos.
Senior moments are disconcerting, but now you can get those finder/locator gizmos to put on your car keys, cell phone, and TV remote. You push the button on the locator (of course, first you have to remember where you put that), and the object you want will obligingly beep for you. This can save you hours a day.
Charm doesn’t fade, wit doesn’t age, and knowledge is still priceless. If we live well, every year we become a year’s worth better, smarter, and wiser. Good humor is more attractive than good breasts, and I think fudge and pets are better than sex. Cheer up and enjoy today, because it will get worse.
Last update:
22 October 2004
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