No age is perfect.
So why do we as a society idealize youth and demonize old age?
There was nothing perfect about my 20’s, except perhaps my plump skin, my seemingly endless stamina and perhaps my naïveté.
There was nothing perfect about being young woman trying to start a career in a male driven often misogynistic industry.
Being a new mother isn’t perfect nor is being a woman trying to have children and finding she’s unable to. Or try being a woman who doesn’t want children at all, and has to defend her decisions, as if being a mother is her only currency.
As we age in a culture saturated with messaging that exalts youth, our options for what it means to be a woman seem to be whittled down to avoiding aging at all costs or to simply disappear. We should strive to be eternally youthful or take a seat and long for what once was.
No age is perfect.
Wrinkles on a woman? Millions are spent on trying to defy what is so natural.
Gray hair on a woman? It’s is a movement. #Silverdisobedience
Not all, but many women yearn for youth. We empty our pockets in pursuit of it, all the while ignoring the powerful truth that NO age is all one thing, good or bad.
My knees hurt, a lot of the time. But I feel better in my own skin than I ever have before.
Sometimes I forget things, okay often I forget things, like a word that I just can’t draw forth from my subconscious. But I believe in myself more than ever before. I trust my gut and I don’t agonize about decisions.
No age is perfect.
Getting old may very well include sagging skin and achy knees. As Nora Efron famously put into the vernacular “I don’t like my neck”.
There’s also the pain of the loss of those we hold dear. I long for a call with my mom who managed to make it all better for me, even at the age of 54.
These are the true and sometimes sad facts about getting older.
But there is also:
Gratitude.
Pride in myself that doesn’t come with a sense of shame or angst.
Confidence.
My openness.
My expanding consciousness.
There are so many incredible things that come with getting older, yet we demonize aging and spin the tale of youth as perfection.
No age is perfect.
I look at my 20 and 30 something daughters, coworkers and friends, and at times I yearn for their glorious youth, their pretty skin, their perky tits, the long life they have ahead of them.
But even that is whittling life and age, or a time in our lives, down to simplicities.
Let’s get honest, even with all the smooth skin, lusty sexual appetite and speedy metablosim, for many women our 20’s were a bit of a shit show.
At that age we are still evolving, we are to put it bluntly, dumb as fuck in many ways.
We’re terrified half the time, we take crap from men and bosses and those with more outward confidence and internalize it. We don’t believe in ourselves and there is a lot of fear.
Then we hit the “motherhood” years. We have babies (or don’t) and we glorify motherhood as the be all and end all for successful womanhood.
But let’s take an honest look there as well. Our bodies change in alarming ways, we’re anxious a lot of the time and terrified of raising an ax murderer.
Marriages start ending in our late 30’s and 40’s because many women begin to wake up and realize they’ve attached themselves, in some dumb hormonal driven decision in their 20’s, to some fuck face who doesn’t have a clue.
No Age is perfect.
Why as humans must we categorize and lump things into black and whites?
There is a gray area.
Aging is great in so many ways, and even in that we often say aging is so great “in spite of: … (insert complaint here.)
Well, my 20’s were great despite the fact that I was dumb and scared and insecure.
My 30 and 40’s were great despite the fact I put my career on hold to raise kids, lost my sense of myself, got divorced, lost jobs and gained 10 pounds.
There is always a despite of and a because of. Why must we talk about our lives like this?
LIFE is sweet and salty, it’s good and bad. Just like in the Disney classic Inside Out - you can’t have joy without sorrow.
Why are aging women not on our soap boxes, shouting from the rooftops to our young women that it’s not over. It’s better in some ways and it’s worse in others.
It’s simply just another stage. We yearn for youth yet reject the idea of going back unless we can take with us what we’ve learned along the way.
Without the things we know now - that youth, glorified in any way you imagine, is hollow.
No age is perfect.