Thoughts on Aging
Most of the time, I use substack to give you my thoughts and opinions, or share my research about any given topic that interests me. This week, though, what I’d like to share is more of a story. I hope you enjoy it.
This morning, as of when I’m writing this post, I went to see a friend who’s just had a baby. I stopped on the way home to pick up ingredients to make brownies for said newly postpartum friend; as I was picking up some flour, an elderly lady exclaimed that she loved my black curly hair. ‘Do you do it yourself?’, she asked excitedly, ‘or is it natural?’. My response that it’s natural and that everyone in my nuclear family has it was enough to keep the conversation going for about half an hour or so. Not that this lady or anyone who knows her is ever likely to read this post, but for the sake of privacy, I’ll refer to her as Julie. My new friend Julie was absolutely enchanted by my almost 8-month-old daughter. She was chatty and looked sprightly to me for her age, but she started telling me that she’s getting weaker and can’t walk quite so far anymore. In the little time we had, we talked about all sorts of things. She told me that, as a young woman, she also had dark, wavy hair, which she got from her Scottish father. She asked me where I was from. When I told her I was born near Venice, she began to narrate her travels to my homeland of Italy. She remembered a summer in Venice so hot that policemen had to shoo people off the streets and tell them to go back inside for fear of heat-related injuries and death, then travelling from there up to the mountains to seek a cooler climate. She didn’t tell me what job she did before retiring, but she mentioned visiting all over Europe. As memory after memory of her younger years came back to her, I could see her eyes lit up.
Then, she started telling me about her nieces and nephews: how much she looks forward to every visit, what their favourite subjects are at school, how close to her they live. I didn’t ask if she had children of her own, but she volunteered the information quickly enough. With a mixed look of acceptance and longing in her face, she told me that she was never able to bear chidren; that when she was in her twenties, she was diagnosed with endometriosis, and there was nothing doctors could do. This must have been in the 60s. Only thirty years later, I thought as I listened, my own mother’s endometriosis was treated, and she was able to have me. Julie was just born too soon.
I delighted in the attention Julie gave my daughter. She remarked that she has incredibly expressive eyes for a baby (which I vainly agree with, as they look so much like mine!), and that, when she’s grown up, she’s going to be a ‘knockout’ (what a wonderfully old-fashioned term!). Finally, Julie told me that she doesn’t get much out of the house. She occasionally sees a friend who lives nearby, but even walking to the park is now a challenge for her. Before we said goodbye, she told me that she used to want many things, but now all she wishes is that she could be young and full of energy and hope once more. She looked at my daughter once more, and told me that I’m so lucky to have such a beautiful child.
What I haven’t told you yet, is that all of this happened at the end of a morning which began with our baby girl waking up far too early and leaving us cranky and exhausted from insufficient sleep. I’d pulled myself together to go see my friend, but in my attitude I had remained despondent. I deal truly very horribly with sleep deprivation. Everyone hates it, of course, but if my husband can stay relatively calm on little sleep, I just, well, I lose it! But meeting Julie drew me out of my hopeless low mood. I felt almost ashamed at how ungrateful I am that I’m experiencing so much life - precisely what she wants the most, but can’t have in her old age. I don’t appreciate my youth. I don’t appreciate having traveled and experienced marriage and children and the gift of being able to write, all at such a young age, when I still have the energy to do all of this. Sometimes, all I see is how much older and more tired I am than when I was eighteen or twenty or twenty-two. What I don’t see, is that in fifty years I’ll likely also give anything to be the age I am right now, again. And though I know I will fail at this many more times, I want to wake up each day with the intention of enjoying my kids while they are so small, and of appreciating my body being so healthy while I am so young.
I am grateful to have been humbled, and Julie is now my new hero. I’ll think about her every time I want to complain about how hard things are right now (which of course, they objectively are, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a lot of joy), and I’ll try to remind myself that having the level of physical health that allows me to feel tired and yet keep going, is in itself an enormous privilege. As Louise Perry would have it, I’ve been a maiden, I’ll one day be a matriarch, but right now, I am fortunate enough to be in my messy, joyful, tearful, exhausting, and beautiful mother era.