Regional
(2009-10-26)
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FT. COLLINS, CO
(KUNC) -
Halloween is this Saturday - and many people have spent the past few weeks searching for the perfect scary costume for their kids or themselves. But for KUNC commentator Laura Bridgwater - an aging birthday suit is the most frightening costume of all.
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I handled turning 40 gracefully enough considering that's the birthday my doctor gave me a mammogram, baby aspirin, and a colonoscopy, but not all on the same day. Despite those medical indignities, turning the big 4-0 wasn't the psychological game that our youth-obsessed culture lead me to expect.
But I have been surprised at how quickly your body can change after 40 and some odd years. I thought the deal was to age gracefully, not age rapidly.
We all talk about that feeling where time seems to go faster the older you get. When you are a kid, the afternoon school bell is a lifetime away. Around the time you get your driver's license, the days pick up speed. In your 20s, the weeks become a blur, and in your 30s the months fly by.
In your 40s, time is measured in decades. How else can I explain that it's almost 2010 and it seems like yesterday when I bought extra propane for Y2K? Or the fact that the span of time from October 31 to January 1 feels like one long holiday called HallowThanksMasEve?
Life in the new fast lane gives you whiplash that you don't see coming. One day you wake up with underarm waddle, and the next day it's open season on the wild hairs that pop up like dandelions in a derelict yard. Where my friends and I used to talk about our kids, now we compare hair removal tactics. We have hairs in places we've never had them before.
For women, it's a whole new growth management challenge. You can feel the coarse, errant hairs, but you can no longer see well enough to pluck them. You break down and buy a magnifying mirror. When you still can't see, you wonder if the Hubble Space Telescope is for rent.
That's why you need a good friend. Preferably one with bifocals. A good friend will give you a pair of golden tweezers and help you pluck the hair on your chinny chin chin. You start to be afraid of camping because you'll have to leave your Hubble telescope and golden tweezers at home. When your kids say they saw Sasquatch, their dad says, "No, that was just mom."
These changes that require extra work are the ones that bother me the most because I no longer have the energy to deal with yet another thing. Where being tired used to mean being crabby, now it means being daffy.
This daffiness starts innocuously enough. One day you put the milk in the cabinet instead of in the fridge. This quickly devolves into rolling white deodorant on the outside of your t-shirt which is black, of course.
Then one day I wore my underwear sideways. When my eleven-year-old daughter heard me tell a friend about my perpendicular undies, my daughter said, with the appall that only someone who wears a size 00 jeans can have, "How is that even possible?"
Frankly, the depressing part wasn't that I put the underwear on sideways, but that I went around like that all day. It wasn't that uncomfortable.
I'm not the only one with this tired problem either. I recently read an article with resume tips for middle-aged and older workers who had been either laid off or needed to return to work because of the down economy. One piece of advice was to list hobbies that make you sound like the Energizer Bunny, such as running marathons and mountain climbing. Reading about energy discrimination just made me more fatigued.
This new naturally-decaffeinated mode makes me appreciate what my parents were going through when they were my age. Now I understand why my mom used to say that if someone wanted to rob them while they slept, that was fine with her as long as they didn't wake her up.
And then I was able to gain some perspective on middle age when pop idols like Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Patrick Swayze died. Their deaths made me wonder about my own place in line. You realize that when you reach the top of the bell curve, it's okay to let people cut in line in front of you. It might be the only way to slow down time. You're happy to be standing where you are, even if it is with waddle, wild hairs, and sideways underwear.
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