What To Do Now Because Doing It At 50 Will Be Hard

1. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Silently. Don’t say "Ugh!" or "Umph." or "Oh..."
2. Hurry. Walk fast and talk at the same time.
3. Cook three courses while drinking a glass of wine.
4. Decide that grad school was a bad idea.
5. Ask someone a question. Remember the answer 10 minutes later.

*Or sing Thriller one last time, fall in love, bare your soul. If you were Michael Jackson. R.I.P.

Juicy. No Couture. (Homage to Mouse on the formatting)

I am 52. It doesn't seem possible some days. But when I look in the mirror closely (which of course at this point has to be a magnifying mirror but one can wax nostalgic even so), I see my blood coming to the surface. All over my body I see my veins coming to the surface. My face, my feet, my hands. This is what happens in Northern California where I live when you plant swamp trees like liquidambars in our semi-arid climate. The roots rise to the surface looking for water that they cannot find below, breaking through lawn after lawn.

In many ways. I would not go back to being 20. Or even 30. 40, yes, well maybe before anything started to ache. But I would sometimes wish for some of the juiciness of the young.

Being my age, and being a mother, and probably for other reasons not clear to me (maybe it happens to all of us stepping down the path to old age), I want to tell young women what I didn't know. You are juicy. Believe me, I know what it's like to scour your body for imperfections. I've had all those conversations, with myself, with my friends. And I can tell you with full certainty that when you are 52 you will look back with affection on your 20 and 30-year old selves and you will, no matter what your relationship was or is to physical beauty, you will remember you were juicy and you will just shake your head. And maybe sigh.

Even Persephone knew the god of the underworld craved the crack of a pomegranate seed between his darkened teeth.

What Do I Read? Funny, Midlife, Moms

Continuing the hunt for blogroll optimization, here is the next section of my Reader, decipherable if you squint. I think.

Funny (I have a "Funny" category but it doesn't fit in the screen shot)
Many blogs are funny but this category is for what might be called concept blogs, i.e. I don’t care who writes them, I like the concept, and they are good for a laugh or something. I read F*** You Penguin (from my college-aged son), Indexed, and the Tiny Art Director, the hysterical sayings of a little girl to her illustrator father, which makes me laugh until milk comes out my nose.

Midlife

Midlife is a tough one for me. I am, after all, if I am lucky and live to be 104, in midlife. But I find a lot of “midlife” blogs approach life or experience life differently than I do. I don’t knit. Or crochet. I like my garden and the names of birds in them to be a little mysterious. I don’t want life coaching. I want to laugh and I want to feel compassion and I want to be surprised. Twenty Four At Heart lives in Orange County, had a bad automobile accident that has her in physical therapy for years, and is so brazen that as High WASP I couldn't use her post from today in my screen shot but will read her stuff happily... Penelope Trunk I have followed since 2000 when she wrote a column and I was in a dot.com. She is brilliant and writes about work in a way that doesn’t make me throw up. I Need A Martini Mom writes about cute things kindergarteners say, while Midlife Musings, um, muses. If you know of a midlife blog on traveling through the sub-Sahara, that might be about right. For me.

Moms

OK now wait. Some if not all of those women in Midlife are mothers. What’s with the second category? The Moms category is for women still in the eye of the maternal storm. Where what they care about most is their kids. Where they are still interested in whether kids sleep and what they eat and what to do about thumb-sucking and nursing and candy. I am past that time and to read these words makes me ache both remembering how hard it was and in sorrow that it’s over. So I read Pioneer Woman. I think of her more as Dickens than a mom. I read nienie because it reminds me that life is sweet. Maybe there are other mothers out there I should know too.

Again, any and all suggestions for widening my perspective are welcomed

I May Need Help

I went shopping yesterday. For clothing. This is an unusual happening. I haven't shopped for clothes in ages except my sortie to Target, which was really more for existential dislocation than purchase. And I haven't shopped for clothes that weren't work clothes in centuries. But I went out for drinks with some of my colleagues from my misplaced job, and I saw one of them looking at me oddly. "What," I said, "You are amazed at my wildly stylish look and the depths to which I have sunk?" "Something like that," he said.

Below is what I was wearing. Yes, really. Notice the High WASP behavior in which you just always wear the same jewelry and carry the same "good" bag.


Really, What Would Your Mother Say? - by High WASP on Polyvore.com

These are clothes that belonged to my kids and even my kids had the good sense to leave behind. Honestly, my mother would never recover if she knew I left the house like that. My mother is a good woman. She wouldn't judge me. But some part of her would wonder what she had done wrong. Or whether I had some terrible sorrow I wasn't telling her about. And, more pratically, since I cannot live forever on cute photos of my son eating baby sweet potatoes and the sight of my garden out my back window, I will need to return to work. And let's just say that if I were to meet someone as I walked around wearing those clothes, the likelihood that anyone in a position to hire me would be favorably swayed approaches zero. So. I went shopping.

Most importantly I needed shoes. But here's the problem. High WASPs don't want to wear uncomfortable shoes. Actually, they won't do it unless they are winning an award or something. There is no point in my going all Stacy and Clinton and getting myself a cute green jacket and some wacky pumps because I won't put them on. My goal here was only to find some things comfortable enough to put them on and respectable enough that I don't have to duck into a doorway should I spot someone I might know in a professional context. That's it. That's all I have to do. So I got shoes. Then I went to Banana Republic and got pants. I might also go to Levi's and get some boyfriend jeans.

But Naturalizers?


At Least When You Leave the House... - by High WASP on Polyvore.com

And then, even if the above is OK, then what on earth do I wear to replace my son's Santa Barbara Surf Shop sweatshirt? Jeans jacket? Too butch. Cardigan? Whatever it is has to be of throw in the washing machine caliber. Hoodie? People I am 52 years old, despite any delusions of indie hip I may cultivate. Lordy lordy lordy I may have to go back to the mall twice in one week. Save me.

What Might a 52-Year Old Woman Wear?

But, even though I have to die some day, I still like to spend my life on highly trivial activities. For example. Looking at celebrities in dressup clothes. When I was little, my mother would give us all her old nightgowns and bathrobes, which were really I suppose pegnoirs, and we kept them in a hamper and would pull them out and play dressup. Three little tow heads wearing pink nylon robes with fake satin and roses. That’s what ladies wore in those days.

Anyway. Celebrities. In dressup clothes. In any clothes actually. And lately I’ve begun to wonder if I would ever see anything I, as a 52 year old woman, might wear…. This? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t even know what to call the area of my body between my clavicle and my navel that isn’t occupied by anatomy that used to feed babies.

But please don’t tell me I have to do this:

The thing about being middle-aged, technically if not spiritually, is that you want to look appropriate without looking like you tried to look appropriate.

And if I wear this I have a vague fear that I might be mistaken for a sofa by someone who wanted very badly to sit down:

Not to mention that fact that I think I would also have to buy a gun and attach it to the back of my middle-aged lady Toyota Rav4. I never did get country western music. Not since Hank Williams and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Ah well. Who am I kidding? I look at celebrities not to find something to wear. I have something to wear. Several somethings. A perfectly good pair of sweatpants with bleach stains that my son left behind. Several perfectly good sweatshirts that said son deemed, for reasons unknown, too dorky. Myriads of black and gray pants and myriads of white tshirts and a small flock of cashmere sweaters to wear to jobs. When I have them. So no, I don’t look at celebrities to find something to wear. I look at them so that I can pretend for a brief glorious moment that I am this girl again:

Squint. Yeah, like that. See? I could be her. I could. I really could. Just gotta keep growing my hair. And fervently ignoring that death problem. That getting older issue.