vital statistics

Today is my birthday. I was born on January 3, 195-. (I am not embarrassed about my age, but Ben says it is not a good idea to post that type of information on the internet - as if it wasn't available anyway.) I am 5' 7" tall, unless I have begun to shrink already. I weigh, well, more than you might think I would, but twenty pounds less than I did three months ago. (And hopefully, twenty pounds more than I will in a few more months.)

My eyes are brown and my hair is, in transition, let us say. I am not sure what color it will be when it grows out, but I see a lot of gray at the temples. I have freckles on my shoulders and across my nose, and age spots blossom on my arms and legs from many years of laying in the sun.

I don't think I take an inordinate amount of medication for someone my age, but together with my vitamins and supplements and aspirin, it is definitely more than I would like to take. I collected five bottles from around the house, including Lovastatin, baby aspirin, multi-vitamins, calcium tablets and fish oil "softgels". I take them all daily, with the exception of the fish oil, which I have a hard time remembering.

Every day I walk Rufus and exercise and read and write and cook and knit. It seems like a very full schedule to me, but some time soon I will have to add finding a job to that list. Until then, I will remain as I am, unemployed, and healthy in body and spirit. Not bad for a 50-something-year-old.

you're as young as you feel

I think we all tend to grow more reflective as an impending birthday draws closer. I had an interesting conversation with Tom last night on that subject, and I hope he won't mind if I share it. (If you hate this, T, just tell me and I will delete it.)

Tom was telling me that on his birthday last year, he realized that he had become the age that Ben was when he was born. I think it freaked him out a bit, and he told me that he felt totally unprepared to become a parent even now, a year later. "I'm still a kid myself," he said, "I have so much growing up to do yet." I hastened to agree with him - heck, yes, he is still a kid. My kid. And Kristy is a kid and Julie and Andrew and all their other same-aged friends are still just kids. That is my emotional response to the thought of any of them becoming parents.

When I look at it rationally, however, they are all at least in their mid-20s heading into their late 20s now. The same ages Ben and I were when they were born. None of them are emotionally-stunted or immature, but they seem so much younger to me than we did at the same age. Why is that? I think one reason is that my generation has consciously or unconsciously (or perhaps a bit of both) tried to keep their generation feeling like children.

I don't think it was done maliciously. Like much of our generation, Ben and I always wanted to raise our children differently, better, than we were raised. Although my dad never made me feel as though he resented spending money on me, Ben had a different experience. As he was growing up, his father made it abundantly clear to him that as soon as Ben turned eighteen and became an adult in the eyes of the law, all of his father's support and obligations to him, legal and otherwise, came to an end. We never set a use-before date for the love and support we offer Tom and Julie. It is endless.

However, this loving attitude has a bonus, if you will, for my generation which I think must be acknowledged. As long as they stay children, we stay young. If we are forced to recognize this generation as adults, parents even, what does that make us? Well, grandparents, of course, and, let's face it, older rather than younger.

I have a feeling this new way of looking at things was invented by us bounteous baby boomers, but I could be wrong about that. This is certainly the first time I have ever been this age, and I suppose it's possible that each generation feels this way about the subsequent one. Some further research in this area may be required. I've been thinking about driving out to see my dad, anyway. Stay tuned for updates.

Note: I suspect this post assumes way more responsibility for the way our children think than we actually have. But, hey, it's my blog, and the opinions expressed herein are mine and this is where I express them. See?

only my hairdresser knows for sure

When I was growing up, I never liked my hair, and it seemed like my mother didn't either. Before I left for school every morning, she would brush it back and braid it so tightly that I cried as she worked. She would get angry, then, and, let's just say, my days didn't start off well. When she tired of that, she got my hair all cut off in the "pixie" style that was so popular in the late 50s. Photos show me smiling happily with my new short haircut, and I'm sure I was delighted to have my daily hair-pulling at an end.

As I got a little older, however, my mother decided to put my hair up in pincurls every Saturday night so that it would look "nice" for church on Sunday mornings. I hated that. Once again my mother pulled my hair to make the pincurls and poked my head with the hairpins as she worked. Then I had to try to sleep on the bobby pins that encircled my head. I guess my hair didn't look "nice" enough, though, because I was taken to the beauty salon for a perm. And taken back again because the first perm didn't "take" to her satisfaction.

Then there was the color of my hair - a light brown that became lighter in the summer, but was darker the rest of the year. The terms my mother used for it were less than flattering: "dirty blonde" or "dishwater blonde." So, no, I didn't like the color of it, either. I always thought my brothers had nicer hair than I did. Thomas' hair was so thick and dark and wavy, and Bill had beautiful red curls that stood up all over his head when he was little.

In the 60s, when I was in junior high, I let my hair grow out. I longed for it to be straight, like the Yardley's of London girl, but it always fell in unattractive bumps and waves. Still, I let it grow and grow, all through my high school years, and my mother threatened to cut a big chunk of my hair away as I slept so that I would have to get the rest of it cut. When I lived in the dorm, every night I pulled my hair into a loose pony tail on top of my head and rolled it on three huge rollers so that it wouldn't wrap around my neck as I slept.

The first time I colored my hair I was a sophomore in college. My friend, Gloria, and I streaked each other's hair with blonde one Saturday night in the communal bathroom of our dorm. I loved it. For the next ten years, my hair was always streaked with blonde, at first Ben doing it for me, and later I had it done professionally. Eventually, I went all blonde, and I stayed that way for many years.

A couple of years ago, I felt ready for a change. I still loved the color of Bill's hair, and believed myself to have a redhead's fair complexion. So I became a redhead myself, with fiery red hair that caught the sunlight. I have to say, I really liked it. I thought it suited me, and so did most of the people who knew me. I never thought of myself as a redhead, however, and was genuinely startled when an elderly woman at an antique show complimented me on my "beautiful" hair color.

I have always been afraid of becoming one of those women like my Aunt Joanne, who doesn't know how to age gracefully, and began to feel that it was time for me to let the gray hairs, which I knew were there, show through. My friend, Kathy, who is a month older than me, stopped coloring her hair several years ago, and she looks fantastic (and much younger) with her salt-and-pepper hair. Well, she would look fantastic no matter what, but thanks to her, I felt ready to take a peek after all these years, at what my natural hair color had become.

My hairdresser and my manicurist and all the other sweet young things - still in their twenties - at my salon dissuaded me for a while, but when I left my job, I knew I wanted a radical change. "Cut it off," I said. "And let's start getting it back to my natural color." So right now, I guess you could say my hair color is in transition. It is two shades of brown with some blonde highlights, but I am done with having it colored for now, and, hopefully, soon the brown and gray that I see in my roots will be the new color of my hair. And, you know, I think I'll like it. I think I'm ready for it.

it's a process

Julie went to a wedding last weekend. Two of her friends from high school got married. She met the bride in junior high, actually, when they were two of the least-played members of the seventh grade volleyball team. In her wedding photos, Tasha looks pretty much like she did when she was twelve - petite, with shining black hair and dimples that flash when she smiles. Her new husband, Kevin, is tall and thin and wears his military uniform. He is an army medic with two tours of duty in Iraq completed, but no guarantees that he won't have to go back again. With his close-cropped hair, he looks much younger than twenty-five. He looks like one of the little boys on the block with a summer buzz-cut.

I was drawn particularly to a photo of Julie with some of her closest high school friends, their arms draped around each other, laughing and leaning into the camera. They look exactly the same as they did in all the pictures we ever took of them in their high school marching band uniforms. Yet I know they are all in their mid-twenties now, married or engaged, for the most part, with one of them expecting her first child. This is hard for me to comprehend because on the inside, I am just about twenty-five myself. Well, a little younger, to be honest. Just turned twenty-one, let us say. Even if you're not a math whiz, you can see that just doesn't add up. So I am trying to accept that if my kids are well into their twenties, I can't be anymore. It's a difficult thing to do, though.

I remember talking to my Aunt Isabel probably ten years ago now, when she was in her late seventies, and she said to me, "You know, sometimes I look in the mirror, and I don't recognize the old lady I see looking back at me. Because in here," she tapped her chest, "I'm still about twenty years old."

So if it's sometimes hard for me to "act my age," at least I can feel that I am in good company.