Post-Midlife Jukebox

Punch in your number and dance, monkey, dance!

Notice that it says “crises,” as in plural

Over a month ago, I posted an introductory message saying that I was all set to start a blog on the realities of being old and fat. Not shaming or blaming or shoulding anyone… just talking about navigating the labyrinth of experiences that involve you coming out on the other side and jumping into whatever experience comes next.

That was a month ago because I got such amazing feedback from people on the idea of this blog that I suddenly felt uncharacteristically vulnerable and exposed. Since 2000, I have lived a lot of my life online. I had a popular blog for almost twenty years where I talked about being a wife and a mom and a magical person and being poor and all the labels and adjectives that described me. I talked about everything.

When social media became a big part of human life, I jumped onto MySpace and then Live Journal and then Facebook. Despite my disdain for many aspects of it, I never moved past Facebook. As issues came up that caused me anxiety, I pared down my access and exposure and pushed on, mostly because I’m tired of jumping around. Read: lazy.

I have good experiences on Facebook for the most part, so I’m still there. Throughout that social media rollout, I remained candid and transparent in my posts. This time, however, I felt weirdly shy. The auditorium was reasonably filled, the mic was hot, and I walked up to the podium and blinked at the lights. My voice was absent.

And here we are, over a month later and with any luck, off and rolling. Good things take time, but so do bad things. Life takes time.

I started thinking about midlife crises and how so many of us have a breakdown of sorts as life shifts for us from being young to being old. For as much as it has happened in the past nearly 200,000 years (theoretically), we really are not very good at this aging stuff. It is a privilege denied to many. My father died at 51 and my mother at 60.

I am a dedicated student of the War of the Roses and Tudor times and man, those people dropped like flies. They died in battle and in childbirth and from every little disease that came along. They had many babies and maybe 1/4-1/3 survived to adulthood. Death was a prominent part of life, which was a way of living that was foreign to most of us until AIDS and COVID-19 came along.

And yet, since the dawn of homo sapien walking uprightedness, people have lived to be old. We know it happens, but no one I know truly seems prepared for it. I took several classes on gerontology when I was in college and let me tell you, that professor had a fire lit under her and that fire was called, “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH OUR PARENTS??” The premise was that we, the college students, needed to be ready with a solid plan for managing the golden years of our parents.

I was older than most of my fellow students and so I was more jaded than most people in my class. My parents had the courtesy to already be deceased when I took the classes, so my response was, “Lady, I don’t have to do shit.” I was more concerned about my old golden years at that point and I was only in my late 30s.

We wrote endless essays and posted unending scholarly discussions on those deplorable message boards (which also required 2-3 responses to other people’s diatribes). I was there to learn about what happens to our bodies, our minds, and our social lives when we age. Instead, this was a search and rescue operation.

I managed to pull an A out of the class, but that was despite the paper I wrote explaining at length why I felt it was the parents’ responsibility to plan for their own end-of-life arrangements rather than putting that burden onto the child. My paper was not well-received by anyone in the class, least of all the teacher. My lack of compassion was discussed at length. I was reminded of all of the pitfalls they felt I had clearly not considered.

Why is it the consensus that the next generation must shoulder the responsibility of what happens to the aging generation? We all know it’s coming. We understand that there will likely come a time when we cannot work and we all know that social security will not cover all the bases if it is even still around by the time we age out of the work force.

And yet, we refuse to make eye contact with this knowledge as much as a puppy refuses to look at where it peed on the carpet. We ignore what’s coming. We tell ourselves to live in the moment and that all will somehow, miraculously, be well.

Part of what is so terrifying is that Western civilization is dismissive at best and unbelievably shitty at worst to their elderly. We tend to hit a place, depending on how much our age shows in our physicality, that we become invisible. Unless we keep ourselves almost unreasonably prime through cosmetic surgery, aggressive dieting, and obsessive exercise, our value in the world plummets after age 50 or so. Why would we want to embrace that?

Good news! We’re down to one crisis now. That is a stock photo relief.

Fifty is the new twenty or thirty or forty? No it isn’t. Fifty is the new fifty. We tell ourselves that people now live longer than they used to, but is that true? No, I don’t have scholarly statistics, but from what I have read in the past, when we talk about the life expectancy is for humans, we are looking at an average, as in what is the average number of years that humans live. We know there is huge disparity in different ethnicities and economic conditions, but average life expectancy is derived from the average age that people live. Since so many people died of war and disease and childbirth/pregnancy related complications, the numbers were a bit skewed. It doesn’t mean that people couldn’t live to be as old as they do not. It’s that for every eighty-year-old, there were probably a hundred or so babies who didn’t survive infancy. If you know how averages work, then you know the point I’m making.

The average life expectancy now is approximately 80 years. That is lower due to the COVID deaths (reference those averages). This means that if I am average, I have around seventeen more years left.

Seventeen years to get it all done.

Is there any wonder that as the kids move out and on (if we’re lucky) and our bodies start to slow down and ache now and then, that we fill up with dread? We spent our whole life seeing how the elderly are treated and knowing we do not want to endure that. We look at how little time we have left. This makes us critically evaluate our current living conditions, as well as the unfulfilled goals and deferred happiness factors in our lives and so, we have a crisis or two or fifty.

In conjunction with this, I looked up what our generations are called:

This is according to Parents Magazine, which used to be an actual magazine but now I think is only an online version. I am solidly in the Baby Boomer Generation and already, “Boomers” are dismissed and out of touch, uninformed, controlling, unteachable, and the cause of all that is wrong in the world.

That was a hard one for many of us to take because we got used to being the cool kids. Surfers, hippies, the mod squad, protestors, the innovators, we broke out of tradition and paved the way for the technological and free-thinking breakthroughs that are now the foundation of our cultural being.

Our previous generation despised us for being long-haired hippy freaks and feminists and sex-crazy dope fiends and now the generation after us looks at us in a similar way for not being like them.

Then I started thinking, “Well, what is midlife anyway, the place where we have this crisis?” Like aging itself, when I Googled “midlife” I realized with a shock that it is not me. I thought of myself as middle-aged and when I read that it is ages 40-60, I realized that it made sense. I am 63 years old and that can’t really be midlife for ordinary people, can it? We don’t live to be even close to 126. I am past midlife. Now I am just old.

It is sobering to recognize that there is more road behind us than we can hope is in front of us even in the best-case scenario. Then we start having quality of life thoughts and the situation becomes even more dire to consider.

I recently had my first psychiatric evaluation for diagnosis purposes. I have six offspring, all of which pushed out of my own body. Consecutively and not concurrently. A few of them have diagnoses of ADHD, OCD, PTSD, and many of the other acronyms. Since some of those have hereditary components and I found I had symptoms much like there, I thought to get evaluated.

I saw a nice lady who looked to be in her late forties (two generations past me, according to the chart above). She is not a therapist, so she doesn’t do talk therapy. She’s only there to diagnose. After filling out loads of paperwork, mostly tests with “do you still beat your wife” types of questions that felt like there were no right answers, she was ready to have our session with the big reveal of what DSM-5 sections had my name on them.

She first said that I had “significant amounts of PTSD” and continued by assessing that at age 53, I would not live long enough to work through all of the trauma I have experienced and she encouraged me not to have those expectations.

I let her know that I am 63, not 53, and she replied, “Oh.”

Then she quickly went on to say that I have “significant levels of OCD with more O than C.” I concurred that was likely the case. The possibles were possible ADHD and possible bipolarism, but “meh,” she wasn’t sold on it so neither was I.

She said in a younger person, she would likely medicate for those situations but that at my age (the ripe old age of 53, haha), I had developed so many coping strategies and done so much shadow work that she did not see a need for it, then she capped it off by saying that when she is my age, she wants to be just like me.

??

Bless her heart. I gave her my $70 co-pay (part of not being quite 65 yet is that I have profoundly shitty medical insurance) and thanked her and moved along. She did exactly what I needed her to do and I deeply appreciate it. It’s a good story, though.

The best part of being older, other than enjoying a time of life lots of people never have, is that I am better able to “land” in my body and settle into a moment. I can look back on the past, even the regrets and the longings and the fears that were rampant back then, and feel peaceful with it.

I think about the smell of an old, empty house on a hot day. How that heat settles into the wood and releases a very specific smell. It seems like the opposite of petrichor. It is dry and earthy and ancient. It is the smell of endurance. It is a house that has been a witness to so many life events. It is history.

It is me. I’m hot, old, dried wood in a house that served for a long time. The house wants to stay but knows it can’t without some intense infrastructure repair going on. The house is tired, and yet still craves feeling honored and appreciated. The love of some Murphy’s oil soap and Windex makes it sigh with delight.

I think the weirdest thing is that we can only know what the road ahead looks like up to a point. There is a hard stop where we have no idea what, if anything, happens next. That is the elephant in every room where conversations about aging happen.

Today, the Vatican announced the new pope, Leo XIV. “The Woke Pope,” I have already heard him called. He is “only” 69. A mere baby. I wonder if I will live to ever see another pope elected. I’ll bet Leo sure hopes I don’t.