Wow, That Was Fast
It really was what happened when I was busy making other plans
NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I am not at risk, nor am I depressed. I have not had a vision that I am dying. I am, as far as I know, hale and healthy. I love myself. I love my body. I love being alive and I’m having a great run of it. I even love aging - I am just amazed by it and by how effective it is at speeding up time, making the days, weeks, months, and years pass so quickly. I’m not ready to stop yet by a longshot. I’m having too good of a time.
It happend so fast. Eric and I were looking through photos recently to choose ones to include in the new CUSP book that will publish next month. At one point, Eric said, “Wow. We really aged a lot in the past few years.”
He nailed it.
A while back, I posted about my failing vision and told a story about getting my first pare of reading glasses. I thought I had something very wrong - tumorish stuff. My friend, Kathy, said, “You’re just old!” I think I was in my late forties when that happened.
Now, I just turned 64 and realize that was the first time someone identified me as “old,” but most assuredly, not the last time.
Things are sagging that did not sag before. Even my fat sits differently on my body in a way that no mortal body shaper can manage. I try, seriously, to wear underwire bras and end up peeling them off after an hour because of stab, stab, poke, poke, ow. Everyone told me it was because I buy cheap bras that are the wrong size, so I choked up on the bat and went to a fancy store and got professionally measured and ordered one of their insanely expensive bras and again, stab, stab, poke, poke, ow. This means that my boobs “go rest high on the mountain,” which is my belly hump.
Age spots are fairly merciless and pepper my hands and my face.
I noticed I had raised, crusty growths on my back and my brain locked up with basal cell carcinoma thoughts but, no. My medical caregiver said it was something called seborrheic keratosis, also known as (ba ba BUMMM) “barnacles of aging.”
These are, according to the Google: A round or oval-shaped waxy or rough bump, brown or black, typically on the face, chest, a shoulder or the back. A flat growth or a slightly raised bump with a scaly surface, with a characteristic “pasted on” look that varies in size, from very small to more than 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) across.
Oh, thanks. Give me more of that.
The good news is they flake off with concerted, scab-picking effort, but still.
I have arthritis in one place that I know of… the base of my left thumb. Amazing how much that sucker hurts. Aleve and topical pain gel are now a part of my nightly routine.
My knees sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies as I sit down and the small of my back hurts quite a bit if I stand for more than a couple of hours.
When I raise my arm with any kind of movement, the skin under my arm looks like pancake batter pouring onto a griddle. At some point, it eventually overcomes gravity and stops falling, then it waves back and forth like the fucking Beverly Hillbillies.
The bottom part of the top part of my leg desperately wants to lap over my knee. (!) This is fairly new.
The arm thing and the leg thing and the belly thing are new since I lost a bit of weight. I think I liked it better when I weighed more and things stayed more upright.
I cannot stay ahead of this lady mustache no matter how much I try. I am starting to look like a Super Mario Brother.
Wrinkles, ho my gawd, so many wrinkles.
I am pretty sure I have a gobbler. I love that the official name for a double chin is a “submental fullness.”
The last audiobook I listened to was an old favorite: “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” by R.A. Dick, which [sidebar] has to be the most scathing pseudonym every employed by a very early 20th century woman author. The movie with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney is mostly faithful to the book and an especially poignant moment is the end when she dies. By this time, Lucy Muir has turned into a whiney old woman and when she dies in a room with no one there except the ghost, she looks back on her body and wonders why that horribly old lady is wearing her jewelry.
I hear ya, Dick. I hear ya.
Now, when I look in a mirror, I do so with love and acceptance. I do not feel bad for how I look, but I am mystified by how quickly I got old.
I was riding with my daughter, Delena, in the car a few months ago and she braked and her arm flew out in front of me. She does not yet have children, so it is not a conditioned response. It’s a torch that passed.
Thanks to my Meniere’s Disease, my kids have gotten used to me saying, “What? WHAT?” seven hundred or so times in one visit.
Despite the rest of my body being bigger, my bladder is now apparently half the size it used to be (based on the evidence).
AARP finally gave up and went away, so I am so old I am on the other side of that.
All of that probably sounds as if I do not like being old. I do. I like everything about it except for those things. Naming them, saying them aloud, makes them a stronger part of me. They are me and not some temporary affliction I must endure.
My body has been good to me. It let me know when it was in trouble and responded well to the treatment I pursued. It cooked up six beautiful babies over twenty-one years and then told me definitively after the last one that we had to close up shop on the baby making right now. So I did.
I cannot deny that when I look in the mirror, sometimes it takes me a few seconds to realize that it is me looking back. I smile, I send her love, but admittedly, a part of me wonders who that old lady is who wears my jewelry.