Mock of Ages

I’ve recently begun to feel very old. It’s probably been sneaking up on me for some time, but several factors have confirmed the aging process in the past few weeks.

First of all, I celebrated my 39th birthday at the beginning of the month. Something about imminently approaching a new milestone causes you to re-examine your life and begin mourning for the decade you’re about to leave behind. I loved my thirties and now I’m supposed to just move on and embrace a new era?!?

Remember Billy Crystal’s presentation about growing older to his son’s class at school in City Slickers? It’s one of the funniest monologues in movie history – he’s supposed to tell the children about his job for Career Day, but he begins reflecting on what happens in your life at each decade: “Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise a family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, ‘What happened to my twenties?’ Your forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.” Crystal continues, but let’s stop there. So I have a pot belly, another chin and peers with grandkids to look forward to? And even worse, what if I am advanced and am already there?!?

I’ve had to start coloring my hair to cover the gray, and young people in stores are calling me “Ma’am.” Our girls think my husband and I are both old – but then again, anyone more mature than Miley Cyrus is considered over the hill. I’ve often wondered what kind of mother I would have been if I had started younger with children. Would I have had more patience and energy to deal with the llama drama? You know, the additional wisdom and life experience I allegedly brought to the table just might be way overrated.

Maybe I felt extremely old at the moment when I watched my nephew open his birthday gift – a Fisher Price Noah’s Ark set – and then thought about what I received for my birthday: a colonoscopy. Where did the years go?

Now I’m only about half serious. I realize that age is just a state of mind and I have many, many more great years ahead of me with a beautiful family and an abundance of friends. However, I do agree with George Bernard Shaw’s quote: “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

Too bad we can’t swim in the fountain of youth from time to time like the elderly characters in Cocoon just to get rejuvenated and reinvigorated. My husband and I thought we were on to something at one of his parents’ pool parties with their septuagenarian friends – in fact, it LOOKED like the road show from Cocoon – but it turned out it was the beer and wine, not the swimming, that made them giggle like teenagers. Who knew?!?

Anyway, thanks for letting me share my age-old thoughts with you. I feel younger and lighter already.