By Tammy McDonnell
Dear Aging Editor:
I read your letter of Saturday, April 4, and I feel your pain. Actually, I feel my own. I turned 51 in March and suffer various minor ailments that all conspire to make me feel old as dirt. On my birthday a good friend who is a few years my junior told me I was still a spring chicken. But I feel more like a fat hen. One of the ironies of my life is that up until recently people thought I looked younger than I really was, sometimes by as much as a decade.
When I was 18, I looked a humiliating 12. But I worked it. I passed myself off as younger and got into the picture show (that”s movie theatre to whipper snappers) for a cheaper admission price. When I was 21, I looked about 17. It wasn”t until I was in my mid-20s and after the birth of three sons that I began to take on a more mature look. I was a grandmother before I turned 40 and people who saw me out and about with my little grandson mistakenly thought I was a new mom. So you can imagine my trauma at suddenly finding myself facing the inevitable.
When I tell people how old I am now, no one bats an eye. Maybe it”s because of the loose folds of flesh on my own eyelids that I know sooner or later will impair my vision. My dentist tells me that the body is supposed to age. We are supposed to sag and bag, shift, shrink, grow slack. This is strangely comforting. At least I know my body is doing what it is supposed to do. Yet, I”m the first person she asked to accompany her to take her Botox board exam. She needed to demonstrate, on a model, that she is fully capable of injecting Botox, and I was to be the model. I”m not sure what to make of that.
I watch my body change. Though never a knock out, I once had kind of a nice behind, that is growing bigger and “behinder” at an alarming rate. I”m losing in some places, gaining in others, neither of which is very attractive. In one way or another my body betrays me.
You say we are all going to eventually lose this battle. I say we ought to just disarm. I”ve found resignation and resolve to be useful tools for getting through the more wobbly, worrisome times. A little false bravado has helped sometimes too. And a youthful spirit. It”s possible, don”t you think, to have both an old soul and a youthful spirit?
I think we are the torch bearers, here to show our callow, pimply youth how this growing older thing is done. You say you are not your usual optimistic self, which I understand. Sickness isn”t fun for anyone of any age. But depression, even circumstantial depression, can cause the aging process to accelerate. So, dear aging editor, be of good cheer! We need only put on our big boy and big girl panties (that would be cotton briefs, available at K-mart 10 to a pack) and deal with it, because from this point on it”s downhill the rest of the way.
Tammy McDonnell was responding to editor/publisher Gary Dickson”s recent personal column in which he whined about the way his year had started off badly.
