Everything from birth to death is a precious facet of life! Yet, as I move into the realm of being an “older woman” I find myself battling with my internal critical voices of the ageist social norms of our culture that discount older people and find that I am discounting myself as well. It is a painful place. As I talk with other women I find that many of us are feeling the same and also very alone in our aging process, in need of companionship and support!
There seems to be a lot of talk about women “over 50” these days as if to say that every woman over fifty is going through the same thing. This is just not so!
Have you heard of the Invisible Factor? Many of us women begin to feel invisible as we get older. Lumping us all into the over fifty category is another way of making us invisible! As we all know, every decade of a woman’s life brings about distinct and nuanced changes that have a big influence on her. So, just as each decade before 50 is very different from the one before so is every one after!
The passage from the end of one decade into the early stages of the next is also very distinct and warrants attention. Since I am in one of those passages, it is the nuances of this that I want to bring out to the fore!
On my morning walks up here in the foothills of the Sierras I feel the relentless dry heat of the Northern California sun. It is parching. Yet, it does not seem too much for the blue and yellow corn flowers in the meadow nearby my house. Don’t they ever age?
It has been three months now since their first appearance. Even as the days slowly lose their light in the summer’s march towards fall, these little beings continuously surprise me with their steadfast uprightness of being and endurance of life without water. I think they should be withered and gone by now, but they seem undaunted in their pursuit of life’s vitality.
Seeing them day in and out I ponder my own capacity to live through challenging changes while staying committed to my own vitality. I’ve been a bit like these flowers. Steadfastly holding my own through the years. I have been the model of the saying “50 is the new 30”, staying youthful and vital even through menopause, hearing the voices of people saying “You just don’t age!” and denying with all my might the experience of aging as if it were some insane idea that I want nothing of.
But, not this year. My skin feels parched in a way that I have not ever felt. I can’t drink enough water and I feel weary of myself.
Something happened for me over the last three years. A subtle creeping vine of change that is almost too elusive for words. A felt sense of my own steeped maturity and, I would even say (in a whisper) my aging.
A few years ago if I were to look at my lined face in the mirror I would be aghast and pretend that the lines would go away as the day progressed like the puffiness under my eyes from a big night out when I was younger. Now I no longer bother to pretend because I can actually feel the skin on my face from the inside out, the sagginess of my cheeks, the wrinkly feeling and the tiredness in my face in general.
And, when I do a forward bend in my yoga practice and see the lose skin on my thighs hanging over my knees I sigh in surrender, as it has been years now and all the wishing it away as if it were just a temporary symptom of something, has not worked.
These are just the physical symptoms. On the inside, I feel a kind of sagginess, a tiredness of being. Weary of my own life patterns taking me down the same roads towards lessons that I have not learned yet, as if to be getting left back a grade in school and finding myself disheartened at the prospect of facing yet another round of the same thing.
My sagging skin mirrors the weariness of my heart in the face of my life’s losses and disappointing repeats. It is all here to stay with me, just like the footprint of my personality, my emotional wounds and the repeating voices of the gremlins of my mind.
I am really aging and two years into my 60’s I’m asking questions that I never thought I would be asking at this age. Who am I now? Will I ever change or is this it? Will anyone every love me again? How will I go on when it seems that nothing’s new and I have lost the enthusiasm that I used to count on? How will I survive when everyone is saying that I am too old for this or that? How can I really accept what is happening to my body with grace and dignity?
I have been 60 for three years now. My first year of being sixty was when I was 59. I was thrilled with the idea of being 60, so much so that I told people that I was sixty when they asked how old I was, even though I was not. I thought there was so much status in it. I would finally be grown up and have some authority!
The second year I was sixty, when I was really sixty, I started saying that I was 61, forgetting that I had skipped a year in my hurry to grow up. Then, I scared myself, as I realized that it was really true that I was sixty and I might be marching all too quickly towards my mortality without full awareness. So I slowed down and settled in to just being 60, unconsciously hoping that it would last forever, because I felt so youthful!
Now two thirds of the way into being 61, I find myself saying that I am sixty, because I don’t want to be sixty two, a birthday that is approaching with the unexpected feeling of being too soon and an awareness of thinking that “I‘m not ready for this yet!” Now I want to slow things way down and turn back the clock! Funny how fickle one can be when faced with the dreaded reality of “aging”!
So that’s how I’ve managed to be sixty for three years! Unfortunately this little game of playing with time no longer works!
What it’s time for, is for me to embrace my aging process with a new awareness and acceptance that is grounded in the here and now of it. I don’t mean to accept the collective thinking that I am old. I mean to face what is happening moment to moment with love and tenderness, to accept this stage of life that I am in whole heartedly. To let go of what I am holding on to of my past identify and step into who I am now because to not is to deny my very existence and that is painfully disrespectful of this wonderful existence that I have actually been given.
Of course, from a spiritual perspective, all on this planet is transient, we are eternal beings and letting go is essential. So what’s the fuss? Well, our humanness is also made up of our physicality, our psychology and our tender emotional energetics. All are part of the richness and mystery of us and important to embrace and tend to.
The passage from the late fifties into the sixties is a unique one indeed. Whatever extreme changes that shocked us in our fifties, are now very real parts of who we are and here to stay.
We are in-betweeners. Too old to be young. too young to be old! Yet, we are more obviously entering into the zone where our mortality faces our life in such a way as if to say “Who are you life, now that I, death am coming closer?”
Before this time there was more life to be lived in the future than what we had already lived. Now there is just that much more of life behind us than there is in front of us. This small detail changes everything.
Single at 60 is an interesting affair, especially after thirty years of marriage, or perhaps never having had a fulfilling relationship. Sex, at sixty, without hormones driving us is another mystery altogether and having to recreate a Career can seem insurmountable!
There are also things like joints wearing out, organs not functioning or just not having the energy for partying into the night anymore. And I thought that adolescence was tough! Ha!
I find myself needing more support than I have in the past about my age and who I am in it. I am wanting more close associations with other women who are going through the same things or who have wisdom to share from having gone through it.
I feel the need to talk about all of this stuff in a real and intimate way. To come out of the closet and talk about what it is really like, because I notice that it seems hard to talk about what is happening in the face of the fears that our culture has about aging, which are also my fears! As if not talking about it will forestall the inevitable. However, when I do initiate a conversation about the nitti gritty of turning 60 for us women, the energy perks up and there is a great feeling of relief and satisfaction all around!
One of the most challenging pieces for me these days is the shift in my sexuality and my desire to be in a relationship. My whole life has been oriented around relationship and my active sexuality. When I realize that I started at ten to be interested in boys I see that it has been over 50 years! It is hard to grasp that this is not so now and not particularly easy to give up! It’s kind of like standing at the edge of a cliff with the bad guys not far behind and trusting that you can get out of it! Who am I without my sexual energy being on! Yikes!
I have a hunch that many of you can relate to this one. I would love to know what challenges YOU are facing in this time and perhaps what is the most challenging for you!
I invite you to visit me on my Facebook page and write a post about your aging process. If you are in an especially vulnerable place and need personal support you can book a complementary empathy coaching session with me as well!