Holding back the years?

It’s time to say it out loud: we’re middle-aged and proud

It was William Shakespeare who famously wrote about the seven ages of man. “All the world’s a stage,” he proclaimed, “And all the men and women merely players.” To paraphrase the Great Bard, we all start off as mewling infants, go on to become grubby schoolchildren, play lusty lovers, then become soldiers or men (and women) of business, until finally we descend into our second childhood “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.

I know, depressing stuff, isn’t it? The thought that our best years will inevitably slip away from us, that life will eventually come full circle and we will end up as the mewling, helpless, dribbling creatures that we started off as (except that now instead of being petted and cosseted by our proud parents, we will be nursed by our resentful children and grandchildren).

Honestly, it doesn’t bear thinking about. And yet, that is the manifest destiny of each one of us, however much we try to hide away from it. All of us are pre-ordained to recreate the seven stages of man (unless we are unfortunate enough to be struck down in our prime).

We will have our chance to enjoy the carefree days of our childhood, where we don’t have to worry about anything other than the annual exams and a bit of schoolyard bullying. We will all have a crack at being teenagers, being ruled by our hormones and tormented by the occasional zit that will crop up at the worst possible time. We will have our youth, when we set out to conquer the world, with that fresh optimism and energy that only the very young possess. We will go on to marry, raise families, see them grow up, rejoice in their successes even as we mourn the loss of our own youth.

Ah, there’s the rub right there, isn’t it? The loss of our youth.

The only age that we seem to treasure these days is that time when our adult life is just unfurling in front of us, alive with possibilities and the promise of a better future. When our skin glows, our figures stay in shape with everything pointing in the right direction without any real effort on our part, and we have all our teeth. When we can read newspapers and menus without having to slip on a pair of glasses. When we can party late into the night and still make it to work early next day, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. When we have the belief that we can take on the world and win.

And such is our celebration of this period of our lives that we seem to have lost the ability to appreciate the other six stages as we focus all our attention on recapturing the one in which we were at our physical and mental prime.

Think about it. We were all blissfully happy as babies; oblivious to the cares of the world as children; our every need anticipated; our every need fulfilled. Would we like to be transported back to the safe, secure world in which we believed that our parents could keep us from all harm? Of course we would.

But does that make us revert back to pigtails and bloomers and run out into the playground, to see just how high we can make that swing really go? Of course not; we know that would make us seem ridiculous.

As rational adults we recognise that clinging on to our childhood is just not a feasible enterprise. So, how long do you think it’s going to be before we realise that trying to cling on to our youth is rendering us just as ridiculous?

Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.

Wherever I look around me, in my world of 30 and 40-somethings, I see a manic desire to slow down time, to hold back the years, to somehow freeze frame so that we always appear the way we want to: with the bloom of early youth just segueing into the wisdom and serenity of early middle age.

Of course, we don’t call it that. Middle age? Perish the thought. We are in what we like to call our late youth, where 40 is the new 30 and everyone shies away from the prospect of turning 50 (or at the very least, admitting to it).  

So, instead of embracing the changes that Nature bestows upon us as we move into another stage of our lives, we try and hold back its ravages with every weapon at our command. We colour our hair; we starve ourselves back into pre-pubescent shape; we exercise maniacally so that we have the toned bodies of the very young; we slather on the anti-ageing creams, the anti-cellulite potions and the under-eye serums; we Botox away the wrinkles that might give away just how far we have journeyed through life; we inject fillers to recreate the plump faces of our youth; and we dress as hip as we can possibly can.

And yet, you know what? We don’t really look young. We just look as if we are trying very hard (and oh yes, we are).

So, it is really worth it in the end? Should we keep up the savage resistance against the worst depredations of Nature? Or is it time to say it out loud: we are middle-aged and proud?

Who are you calling aunty?

That traumatic moment when you realise you have tipped irrevocably into middle age

Last week a friend of mine called up sounding distraught. Given that she is generally a ‘glass is half-full’ sort of person, I thought that there must be a major crisis in her life. As it turns out, I was right. She was suffering from a serious case of mid-life crisis, sparked off by a visit to a five-star hotel loo.

It happened thus. She walked in and found a gaggle of excitable 20-somethings gibbering excitedly amongst themselves. They were still gathered around the sink when she emerged to wash her hands. And then, lipstick liberally re-applied, they started trooping out when one of them stopped and asked: “Whose bag is that?”

Without missing a beat, the other replied, pointing to my hapless friend, “That’s aunty’s.”

Yes, you heard right. It was that dreaded ‘a’ word. Aunty.

My friend, a well-preserved woman in her 40s, is used to seeing people do double-takes when she reveals her age and assuring her that she looks at least a decade younger. So, the ‘aunty’ bit was a fell blow that left her catatonic for the rest of the evening.

When she called me the next morning, she still sounded devastated. Did she really look so old that 20-something young women would refer to her as ‘aunty’? Did this mean that she was well and truly middle-aged now? Were the best years of her life over? Was she now on a slippery slope heading inexorably downwards?

I have to confess that I wasn’t terribly sympathetic. As someone who acquired her first niece at the age of 12 (in my defence, my sister is 15 years older than me), I have become accustomed to being called ‘masi’ or ‘bua’ over the years. So what, I asked my friend, was the big deal about being called ‘aunty’? After all, technically speaking, she could have given birth to any of those young 20-somethings. And her kid’s friends called her ‘aunty’ anyway, right?

That wasn’t the point, said my friend. “Standing there at the sink, I had this sudden epiphany. Now when people looked at me, they no longer saw as an attractive woman. They saw an ‘aunty’. They saw someone who was well past her sexy-by date. And as I stood there, I realised that soon nobody would see me at all.”

Yes, that’s a fear that all of us harbour at some level, don’t we? That as age takes its toll and nature wreaks its worst on us, we will turn into invisible women. The women whom nobody pays attention to; who are looked through at parties; ignored as they try to make purchases at a store. The women whom nobody leaps up to open the door for. The women nobody wants to chat up or flirt with. The women who are no longer seen as sexual beings.

In other words, the women who fit into the ‘aunty’ category.

And, for obvious reasons, this is especially hard for women who have been considered beautiful or sexy in their dewy youthfulness. They are used to being the centre of attention in any room they walk into. They are accustomed to being treated with deference. They are used to being objects of desire. They are conditioned to think of themselves as special. So suddenly being reduced to ‘aunty’ status comes as something of a shock.

And to an extent, it was this ‘Beautiful Woman’ syndrome that lay at the root of my friend’s trauma. It was a bit like the jolt an actress feels when she’s first told that she not being tested for the heroine’s role, but for the role of the hero’s mother.

But part of it was also down to the fact that ours is the generation of women who refuse to age. We are unwilling to let Nature take its course when it comes to our appearance. Instead, we rely on extreme medical procedures to keep looking young for as long as we can.

Ours is the generation that embraced Botox and fillers, treating them as lunch-time procedures. Ours is the generation that treats cosmetic surgery as an essential beauty aid, treating face-lifts as extreme facials. And not surprisingly, ours is a generation that looks much younger than our mothers did at our age.

We exercise and diet so that we weigh the same as we did in our 20s. We wear the same clothes as our grown-up daughters. We colour our hair every five weeks to get rid of those greying roots. We slather on the anti-ageing cream last thing at night.

We look in the mirror in the morning and we see a young person staring back at us. Yes, the jawline is a little slack, there is incipient creping of the neck, and the laugh lines run a little bit deeper. But hey, nobody would put us down for 40-something. We don’t look at day over 35!

And then, you walk into a five-star hotel loo and a 20-something calls you ‘aunty’. That’s when you know that the game is well and truly over. You have tipped irrevocably into middle age – and there is no coming back.