Why Not a Memoir?

It all started when I was examining my skin in the mirror one night, as women of a certain age are wont to do, and I noticed the crepe-paper-like texture of my neck.

By dint of DNA (thank you, Nannie), I tend to look younger than I am. I do not mean to brag, but it is true that people generally peg me anywhere from five to ten years younger than my actual age.

I don’t really dwell on it because, to me, most working adults, at a glance, could be anywhere from 30 to 55. It’s only when you talk to them and learn their cultural touchstones that you figure out where they stand in the generational landscape. Do they make references to Van Halen and Diff’rent Strokes?  Or is it Nirvana and My So Called Life?  Or, God help us, The Backstreet Boys and Felicity?  What you talkin’ about, Willis?

Anyway, so everyone “of a certain age” pretty much looks the same to me . . . except, I have recently discovered to my chagrin, the necks. 

Necks don’t lie. With all the bending and stretching, especially in our smartphone age in which we are all looking down all the time, they cannot lie. They tell people you’ve been looking down and around for a long time.

And mine is a brutally honest neck. My neck, an over-50-year-old neck, tells you it has very much been looking down and around for more than a half-century, thank you very much.

So when I was examining my neck the other night before bed, contemplating buying neck cream (which I did do, but have not yet opened because I have a generally slovenly skin care regime — more on that later, in a to-be-written essay) . . . . When I was looking at my crepey neck, I remembered a book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

I remember when it came out in 2006 and, I confess, I didn’t really get it.  The When-Harry- Met-Sally-Silkwood-Sleepless-in-Seattle lady wrote a book about her neck. Weird. I didn’t read it. 

I didn’t read it because my neck and I were only 35 years old at the time and, while not quite swan-like, my neck certainly was no turkey-waddle either. It was an early-middle-aged neck, and it and I were unconcerned with fine wrinkles and horizontal creases at that moment in our history. 

Flash forward 17 years and here we were, contemplating neck cream. I finally understood the title of that book. 

So I bought it on Audible. And I started listening. Not only did I relate to Nora Ephron’s essay about her feeling bad about her neck. I related to a great many of her essays on what it’s like to be an aging woman.

I related so much to her essays that I started telling my slightly more middle-aged husband about Nora Ephron’s essays and how funny and relatable they are. I even related to the essay in which she talks about not being able to read maps and phone books anymore — even though we do not have maps and phone books anymore —  because I related to needing readers. (And . . . the essay made me nostalgic for maps and phone books. Remember Mapsco?)

So anyway, one hot Texas summer afternoon, after I’d shared with my husband Nora’s love for John LeCarre (whom we both also love), he sent me a text, a writing prompt of sorts. It went like this:

Meredyth writes the next Ephron memoir: 

"After 15 years of marriage, there seems no point to renewing any vows. Marriage vows have always seemed to me unnecessarily prolix and frankly unnecessarily vague. The terms of our marriage, I tell my husband, reduce to one fundamental rule: Our lives must never be so penurious that we’re forced to buy store-brand salad dressing. We must be sufficiently comfortable that I can guiltlessly buy Newman’s Own."

I sent this true gem to my two best work friends with this comment:

I feel like, perhaps, no actual memoir is needed, for he has perfectly summarized my views on our future retirement. I do not ask for much. Only that we are wealthy enough to afford non-store brand salad dressing in our dotage.

Then I added, “Perhaps, though, a memoir would be appropriate, after all, to explain how I arrived at this modest life goal. Hmmm.”

And then I dismissed that idea as nonsense. Who would read my essays?  I did not marry Carl Bernstein, nor have I written many famous movies and books. I mean, I would like to do that. I would love to write novels. I would love to write engaging novels that people can’t put down. And I’ve tried. I get writers block. But I find my own stories trite, tired, derivative. I bore myself. The characters are wooden. I grow to hate them and do not want to spend any more time with them, let alone create them and their stupid lives. You get the idea:  While I may have that one great novel in me, as the old saw goes, I am not sure that I have the capacity to get it out of me. 

And yet, I write essays. I write them nearly effortlessly. The words just come. I’m just talking to you, see?, telling you my opinions, my prejudices, my observations and frustrations. I’ve been doing it for years in a blog only a handful of people read. But the handful seem to enjoy my essays. So why not a memoir in essay form?  Maybe more than a handful would read it. Maybe?  Worth a shot?

Hmmm. 

Tolerance

I wanted to write a blog post today because, well, I wanted to.

A friend recently gave me the idea to write about all the wonderful benefits of age – specifically, the fact that age gives you the extremely blissful ability and desire to say of most thing, “aw, blow it off and get you a beer, who cares?”  Trivial stuff actually DOES seem trivial at this age.  And that’s a great topic, but then . . . .

The Federal District Court in San Antonio published its opinion/order in Deleon v. Perry, in which it finds Texas’s gay marriage ban unconstitutional on the basis that (broad over simplification of the opinion to follow) it violates the 14^th Amendment’s protections of due process and equal protection under the law.  So I thought I’d write about that.

But then I read this article about over-achieving mom/parent culture at school (and how we parents – and the schools too -- should all just simmer down a little bit), which, paired with all of the crazy things I’ve seen on Pinterest, lead me to concur that we’ve all gone just a little bit overboard on, e.g., our kids’ Valentines cards and gifts.

AND THEN, I read a story about a new study – a single study – that found that, basically, if you didn’t breastfeed your baby, no harm/no foul.  Your kid is not permanently damaged because you didn’t give him/her sufficient boob juice with all kinds of magical and beneficial hoosiewhatsits in it.  And for those of us who had a hard time producing enough milk to fill even one bottle, this was welcome news.  (It was also welcome news to those of us who have been milk-shamed for not breastfeeding or not “trying hard enough” to breastfeed.)

Then I realized something:  all of these things have something in common.

Tolerance.

I think that tolerance has gotten a bad rap in recent years.  Some people hear the word, “tolerance,” and they think that you mean “approval.”  And that’s not what tolerance is at all.  Tolerance is the ability to accept that something you dislike exists.  Think of tolerance, in fact, as endurance.  Something may be painful to you, or distasteful to you, but you nevertheless endure it with grace and aplomb.  I have tolerated many a continuing legal education lecture through the years....

You don’t have to like it.  You don’t even have to endorse it.  But humility, patience, and generosity of spirit can allow you to live in peace knowing that something you think is wrong exists in the world.

That’s tolerance.

There are a lot of people who don’t want to tolerate gay marriage.  They find it morally offensive.  I get that.  I tolerate that.  I can even sympathize with those feelings and thoughts.  Because there are a lot of legal things that I find immoral and/or distasteful, but I tolerate them because I live in this civil society that permits them.  (Example:  the death penalty.)  And it seems clearer and clearer that the law of equal protection and due process will extend to the marriages of same sex couples throughout this land, and sooner rather than later.  Not everyone has to like it.  But trying to find a way to tolerate it while remaining true to oneself is a virtue for which we can all strive.

As for the breastfeeding and the over-achieving parent behavior, well, let’s try to give each other a break, shall we?  Not everyone is going to make the same choices as you do, and that’s okay.  In fact, we make the choices that are best for us.  For some of us, that’s breastfeeding and making elaborate Valentine cards for our kids (sometimes simultaneously!).  For others of us, it’s Enfamil and dollar store Valentine cards with Dum Dums suckers taped to the front of them.  Whatever it is we choose, that’s okay.  No child will be damaged by a non-homemade Valentine card, nor will any child be damaged by elaborate homemade ones.  The worst thing that could happen is that the other grown-ups will talk behind their hands in judgment of your slackerdom or over-achiever syndrome.  (Something I’m guilty of myself, I confess.)  Rather than do either, we should gracefully nod, and tolerate the different choices of our neighbors.  “Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.”  Proverbs 16:24.  (I love Proverbs.)  It’s good to remember that, when thinking of our neighbors.

All this being said, we should not tolerate everything.  Some things are worth the fight.  (For me, women’s rights, human dignity.)  And, I suppose, that we must choose what battles we will fight and what things we can tolerate notwithstanding our disapproval.  What is worth it to us?  And are there things for which we can turn the other cheek, or drop our untossed stones, understanding that we are also not perfect?

Which of course brings me to the first topic I considered writing about today:  the relaxation of care that comes with age.  In my forties, it’s true that I just do not have the fire in my belly to become indignant or fight back about every slight.  In my forties, I’m becoming more “live and let live” and less “you’re doing it wrong.”  It doesn't mean I don't have passion or that I'm world weary.  But my two-score-plus years have given me a lot of patience, gratitude and perspective.  So here in my forties, I tolerate a lot . . . mostly gladly.

We’d all be a lot happier, I think, if, rather than seethe and gnash our teeth, we would just blow it off and get us a beer when something irks us.  (Or a red wine.  Boxed, even.  I’m not picky, I’ll tolerate whatever you’ve got.  Cheers, friends.)

Relic

There was a time when I was cutting edge. I knew every new band. I knew every obscurity too. 

And I remember thinking more than once during that period that I would never take my finger off the trendsetters' pulse.

But sometime between 30 and 40, I became a relic. I retreated into my familiar musical cocoon and wrapped myself in Gershwin, REM, Elvis Costello, club music of the late 80s and early 90s, Bryan Ferry, The Smiths, Queen, 10,000 Maniacs, Clint Black, The Eagles, The Cure, Johnny Cash, Pearl Jam, and Beethoven.

I mean, that's all still cool, right?  But it's just not new-and-cool. 

Without even perceiving the shift, it seems that one day I suddenly didn't care what the latest hit was.  I wanted what was comfortable and familiar.

Perhaps it's because I didn't need the music to illustrate my present sense condition like when I was younger.  When I was younger, songs would work through me helping me process emotions, situations, frustrations, love. 

But now and for the past decade or so, the music, instead, has been there to conjure up ghosts.  It reminds me of many happy times. And oddly, even though songs in their moment helped me through sadness and heartbreak, none of them draw forth the melancholy today. (Or maybe I just don't listen to the sad songs anymore....)

So today, when I listen to Left of Center by Suzanne Vega, I don't feel like she's talking about my life anymore. I just remember that when I listened to that song, memorized it, and made it my own, I was the girl who wanted to be Molly Ringwold in Pretty in Pink, and I did my small town East Texas best to dress the part. And that memory makes me smile.

Reminiscing is okay, right? And allowing yourself to mellow?  And my 20-year-old (or more) music is still awesome music. So maybe even if I'm not out on the edge (or even in the popular crowd) anymore, my music's still cool and still talking to me in ways nothing else can. It helps me remember.  And that's still cool, right?

Sixteenth Birthday, I think.....

Oh yeah, it's another post about my weight.

If you read me with any regularity, I'm sure you are tiring of this:

I'm still about 20 pounds overweight.

But here's the good news:  I recently had all my lady parts and other parts checked out and, apart from the weight (which no doctor even batted an eye at), everything checks out great.  Blood pressure:  great!  Total cholesterol:  great!  LDL:  great!  HDL:  great!  Triglycerides:  Great!  LDL/HDL ratio:  great!  Mammo:  great!  Even my skin, at forty-two-years-three-hundred-sixty-three days old is remarkably unlined.

I'm just kinda chubby.  Kinda jiggly in places.  Kinda two jeans sizes larger than what I'd want to be.  (Okay, three.)  Kinda biggish-boobed.  Kinda biggish.

But, I'm healthy, quite healthy.  And that is a blessing.  I am thankful.  I know that there are lots of people my age on medications to have blood pressure like mine or cholesterol like mine.  And I'm chugging away just fine on my own, even if I'm a bit overweight.

So I'm thankful.

But I'd still like to weigh less and be smaller and look better naked and not be embarrassed to wear shorts because of my thunder thighs.

I'm exercising and I'm eating mostly right.  Maybe I could skip the chocolate cake I had last night with my son or the nearly nightly glass of wine.  Or bread.  Or chocolate.  Or cheese.

But that's no fun.

And I don't deal with deprivation well.

So I've just decided not to worry too much about the number right now, and just be thankful for being healthy.  And keep doing what I'm doing.

It doesn't mean that I don't still want to lose the weight.  And it doesn't even mean that I won't try, but I'm just not going to worry about it anymore like I have done.  I'm just going to enjoy being healthy and understand that I'm blessed to have my health.  And I'm going to keep having fun, which includes occasional indulgences in chocolate icing with the little person.

Now, though, it's time for red wine and chocolate.  The Working Mom worked it pretty hard today doing a deposition and she's going to unwind.  And not feel guilty about it.  Night-night.

My skin is loose.

My skin is looser than it used to be. It slides under my palm when I rest my cheek on my hand. My son pulls the skin on the back of my hand up to make a high point and then releases it to watch it slowly ooze back down to cover my bones.

This loose skin will soon lead to wrinkles and sagging. It already has begun to do so.

And I'm really okay with that. I mean, I'm okay with it partly because I am, by luck of the genetic draw, blessed with a relatively youthful appearance.

Still, I have learned that you have to approach make-up and skin care differently at middle age.

You've got these wrinkled that you'd like to minimize, which would have been make up's job in the past. But too much make up only accentuates the problem because it settles into the lines. Ditto that for some lipsticks on some mouths.

So what do you do? There's always expression-stealing Botox, but I would never do that. I'm not a cosmetic surgery/procedure kind of gal. I won't even sign up for the laser treatments that my dermatologist recommended for the slight discoloration at my hairline, a lasting reminder of how many hormones I had to shoot up to get The Boy. (A dab of concealer does just fine.)

So, I don't know what you do, but for me, I've gone minimalist: a good all purpose moisturizer twice a day, sunscreen in the summer, only-just-enough make up, and the realization that no matter what I do, my skin will get looser the longer I wear it. I hope I live so long as to crease the hell out of it.

The Middle Ages

I picked up my new progressive lens bifocals on Sunday.

I sprained my hiney back in August . . . .

Oh, and I'm 42.

Yes, friends, even though I am the mother of a toddler, I am middle aged.

Despite what you've been told, 40 isn't the new 30. It's still 40, and you're still just as old as your parents were when they were 40 . . .

. . . which means that your parents were a lot more fun and interesting than you thought they were . . . and a lot less old that you thought too.

But being fun and not being past-it doesn't reset the aging process. Julianne Moore, who according to imdb.com is 52 years old, recently took more than casual, comical offense at being called middle aged. Does she anticipate living to 150?

Hollywood wants us to believe that wrinkles, stretch marks and bulges are evil. Hollywood also wants us to buy into the notion that adolescence can extend even to your late 30s. (Or is that just Judd Apatow who wants that?) My husband rightly points out that this is why people like Juilanne Moore blanch at being called middle aged. Middle aged women don't get good parts. In an industry that prizes youth, being middle aged is a career killer.

In the TV show, Slings & Arrows, one of the female characters -- a professional stage actress, a middle aged one -- tells a young actress that, in Shakespearean theater, the actress's progression is thus:

"This is the life of an actress. You play the ingenues, you play the queens, you play the dreaded Nurse [in Romeo and Juliet], then you retire . . . . Then you sit there in the dining room eating rice pudding and hearing endless tales of life on the wicked stage. And you realized that you never really lived at all, you just pretended. Is that what you really want?"

If that is the life of an actress, I'm glad to be a lawyer. Fame and adoration in the now cannot be worth such emptiness and regret in the end. Even if it's an exaggeration of the truth, there is no avoiding the truism that our pop culture values youth more highly than it ought to.

Still, when I was having so much trouble getting pregnant at ages 37 through 39, I resented the hell out of the 40-something actresses having babies and pretending that the offspring were genetically their own. My doctors all insisted that the vast majority of these women (especially those over 45) used donor eggs. I didn't resent that they did it. I resented the message they were sending to the non-rich and famous by not acknowledging that they did it. Their (what I perceived to be) casual use of other women's DNA to continue the illusion of youthful fecundity really pissed me off. And I feel like it misleads the populous into believing that it is easy to get pregnant in middle age. So easy, in fact, that middle age isn't middle age anymore.

But despite how much fun we're having, how great we look, how much energy we have, and how happy we are, I think a healthy dose of realism is necessary. It's part of that wisdom that comes with age.

We are mortal. The flesh fails us. This mortality weighs heavily on The Working Dad and me, having a child who is not yet two. We delight in him, but we are conscious that when he is our age, we will be elderly, indeed (we hope, and not the alternative). Being conscious that life is short and time is fleeting makes parenting a joy and makes family, not work, the central figure in our lives. It is the ability to see the end, from this vantage point in the middle, that makes the present so sweet.  I'm not sure I would have had this kind of appreciation for my very brief time with my son as a boy if I were not middled aged.  We have him for 18 years.  I had done 18 years twice and then some before he was ever born.  It brings a perspective that a first time mom at 24 just cannot have.

So, in the middle, here, our limbs aren't as strong, our eye-sight not as keen, our internal parts -- ovaries, hearts, knee and hip joints, stomachs -- all are starting to show the signs of decades of useful employment. You know what else shows those signs? Our smiles. Our slightly crinkled eyes. Our knowing glances. Our, cliche or not, wonderfully bewizened brains.

The character Sally on Coupling may think that "age bring you more to shave" (and she may be a little right about that), but age also bring patience, peace and experience. We have seen the world. We have lived in it. And we know how to work it, now. These are good things!

And, being middle aged, not only do we know how life works, but we have (actuarially, at least) a whole other half of our lives to live well and wisely.  Any regrets we have, we still have time to mend them. Any places we've not visited, we still have time to travel. Any adventure unpursued can still be embarked upon.

And beyond all that existential stuff, I'm just better at stuff in my middle age than in times past. For instance, I'm a way better cook at 42 than in my youth . . . way better. And I like being good at stuff.

There's a long road ahead after 40. It's not as long as the one we stood on when we were 20.  But now we see well enough -- with our progressive lenses -- to see the potholes and caution signs we were blind to in our youths.

We are not old. We are the middle. And the middle can be a hell of a lot of fun.

Middle Aged Woman Wearing New No-Line Bifocal Glasses

(Doesn't she rock out loud?)