Aging Gracefully or not

My newly married daughter and expectant mother asked me if I was going to write about becoming a grandmother.  I told her no at the time, because I was trying to gear my blog toward personal development, not my life.  She teased me that I just didn't want to admit that I will be a grandmother.  Since then the focus and purpose of my blog has changed.

Here is my truth.  I am closer to 50 than I am to 40.  For all intents and purposes I am a middle aged woman.  I just don't fee like one.  If I didn't have all the responsibility, didn't have to go to a club or bar or had a husband that would go with me, I would go dancing every weekend.  I had my first mid-life crisis at 30, dreading that all the best things in my life had happened, and that my life would be all downhill from there.  I even tell people I can't be old enough to have a grandchild I have a 6 year old.


If you couldn't tell I am fighting my age with everything that I have.  Yes I can recognize all the wisdom and knowledge that my time on Earth has brought.  The problem is that we live in a society where youth and beauty are held in greater regard than wisdom and experience.  In women that holds especially true.  Male TV, Movie, and Media stars can be considered sexy and sought after well into their 50's while women are often less sought after once they reach their 30's.

The first gray hair I saw sent me into a panic mode, coloring my hair and finding ways to hide the natural aging process.  The thing is no one else was seeing the gray hair because I have a lot of natural gold highlights in my hair and from a distance just blended in.  The hair coloring wouldn't stay in the gray hairs so I moved to highlighting my hair to mask the gray more easily.  That  meant costly and time consuming upkeep.  I finally decided to accept that my hair was going to gray much sooner than I wanted it to.

The next thing I did was to stop looking back at how much I had lived and start looking forward to how much I still had left to live.  One can accomplish a lot in 20-30 years.  Look at Grandma Moses or Mother Theresa.  Look at Oprah Winfrey.  Just because we are aging doesn't mean we have to stop reaching for our goals and dreams.  In fact the older we get the more we can appreciate those accomplishments as we fight for them.  We no longer take them for granted.

So maybe I am not ready to hear the word grandma used in my presence, but at least I can find ways to leverage my age and energy into more positive thoughts and actions.  After all the reality is age is just the number of years we have been on this planet.  We can feel and act as young as we want to.  We just need to make sure that we keep good maintenance on our bodies so that we don't break down sooner than we have to.