#getting older

This is my mother dabbing.

If you want to mortify my daughter (always very tempting), dab.

This mortifies her even if I do it in the privacy of our own home when there’s no-one to see. If I really want to mortify her, I do it when one of her friends will see me doing it. Double mortification is when her dad joins in.

‘You and your mates dab,’ I say.

‘Yes but we’re doing it ironically,’ she says, as if I do it with the seriousness required of a U.N. security meeting.

Dabbing, in case you didn’t know (and are getting worried) is what is being demonstrated by my mother in the photograph below and I’d explain its origins except that the wikipedia article is a bit too long to summarise. It started in 2015 as a youth thing. Nowadays, according to my nearly-seventeen-year-old daughter, you only do it if you’re a kid (e.g. from her perspective, anyone under fourteen) or being ironic. You do not do it if you’re a parent.

I read a blog post about the meaning of ‘old’ (link below). When does one become old? Is it an age or an attitude? Part of the author’s aim was to raise awareness of fiction aimed at or written by people over forty and whose characters are older than, say thirty-five and who yet have adventures, fall in love, exist in the real world without needing slippers and a cup of tea.

There is a prevalent attitude in western society that youth is king and that getting older means no longer being switched on to the modern world or able to keep up. It’s total nonsense.

I am sure, if you’re beyond forty-nine and watch ‘The Apprentice’, you shout at the television when the candidates are asked to market things at the over fifties and start assuming a complete IT incompetence and general out-of-touchedness, despite the fact that the IT revolution was started by people now in their seventies or eighties. I’m in my fifties and surprise, not only do I know how to use a mobile phone and various computer programmes but am working in a digital modernisation project. At this precise moment, my husband is helping my mother with her laptop (see – she’s eighty and has a laptop). In reciprocation, if I need help with photoshop, I ask Mum, because she’s an expert. It’s all relative.

The generation gap is quite different now to what it once was. When I was a teenager my parents watched ‘Top of the Pops’ in despair, complaining about hair length, make-up, high pitched screeching (and that was just the boy singers). Nowadays my children and I enjoy the same music without anyone (generally) criticising the other’s taste. I don’t care about anyone’s hair length or who’s wearing make-up or what anyone’s gender identity is. I envy the clothes my daughter wears but won’t copy her. I don’t want to look mutton dressed as lamb and anyway, ripped jeans would give me cold legs. But we do share sweaters and coats sometimes (although they’re just a tiny bit looser on her). Any suggestion that ripped jeans and perfect, identical eyebrows will one day be looked back on with derision is met with the confident assertion that this year’s fashion is different and classic and eternal. I have learnt to keep silent, having grown up through the 70s and 80s with the terrible photos to prove it.

Sometimes I feel younger now than I did when I was in my twenties. I was out with colleagues last week, all but two of whom were over forty. We felt that we are lighter hearted now. We may be more … cynical… realistic… (call it what you will) than the two twenty somethings who possibly wondered why they’d come out with a bunch of giggling middle-aged people, but we know we’re more inclined to laugh at ourselves, not to mention forgive ourselves than we once were. We know that life won’t be roses all the way, we’ve seen enough change to know that there is nothing new under the sun whether it’s an appraisal system or a theory or a plan or a political crisis.

I know I am very fortunate to have been born at a time and in a place where I have had access to free healthcare since birth, in a place where efforts to reduce pollution and limit artificial additives in foods have meant that my environment is better than many. I had parents who were able to physically, mentally and emotionally nurture me. All of those things mean that my life expectancy is better than huge numbers of people round the world, particularly other women. Believe me I don’t take that for granted.

Anyway, the point is that while my body is starting to send out little signals that I’m getting older, inside, I’m still a girl, just a grown-up girl who knows that I can make a fool of myself without the world ending. All being well, one day my daughter will jump over the invisible generation gap and take a simple delight in embarrassing the generation below hers and maybe we’ll high five or whatever the equivalent will be then.

Right now, I’ll keep looking for characters of my age in books and writing them too. The book I’m working on now is set in AD190 and has two women who have somehow, against the odds lived to their early sixties. One is deliciously nasty and the other delightfully wise. I have a teenage girl character too, who naturally thinks these ‘old ladies’ know absolutely nothing about anything. I think I need to make one of them mortify her.

Back in the 21st Century, I am sure you can imagine my daughter’s horror at being asked to show her grandmother to dab so that I could take a photograph and put it on my website.

All I can say is mwah-ha-ha.

When is old not so old

Books for older readers

I sometimes think vampires have it easy.

OK, so everyone fears and loathes them. But they always look good and never have to look in a mirror. In fact they can’t. Lucky vampires.

I tend not to look in mirrors after I’ve done my hair and make-up and checked the lumpiness factor of whatever I’m wearing (or should I say, whether my clothes disguise the lumpiness factor). After that, I do my best to avoid mirrors entirely until bed-time. That way I can preserve a mental image of myself looking neat and in control.

Of course, it can and does backfire. One year, at end of year review time, I took a train to meet my line manager. End of year reviews involve extolling one’s own virtues, justifying and analysing one’s actions etc. For an introvert, this is a fairly agonising process, but has to be done. After several years of it, I’ve got used to the drill. For a while I sat on the train reading what I’d prepared and then worked, editing some paperwork with a red pen. A young couple got on board and started looking round for seats. The train was busy and they were going to be separated. So I picked up my things and offered to move so they could sit together. Naturally, this altruistic move was accompanied by everything slipping. Rather than arising in one swift, sophisticated move, I got up in a tangle of bags, papers, coats and self. Without saying thank-you the young couple got down to canoodling while I concentrated on organising myself for the review.

At the office, I went to the loo and washed my hands etc in order to give my inner actress time to emerge for her annual performance. I purposely ignored the mirror because I didn’t want my confidence to be diminished by discovering that my hair was a mess, that I’d rubbed off half my eye make-up and that I looked podgy and vague. Imagining myself immaculate and confident, I then walked in to the room where my line manager was, primed to blow my own trumpet for ten minutes or so. ‘I have done a difficult job for several months and am finally moving forward. I am an efficient and conscientious employee. I am…’

‘Why have you drawn all over your face?’ said my line manager.

Turned out that while moving seats in the train, my red editing pen was pointing the wrong way and I had scribble all over my right cheek.

After that did I start looking in mirrors more often? No.

Is this because I’m convinced that I always look immaculate, confident and sophisticated? No.

I know what I look like really.

Do I wish I looked different? Well of course I do. I wish I looked younger, prettier, slimmer, less grey, taller. I see photographs of myself and sigh. I stand next to my lovely daughter in her trendy clothes and mourn for my long lost youthful figure.

But then I think to myself… even when I was young and slim and not grey, I still wished I looked different. The long long lost youthful figure was generally cluttered up with frumpy clothes (partly because of prevailing fashion and partly because of lack of confidence). My hair was tortured with perms (again partly because of prevailing fashion but also because I thought it was too straight). I worried about make-up. I despaired. I looked too young and too short. Bits of my figure were out of proportion. No-one noticed the tiny waist because of the full bust. No-one would ever find me attractive. I would never be successful because I didn’t look right.

Have you seen the meme that says ‘I wish I was as fat as I was when I thought I was fat’? That’s me.

But now…when I do look in the mirror and see fine lines etc I make myself remember that I loved my grandmothers’ soft faces. When I look at my hands, I see all the words they’ve written, the stitches they’ve sewn, the meals they’ve cooked. I look at my rounded stomach which (short of major surgery) will never be what it was and remember the children it carried under my heart.

And this is the thing. Most of us look in mirrors and despair because we are always looking for something that’s not there and was never there. We are looking for the perfect person we think we ought to be. Virtually none of us put as high an expectation on anyone else.

Last weekend I was bride’s helper at a wonderful wedding in the Highlands of Scotland. I have known the bride since university. The other bride’s helpers were her sister, her oldest childhood friend and a mutual university friend. I hadn’t seen the sister or the childhood friend for well over twenty years. They looked almost exactly as I remembered them. Not because they still looked twenty-ish but because they looked themselves. I wasn’t searching for the signs of age, I was scanning their faces for someone I’d once known. Talking to them, I found that like me, they were the same and yet different. We are grown up.

So I’m not going to start looking in mirrors more. I know that sometimes I’ll look tired or sad or bad-tempered but I can rise above it; sometimes (more often than not probably) my hair and make-up won’t be quite right but who will remember except me?

I’m an older woman who’s had two children. I will never look nineteen again. Why do I want to look nineteen? I don’t want to be nineteen.

I am happy to risk pen on my face if I can mostly maintain a mental image of myself as ‘looking OK’.

And as for vampires, well perhaps they’re missing out. Or maybe not. I’m still a little jealous.

looking good

	Voinks on Writing In The Wild
	lizmilnewriting on Writing In The Wild
	Paula Harmon on Writing In The Wild
	Voinks on Writing In The Wild
	Paula Harmon on Tales of a Country(ish) Mouse

Paula Harmon

Writer

Just a Number

Looking Good?