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  “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.”  Anyone around here remember that advertising slogan from the 70’s?  ‘Course not, that would mean we are getting old(er).  At the time my rejoinder was, if that’s true, why do I need their product?  I was young in the 70’s and could afford to be flip.    

 The identical twin cliché of that sentiment goes like this: you may be getting older but you are getting wiser. If I combine the two, I come up with I am getting better and smarter.  I think I can buy into the smarter; I am not sure about the better.  Do bad knees, an aching back, and a cranky disposition count as better?  Oh and how about the bad teeth?  Where do they come in?  These are things my mother never taught me, but then my mother didn’t live to be old or even into solid middle age, so I have her there.  Perhaps she never experienced some of the advantages of being wiser that I now experience. Let me itemize:

1)      Grey hair. 

Since I began going grey when I was eighteen the silver strands among the gold (or in my case coppery brown) have never bothered me much.  It bothered me a lot more to continue using the aforementioned product line to try look younger than I am so I discontinued using hair coloring several years ago and found that the simplicity of not coloring my hair far outweighs dealing with dark roots every month.

2.) Bi-focals:

I have been blind as a bat since I was fourteen so corrected vision is a matter of course.

3)      The disintegration of teeth:

This has been kind of a tough one for me. Losing my first tooth made me feel well, long in tooth. But the fact is that I have had rotten teeth since I was a kid.  In fact my dentist once told me that the muscles in my jaws were too big for my teeth.  (Must be a side effect of all the talking we do in our family) and that the sheer force of my bite was highly destructive to my choppers.  I also apparently have no nerves in them as they don’t hurt me as they rot from within like an old tree stump.  Therefore I was the recipient of many large fillings when I was quite young.  Old fillings can’t be refilled when they fall out, they have to be crowned, capped, root canalled, and replaced with implants.  Or as my dentist now says, “thank you for single handedly funding my retirement.”  It always pleases me to be helpful.

4)      Random aches and pains:

These are probably not so random.  I was an equestrian during in my teens.  Part and parcel of riding horse back is that since there is another being involved, and the other being sometimes has a mind of its own, on occasion I ended up on my back in the dirt, draped across a fencepost or handy shrub.  I bounced a lot better then than I do now, but it catches up with you.

5)      Unexplained weight gain:

I went to the doctor because seemingly overnight I couldn’t button my jeans.  My doctor told me that I shouldn’t worry; I was just fat.  WHAT?? !! Apparently that is just something that begins to happen when you reach a certain age….you begin accumulating nice comfortable padding around your mid section.  Not being one to accept one medical opinion, especially if it is one with which I disagree I went to another doctor, a woman this time.  She said:  “You are consuming more calories than you are burning off.”  (I paid her $200.00 to tell me that??) But she did test me for thyroid function.  And it turns out….

6)      Thyroid hormone shut down:

Is one of the advantages of being wiser.  The good news is that there are drugs for that and upon taking those drugs I lost ten pounds.  However, the other 25 pounds that I need to lose I am at a loss to explain. (Either how they happened or how to get rid of them.)  I have been told that a diet might work, but I have discovered that dieting requires you to quit eating.  I don’t much care for that idea.

7)      Constant surprise when I see myself in photographs.  I just don’t look like me.  When I see a person in photographs that must be me, as I know the other people in the photographs and I know who I was standing next to when the picture was taken, the person looking back doesn’t appear to be familiar.  When did I get so, ahem…cough...round and short?  As I recall I used to be close to six feet tall and looked like a slightly heavier version of Cindy Crawford.  Who is that matronly woman hugging my children in that picture?

8)      A lived in face.  Actually, this is one aspect of being wiser that I don’t mind.

There is a certain je ne sais quoi about laugh lines and squint lines.  I am rather proud of the lines around my eyes and was very disappointed when I tuned in CSI this past season to see that Marg Helgenberger appears to have had a face lift.  She had such beautiful creases around her eyes.  Sigh….  Now I wouldn’t mind having a little jaw tuck if I could afford it. Gets kind of embarrassing asking my kids to hold up my jowls when taking family photos.

  Is the trade off worth it?  Is being wiser better than being younger?  I am rather greedy and am never satisfied with one or the other.  Why can’t I be wiser and younger?  When I look at my eighteen year old self, it is kind of embarrassing. (Even though I was pretty cute, I was also pretty oblivious.)  If I am so wise and knowledgeable why do men my age choose twenty and thirty somethings every time?  Don’t they look in the mirror and see that they aren’t nearly as studly as they once were?  A friend of mine had met a man her age (late 40’s) that she liked pretty well. They had many common interests and goals.  One day they were walking down the street and he pointed out a college cutie and told her, “If you looked liked that you would be perfect.”  She dumped him on the spot.  Bravo!  Those of us in our forties and fifties (and yes even older) who want some peace of mind need to come to terms with the fact that we will never be twenty again. Trying to look like we are twenty again is a frustrating and losing battle. Looking good “for your age” seems rather oxymoronic to me.

  I believe in being healthy, eating right, exercise, and maintaining an active and interesting life.  I am not at all sure about cosmetic surgery, obsessive dieting and extreme exercise to try to look younger.  I can’t compete with my younger self, sheesh, I couldn’t compete with my younger self when I was my younger self.  While I think Cher is one hell of a woman, I also think she has turned into a caricature of her younger self. Ditto Joan Rivers and any number of other actresses that if I thought hard I could come up with.  It’s not worth it girls, you don’t look young anymore, even with the nips and tucks.  Nips and tucks don’t change your age. 

  I remember once sitting with a friend of mine in a bar after work having a drink and a talk.  Enter two out of towners, salesmen I believe they were, and a good twenty years our junior.  They were looking to score and apparently the dim lighting made us appear good enough to them.  After the opening repartee (both of them thought they were highly amusing) my friend said, “You know, I have a son who is almost your age.”  One of the young men answered her, “if I were you I wouldn’t admit that.”  Her response was, “Not admitting it doesn’t change it.”  That pretty much sums it up.  That and my question which was, “What would I do with them, bronze them and use them for a doorstop?” which made the whole encounter worthwhile.  Those two guys realized that even though we were past our prime we were way out of their league. Perhaps being wiser is better than being better.