Ah, que la vie est quotidienne.  _{Jules Laforgue}

I’ve been spending a great deal of time in the last few months contemplating the passage between the last bloom of adulthood and post-middle-age. I am turning fifty soon, and although the actual number doesn’t trouble me, the other trappings of aging have me in an irritating dialogue with myself; the conversation bounces from boredom to denial to annoyance to rage then despair.

When I was young, I took youth for granted, as I suspect most of us do. I thought I would always be young, always be beautiful, always be healthy. I never feared being alone, as I never saw a future where attractive single men weren’t right around the next corner. As a teenager, I listened to my middle-aged parents talk about their aching backs and their diminishing memories and I reacted with teenaged distain— I sighed the universal adolescent sigh and thought, “obviously they are exaggerating to gain attention.” As if.

I didn’t have a happy childhood—I never once regretted leaving it behind. I never adjusted well to accepting things that were out of my control. Once a teenager and beyond, I felt in control and that the world was open for my investigation. I went to college and graduate school. I landed a great job. I moved whenever I had experienced enough of one place or one job. I traveled and studied, and had adventures from the Mexican rainforest to the Pyrenees Mountains. As I grew older I proudly announced each birthday with the proclamation “I have earned every last year.”

But in my forties, I learned what I expect most people learn when they raise children. That daily life cannot always be a grand adventure. That once we are adults, most of our time on this planet is spent in very ordinary activities. Once I obtained a certain professional achievement, I couldn’t easily hop to another job in another place anymore. Contrary to all the advice in the “over forty women’s magazines,” it isn’t so easy to “choose your best life” and “live your dream” when you’re over forty and have obligations. It often isn’t even an available option.

Even more grievous are the losses. Around the age of thirty-five I began accepting that aging would entail a lot of “giving up” of the attributes of youth. I will never again look as I did at twenty-five. I will never have children and may never be married. As my forties grew closer to fifty, new incivilities of age abounded. My body aches. I have to take fistfuls of supplements. I can still bend over and reach the floor, but most of the time, I need a steady armchair for help.

Recently I hit my plateau of what I’m willing to give up. I am digging my heels in like a five-year-old and saying “no” to things that I realistically cannot say “no” to. Having spent half a century on this planet, I will soon have to start taking medications to control body functions that I always took for granted. I don’t WANT to change my diet (which is already pretty damn healthy and means giving up the few luxuries I kept in my diet). I don’t WANT to add more exercise (which means daily, instead of three times a week). I don’t WANT to accept that some lifestyle changes are going to have to happen, or I am going to be very sorry in the future. I can tell myself all I want that “it’ll be like when you gave up eating dessert in your thirties,” but it’s not the same at all. It’s a wholesale giving up, not just a small adjustment.

I am railing against this necessity, trying to find a loophole. I know there is none. And I’m grieving that fact. I’m slowly trying to work through the anger and the grief so I can just get on with what I have to do. I don’t like it at all.

I’m trying to find solace revisiting novels about the sanctity of mundane daily activity. Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Kasischke’s The Life Before Her Eyes. Cunningham’s The Hours. Just now I made a note to myself to re-read McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

My Irish great-grandmother used to say, “Tis a fine life and it’s few who get out alive.”  I watch my healthy 80 year-old father, who eats Advil like candy for his physical pain and walks slowly with a cane. On his 79th birthday I asked him, “how old are you?” and his honest response was “Too damn old.” But he’s making plans for the next ten years. He’s seeing someone for his grief over his recent life losses. He’s getting up every morning, feeding his cats, and visiting his wife in the nursing home.

I come from good strong people who knew how to live. I need to look to them to learn how to grow old. 'Cause it truly is few who get out alive.

text and photo copyright voicegal 2009