On being fifty-plus

A bit of introspection today.

Yesterday, an article popped up in my feed in one of my social media spaces. One of those ones that you know has been selected for you based on an algorithm. This one was all about fashion mistakes that middle aged women make, that make them look older. I was proud of my middle aged sisterhood for responding by flipping the article the collective bird in the comments section.

But it set me thinking.

Once we hit this patch on life's journey, we're constantly being given hints and tips on looking younger, slimmer, more attractive. Now, I understand that on a purely instinctual level, men are more likely to be attracted to women who are (or appear to be) of reproductive age. It's that whole hard-coded drive to procreate. Attracting a mate is in the very DNA of living things.

But for those of us whose reproductive years are behind us, surely there are more important things to do than pretend to still be young enough to gestate?

Use our cosmetics (tested on animals) to make yourself look younger and more attractive to men!

Ugh.

I'm not suggesting that we neglect our skin care regimes and abdicate stewardship of bodies and faces. But surely we can move on from this notion that old=ugly? My skin is pretty good, but it is unmistakably the skin of a woman in her mid 50s. And why is that a bad thing? I am a woman in her mid 50s. My skin has housed me all that time. It has stretched as I grew up or got larger through pregnancy or gluttony. It has also (albeit less frequently and less dramatically) shrunk, after childbirth or due to diet-and-exercise. It bears the marks of the story of my life so far. A scar on my cheek from a close encounter of the painful kind with a steering wheel. Another across my brow bone, where said brow bone once made a bid for freedom and tried to forge a new life for itself on the outside of my skin. Stretch marks like laddered tights all over my hips where growing babies tested the limits of its capacity to stretch. Inevitably, for a woman who grew up in a sunny country in the days before people cared about sunblock, I have a few of the clusters of melanin referred to as age spots. I'm carrying far too much weight, and for the sake of my health, I should shed it. But my skin soldiers on, housing all the excess me and taking it in its stride.

You've got to respect that. Come on.

Stop wearing that. It ages you. Wear this. It makes you look younger.

But I'm not younger. And why is that a bad thing? I've had almost 55 years of doing stuff. There's no way all that stuff could have fitted into a shorter period of time. 12 years at school, almost 30 years of marriage, a master's degree, a career spanning 25 years, two adult sons. Races run, songs sung, awards received, conferences attended (and addressed), loss, grief, joy, achievement, triumph, defeat. I've acquired skills and knowledge. I've been places and done things.

Judging by the attitudes of my peers, it takes this long to find the sodthat button and push it with an unrepentant, if slightly arthritic forefinger.

These days, I spend most of my days dressed in overalls and safety boots. I'm usually covered in sawdust and/or paint. Quite often my face is obscured by safety goggles and a dust mask. Does my bum look big in that? Probably. Because it is big in that... and every other thing I wear. Does it age me? Almost certainly, because the sawdust will emphasise my wrinkles. I'm sure the appearance police would have a conniption.

It's all about outward appearances. We're obsessed. How old do you look? How slim do you look? Wear blocks of colour to look taller. Wear vertical stripes to look slimmer. Wear lilac eye shadow to look younger.

Surely it should be less about looking and more about being and doing?

So your outfit makes you look young, but you treat people like dirt? Is that okay? You have a tight tush but you've never helped anyone out of a tight spot. Is that cool? Your skin looks like that of a woman 15 years younger, but your cosmetics are wrecking the planet. Is that good?

I believe Roald Dahl said it very well (in The Twits):

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

Gaggle of middle aged women (I'm in white)

So yeah. See that gaggle of middle aged women over there? You think they look faintly ridiculous in their inappropriate outfits. You wonder if they realise that you and your friends are laughing at them. You wonder if they realise that their confidence is misplaced, after all they lost their power to turn heads at least a decade ago.

Well, eat your heart out. They've earned their stripes. They don't care that men aren't drooling over them (in fact they feel quite liberated by that fact). It's taken them fifty-plus years to reach this point and they're going to rock it. Hard.

Women's magazines are full of advice for them.

They don't give a rat's ass.

An accommodation conundrum

With our sons now having flown the nest, it seemed a sensible time to downsize. So we put our house on the market.

For various reasons - most of which are covered ad nauseum in other posts on this blog - we decided to rent for a while, until we got a handle on where life is taking us.

It sounds so simple doesn't it?

But it isn't.

Not even a little bit.

Not even slightly.

Jess is not small

You see, we have a dog. Most rental properties don't allow dogs. Even those that say 'pet-friendly' in the description often mean something in a cage/bowl. Many of those who will consider dogs will only allow small ones.

Jess is not small.

But let's pretend for a moment that having a dog isn't a problem. Let's pretend that the dog-loving British nation includes scores of dog-welcoming landlords.

We're still being turned down by property agents before we even get to the viewing stage. Why?

Because we're both currently unemployed. Not by choice, and we're doing everything in our power to change that. But our power has its limits.

One refusal I got from a rental agent this morning said that we needed to be earning at least £27kpa in order to be considered as tenants.

The proceeds from the sale of our house will enable us to pay a year's rent in advance. The entire period of the lease.

Not good enough, apparently.

Now just say for a moment, they find a tenant for that house. A couple earning £27kpa. Then, two months in, they lose their source of income. On a salary on £27kpa, they are unlikely to have been able to build up enough of a savings cushion to tide them over to the end of the lease period.

How is that a better prospect than we are?

Don't get me wrong: I bear this fictitious couple and their £27kpa no ill will. I have no desire to see them homeless, especially since - in my head - they have small children.

But I have no particular desire to see me homeless, either. My arthritic joints are unlikely to cope with sleeping rough. Not that I liked sleeping rough even when my joints were young and sprightly.

According to our estate agent, we're on track to be out by the beginning of next month, and we haven't even been allowed to view any properties.

I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to do about this situation. If you have any suggestions, let's be having them.

Finding that silver lining

Just at the moment, Mr Namasi and I are facing some really significant life challenges. Each one daunting on its own, but when they gang up like this, it can be somewhat overwhelming. Just to prove that I'm not exaggerating, our list of challenges includes (but is not restricted to):

• Mr Namasi has been unemployed since December when the company he worked for folded, and I don't earn nearly enough to make ends even wave at each other
• When we at last found a buyer for our house, the sale fell through at the very last hurdle - we've already gotten rid of much of our furniture and started packing
• Our presence in a post-Brexit UK is not guaranteed.

I'm sure you get the picture. Things are pretty bleak. And yet, and yet...

We've introduced what we call 'austerity budget' and have cut corners all over the place. We've had to do this before and, as before, somehow it's fun. Planning meals together, choosing cheaper everything, and buoying each other up with the make-do mentality and the fact that we're in it together. Something as mundane as a chocolate bar becomes a real treat, and we appreciate the little things so much more.

I recently came home from work to find that a friend-and-colleague had popped a chocolate bar into my handbag. I gave it to Mr Namasi, because it happened to be a Boost and he needed one.

A friend treated me to a Sunday roast dinner out, which was such a blessing.

After a protracted battle with HMRC, who kept sending me letters to say I owed them money, in spite of the fact that they had already confirmed more than once that this was not the case, I finally spoke to someone who was able to stop the regular letters. This person was also able to tell me, that not only did I not owe them any money, but they owed me £100. Mr Namasi and I had foregone birthday presents due to budget cuts, and I decided that we would split the money and each buy ourselves a £50 gift.

As part of the ongoing downsizing project, I've been advertising some of our belongings online, and a few of them have sold. It's just £10 here and £15 there. But those little windfalls feel significant when they're dropping into an empty cache in a way they wouldn't have done under normal circumstances.

And then, of course, things go wrong - things you just don't have the budget for. The glass turntable plate thingy in the microwave broke clean in two. Normally, we would just buy a new one. On the austerity budget, we repaired it with superglue. So far, so good. We feel good about our resourcefulness.

Our tumble drier broke down - the spindle holding the drum in place sheared clean through. We can't get by without one so, with sighs of resignation, we called a man in to repair it. He discovered that our tumble drier is a recalled model. He waived his call out fee (incredibly generous of him) and arranged for us to have a brand new tumble drier for less than his call out fee would have been.

The friend who supplied the Boost bar, has also supplied other little blessings: a can of coconut milk here, an 8-pack of my preferred soft drink there. Things that I would normally buy without even looking at the price tag, and which have now been cut on the austerity budget.

Another friend gave us tickets to a live comedy act. A night out that we wouldn't even contemplate at the moment.

We find ourselves more determined to find the upside to every situation, to look for a reason to be glad.

Something that happened not to us, but to a friend, is an illustration of how the most unlikely things can turn out to be blessings in disguise. She found a lump in her breast and went to see the doctor, as you do. The doctor was pretty sure it was nothing nefarious, but sent her for a mammogram anyway. The mammogram confirmed his suspicion that the lump was of no concern. However, they found early stage cancer in the other breast. Apparently, it is pretty much undetectable at this stage other than on a scan. This makes for an excellent prognosis. Hooray for the lump.

So now our house is back on the market. There is no furniture in either of our sons' ex bedrooms. One of them is doing duty as a storage space for the stuff I'm looking to sell. Our lovely double length garage used to house gym equipment and a lovely XBox gaming space - it's now full of boxes, some packed and some empty. There are no pictures on the walls. There are half-packed boxes in most of the rooms. My lovely studio in the loft, with the best views in the house, is full of stuff from the attic-space, which is in the process of being sorted. It is nowhere near the lovely home it was when our previous buyers saw it. The sight that meets prospective buyers right now is far less inviting. But we've already had one offer, and it was a smidgen higher than the offer that fell through. And viewers are still coming. Maybe the failed sale and the resultant flirtation with financial ruin will result in a better price than before?

Mr Namasi, my wonderfully pragmatic, phlegmatic husband has made an occupation out of job hunting. This is the first time he has been unemployed for more than a couple of weeks, and the job market is not kind to the over 50s.

He has a daily routine of checking his emails, following up on new job alerts, making phone calls, reaching out to his network. He has been pouring himself into the task with the same sort of dedication and commitment that characterises the way he has approached every aspect of his life: previous jobs, marriage, parenting, sport, volunteering commitments... His resilience inspires me.

As we speak, he is en route to an interview in London. If the potential employers had been a fly on the wall as he prepared for this interview and spoke about how life would be if he got this job (at a lower salary than his previous role), they would have hired him on the spot. I just hope they are able to see his sterling qualities in the short space of time they get to spend with him. And maybe he will land a role that fits him like a glove, holds his interest and allows him to grow and develop.

Maybe this time of unemployment will also prove to be a blessing in disguise? I have to confess that at the moment, if this is a blessing in disguise, the disguise is a pretty impenetrable one, but I'm standing hopefully by for the Great Unmasking.

The statute of limitations on new ventures

There seems to be a bit of a preconceived notion about when it is the proper time to do certain things in life: You attend school from this age to that age. You get married before X age. You started your family before Y age. You learn new hobbies or start new sports by such and such a stage of life. You stop wearing your hair long and your skirts short by this point...

But why?

Okay, I can understand the instinctive drive to procreate before a woman reaches menopause. I get that one. It's primal. Not so sure about the others, though.

Eve Fletcher

I recently saw an episode of Homes Under the Hammer where the developer who bought and transformed the property was a retiree in his 80s. There are countless stories of people in their 70s, 80s and 90s going back to university...and some even to primary school. A few days ago, a friend of mine ran her first 89km (55 mile) Comrades Marathon in the year she turns 50. There are viral videos of dancers in their 80s and 90s (example). And Bette Burke-Nash is still working as a flight attendant at 80. And Eve Fletcher was still surfing in her 80s.

So here I am, in my 50s, embarking on a new chapter in my life, and honing my skills with power tools. In 10 years' time, maybe my arthritis will have become so bad that I won't be able to do the things I can do now. So I'd best get on with it, hadn't I?

Some years ago, my mother in law and I went shopping for a pair of shoes for her to wear to a major family function. One of the several reasons for the shindig was her 75th birthday. She shied away from a lovely pair because they were rather expensive and needlessly good quality. After all, she was only going to be around for another five years or so - why go to the expense of shoes built to last any longer than that? Well, I'm here to tell you that she has outlasted those shoes. She turned 90 earlier this year. Her faithful feet more than deserved the good shoes.

I once read a meme that said "I wish I were as fat now as I was when I first thought I was fat." You might want to read that one again. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Got it?

Do you know that I spent the six years from age 16 to age 22 stuck indoors when the family went to the beach because I was 'too fat' (at a UK size 10/US size 6)? All that wasted time, for a girl who lists among her favourite sights, sounds and smells all manner of beach-related things. What an eejit!

Now I know that too fat and too old aren't quite the same thing. But they're not a million miles apart. They're both matters of perception.

Let's look at it this way: right now you think you're too old to do X thing. In ten years time you'll think, "Dammit I'm too old to do that thing now. I wish I'd started ten years ago."

So the hell with the statute of limitations. Give it a whirl. You'll never be this young again. Go. Sign up for that salsa class. Go skydiving. Learn a new language. Teach yourself to play the guitar. Have a go at being a full time artist/poet/upcycler.

Let's grow old disgracefully!