Aging Disgracefully

I don’t think I’ve ever felt my age so much as I have since I started this blog.

Mainly, it’s because I’ve been trying to network with other bloggers. What I’ve discovered, or at least what it seems like I’ve discovered, is that most of the bloggers out there are aged 18-25 and they are writing about fashion and makeup.

I certainly don’t begrudge them that. A lot of them are really good at what they do and they really know their stuff. Plus, the fashion/makeup niche does really well. If you go on Twitter, these kiddos have hundreds of thousands of followers and equal numbers of page views on their blogs.

Obviously, they’re doing quite well. More power to them.

Then, there are the mommy bloggers. They’re usually a little older than the fashion/makeup girls, but still much younger than me. I’m a little beyond potty training, terrible twos, and first day of kindergarten. 

Never has that been more apparent than when my youngest granddaughter had a screaming fit the other night because I sat in her spot at the kitchen table. Later, she lost her shit because her mommy tried to put the same dry pull up back on her.  

I can’t blame her. Being two years old is hard. Everybody expects you to be a “big” girl and go potty on command and wear pants out in public and be nice to your big sister. Then they hand you the wrong color sippy cup. It’s just too much.

However, after helping Kim wrangle her into the pull up and then back into her clothes, and watching her throw herself face first onto the carpet to kick and scream, it became crystal clear to me why most women my age are not having babies.

It’s because that crap is a young woman’s game.

When you’re the mom in the thick of that, you just roll with the punches. You’re almost numb to it because it’s just part of having a toddler. You deal with it and move on to the next pint-sized catastrophe.

When you’re the Mimi and haven’t had to deal with toddler meltdowns in over a decade, you don’t roll with punches. You roll into the kitchen for an adult beverage and then go lay down. I understand now why my grandparents took so many naps while they were babysitting us. 

But I digress.

I already wrote previously about why I shouldn’t be a mommy blogger anyway. So where does that leave me on the blogging hierarchy?

Honestly, I don’t know.

I’m at the stage where two of our kids are in their 30’s and the youngest is three years away from being a legal adult.

Gulp. Did I really just say that??? 

I guess that’s why I’m a little lost and somewhat frustrated. I’m not old, but I’m not exactly young either. Finding other bloggers my age who are writing about the stage of life I’m in, has not been as simple as surfing the net.

In a way it’s good. I mean, I’m obviously filling a niche that needs to be filled, right?

On the other hand, it makes promotion difficult. No nineteen year old lipstick blogger wants to retweet the blog link of someone talking about her back fat and wrinkles. I’m kind of on an island here!

On the flip side, I’m not ready to talk about reverse mortgages (sorry, Henry Winkler…I adore you anyway!) or even retirement. I mean, when I did a search for “mature” blogs I found one written by an 87-year-old blogger and found another one called “I’m Not Dead Yet”.

Seriously?

I joke about being old a lot, but really, my age has never bothered me. I never “mourned” the loss of my 20’s when I turned 30. By the time I turned 40, I had lost pretty much my entire immediate family and the majority of my extended family, so I had the attitude that any day above ground is a good day. I’m not one of those people who refuse to give their age like it’s some kind of national security secret. Birthdays don’t bother me at all.

On the other hand, while I’m ok with embracing the number, I don’t embrace everything that goes with it, like wrinkles and body parts that have succumbed to gravity. On some days, forty-six is hard to swallow. I heard Joan Rivers joke one time that she would keep having facelifts until her ears would finally meet at the top of her head. I can’t say I disagree with that philosophy.

Maybe instead of saying I’m aging gracefully, I’ll say that I’m aging as disgracefully as possible and I’m fighting the physical aspect of it every step of the way.

My morning and night time skin routine resemble something akin to restoring the Sistine Chapel. There may or may not be scaffolding involved. Potions, moisturizers, serums, exfoliators. It’s only a matter of time before 60 grit sandpaper and caulk become a reality. My Dad always taught me there’s nothing that can’t be fixed with some heavy duty glue and wood clamps.

He may have been onto something!

The Husband Dude is ten years older than I am, so aging does sometimes have a recurring theme in our home. Most people are surprised to find out how old he is, because he neither looks nor acts his age.

With the exception, of course, of when he’s yelling at some kid to get away from our garage or he’s claiming his one piece of sofa cushion and is demanding to be left alone to vegetate.

Those are the times I really believe I married my Dad. Or Archie Bunker.

We aren’t the best with modern technology, either. THD still refers to recording videos as “filming” something. I had to have major help getting my blog up and running. When we still had cable, THD would try to plug the cable directly from the wall into the TV, completely by-passing the HD DVR box.

We are both coax cables in a HDMI world.

However, being this age does give us a skill set not readily available to millennials. I firmly believe those of us over the age of forty are much more suited to a major catastrophe or even a zombie apocalypse.

After all, we can remember a time before smart phones, cable TV, and participation awards.

We survived riding in cars without car seats or seatbelts and even riding in the back of pickups. We played outside unsupervised and drank from the garden hose. I even knew my share of kids who actually ate dirt.

Our playground equipment was metal and rusty. If you fell down, you didn’t land on some rubber shit made out of recycled tires. You landed on the ground (sometimes asphalt) and sometimes you broke bones.

But you finished your game before you went home and told your mom.

We rode bikes and skateboards without helmets and played ball games in the street without safety equipment. I can’t tell you how many times I pitched a softball to my brother from about five feet away, only to get it hit back to me squarely in the face.

The fact that I never actually fractured a bone in my skull, lost a tooth, got a concussion, or needed major plastic surgery before puberty, is nothing short of a miracle.

When we played Dodge Ball or Wall Ball, we went for the kill. There was no mercy when you had to go stand against the wall for the firing squad. Especially for siblings.

I would put these survival skills up against anything the YouTube and Vlog generation of today have to offer. Who do you think is going to survive The Walking Dead situation? The kid who got a trophy just for showing up to T ball and picking daisies in the outfield? Or the kid who burned all the skin off the back of her legs on a metal slide in the middle of summer, and went back twenty more times?

I know who I’m betting on. So don’t count us out yet.

Of course, my parents and grandparents would’ve shaken their heads at my generation too. My grandparents told me about having to travel around to pick cotton during The Great Depression. My grandma’s family of 10 could not afford a bar of soap so they shared one with another family in camp. 

Real life Grapes of Wrath stuff.

Do you know what kind of stories I’m going to have to tell my grandkids? I imagine it’ll go something like this:

Me: Let me tell you kiddos about how hard life was in 1976! We had no remote control on the TV. My Dad made me get up to change the channel for him. I was actually the remote control! It wasn’t even a color TV. It was black and white.

Grandkids: Didn’t they have color back then, Mimi?

Me: Yes they did, and we did, but when my brother was three years old, he played with the color knob on the color TV so much that after a while, pretty much everything was green. So my Dad replaced it with a black and white TV.

Grandkids: Mimi, why didn’t he replace it with a color TV again?

Me: The TV was part of a giant console that took up the entire living room wall. My Dad was too cheap to buy another color one to put in the huge console, so he bought a black and white one and set it on top of the console.

Grandkids: What’s a console?

Me: It’s a ginormous piece of furniture, kind of like a cabinet, that had a TV in it. Ours had little sliding doors you could close when you wanted to hide the TV. It also had a drawer on one side that held an AM/FM radio and a drawer on the other side that held a turntable.

Grandkids: Mimi, what’s a turntable?

Me: We used to play records on it.

Grandkids: What’s a record?

Me: It’s like a giant CD, but instead of playing with a laser, it played with a needle that would read the grooves on the vinyl.

Grandkids: What’s a CD?

Me: Oh, for crap’s sake! Never mind! The point is, I had to get up off the couch to change the channel because there was no such thing as a remote control.

Grandkids: How did you change the channel?

Me: You had to turn a knob on the TV.

Grandkids: How did they fit so many channels on the knob?

Me: We only had three channels.

Grandkids: Only three channels! Did you have to watch Netflix a lot?

Me: There was no Netflix. We didn’t even have VCRs or DVD players yet. We had to either watch three channels on TV or pay to go to the movie theater.

Grandkids: What’s a VCR? What’s a DVD?

Me: Never mind. All you need to know about this story is that Mimi had to walk TWO MILES through Harvest Gold shag carpet to change the THREE CHANNELS on the BLACK AND WHITE TV. And then I had to RAKE the shag carpet.

Grandkids: Why did you rake the carpet??? 

Me: Because of the foot prints…oh just you never mind! Forget I said anything. You kids go watch your fancy color TV with the 300 channel remote and enjoy the fact that your feet don’t have to touch the flat carpet for the next two hours. I’m going to lay down and take a nap…