​Messy Aging - Amie Wolf

When I was thirty, I could easily tie my sneakers while standing on one foot like a flamingo without ever thinking, as I do now, “Wow, those core strength exercises really have helped improve my balance!” Back then, it never occurred to me that the lone sixty-year-old in my grad school class might feel invisible—I had never heard of, or even thought about “the invisibility of older women”— even though that older classmate was mostly invisible to me. In the good old days, my friend’s husband would have never said to me, upon arriving at a family wedding dressed in my favorite sapphire blue cocktail dress, “You look pretty good for your age.”
 
I’m not sure how much aging versus cluelessness has to do with that last bit. Some men possess a special talent for delivering wounding zingers like they’re graciously handing you the Sunday paper after removing the best sections. Even so, I don’t think being sixty-five has helped much, except insofar as I’ve learned to take those zingers less personally.
 
For women, getting old is treacherous long before your body actually starts to go. I could write an entire piece on coarse chin hairs that leave behind angry red marks after plucking, another on thinning skin that threatens (ok, fine - more than threatens) to crepe at the thighs, a third on the hormonal sunburn that roasts the face in the dark of night and throws you into a panic over nothing you can think of, until you begin worrying about everything imaginable. Unless you haven’t been paying attention at all, you’ve already overheard grumblings about the onset of menopause- these are subjects many of us need to unpack together in the same way we first compared notes on period cramps, painfully awkward (or awkwardly painful) sex, the process of trying to push a baby’s head through a keyhole-sized opening…
 
You get the idea.
 
But I don’t think these physical changes are the worst of it. What really kicks me in the gut is a potent, growing dread that I, like many women I know, might be moving inexorably toward becoming that particular combination of opinionated and exasperating that reminds me of what I least liked about my mother and her cohort when they were my age. I was always a little bit mouthy, in that sassy, clever sort of way others seemed to find amusing. But now, multiply mouthy by two, and subtract clever and sassy (because at this stage of life they are likely to be neither), and you get a sum that is roughly equivalent to the look of annoyance on my adult children’s faces.
 
Becoming an older woman is a messy, arduous, meaningful business. Think of it this way- picture your young self, as you are now or as you used to be, lying prone at the top of a very steep mountain, covered head to toe in sticky hair-removal wax. Now imagine an impassive esthetician pushes you down that hill, and suddenly you’re tumbling over the earth’s longest yard sale, the land covered in years and years of saved greeting cards, overstuffed photo albums, books on how to lean in, do it better (marriage, career, parenting, self-care, the impossibility of doing all of them well at the same time), books you’re still trying to write, perfectly good advice that no one wants to hear, twice-used makeup in colors that didn’t flatter, clothes so far out of fashion that even if you achieve enlightenment, you will not want to wear them, storage bags full of bleeding and broken hearts, painful goodbyes, illnesses and body aches that might not pass with time, drawings by children who only want to say they love you, so very many mistakes and regrets and feats of absolute heroism that no one even noticed, though you’re profoundly proud of them especially because no one noticed—until you finally reach the bottom of that mountain and come to rest, covered in everything you’ve touched along the way. As you stagger to your feet and take a good, hard look at yourself, you notice that this particular form of waxing has only removed those things you didn’t want to lose or say goodbye to.
 
Here you have an abstract sculpture of an older woman. The young woman is still in there- where else would she be? She can’t be cut out like Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley tried to do. We saw how well that worked - two women who couldn’t recognize themselves in each other, who needed catastrophic, gory reminders that no woman is ever just her skin, no matter how lovely, never only her accomplishments. Every woman is the mess of things she gathers and becomes after rolling so far, for so long.
 
Do older women become increasingly invisible? There are numerous advantages to invisibility, as Akiko Busch so brilliantly wrote, but still? And are we invisible to everyone?
 
I don’t think so. Among other things, we aren’t invisible to each other. When I see a woman my age out walking in the park, I feel the stirrings of my inner golden retriever discovering a lost littermate. I wish I could break free of the leash I keep myself on, the shock collar that warns me not to be awkward or intrusive, the fear that if we spoke, you actually might annoy me. But if you’re a woman who’s getting up there in years, if you know what I’m talking about, if you see me, I want you to know that I see you too.
 


Amie Wolf is a psychologist and writer. She completed a novel, The Unpreparing, and is in the submission process, represented by Sabrina Taitz at WME. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, a PhD in Psychology from Fordham University, a Master's from Columbia, and a BA from the University of Michigan. Her short story, Large Knuckles, was published in Narrative Magazine, and another short story, A Gentle Heart, was published in Gravel Magazine. The current submission, Messy Aging, is a non-fiction piece about the messy business of growing old (er).