A Lot Younger Than That

"Someone has a birthday coming up I see," she said as she handed back my driver's license to me. "Um, yes--a big one," I replied as I wondered how to avoid talking in cliches about birthdays and age. "Oh? What birthday is it?" she asked. "My fiftieth," I said in a normal speaking volume, not the hushed whisper often used when speaking about that particular age or cancer or something else as equally dreaded. No one was in the waiting room with me, so I was spared the admittedly ridiculous ritual of furtively looking around and lowering my voice before telling her what birthday I was soon going to mark.

She abruptly pulled her head up from the computer and stared at me for a few seconds before exclaiming, "Oh, you look a lot younger than that." I gave her a big smile and a quick thank-you, all the while praying she wouldn't get more specific. Please Lady, allow me to bask in the welcome sweet vagueness of "a lot younger than that." But she wanted to keep going. "You look like you're 42!" she gushed, as if she were giving me a great compliment. 'Aw f*ck -- there it is,' I thought.

At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful jerk, I find being tagged anywhere in my forties sounds old. Agewise, I'm now so advanced, even my age compliments sound old to me. Coming from a cute woman in her late 20s, it felt like she was really saying, 'You look like you're only *slightly* over the hill.'

I wish I could resolve my ambivalent feelings about turning the big 5 - 0. I often feel lucky when people occasionally think I look younger than my actual age. But almost as often, I feel embarrassed that I am not-so-reluctantly buying into the absurdity that it's just better to be younger -- as if one had a choice in the matter.

Are We There Yet?

"Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street," sang Taylor Swift right before I flipped the radio dial to another station. It's the only line of *any* of her songs that I like. Not that it relates to me and my life, but I appreciate a good simile when I hear it. If I were singing that song (or having that song sung about me), I would revise that line to: "Loving him is like driving an older, but well maintained, Volvo on a limited-access traffic-clogged toll road on a rain-soaked day." It's not catchy or poetic like the Maserati line, but such is my life. Twenty-five years from now, I imagine Taylor Swift's songs will be filled with similar turgid lyrics drawn from her middle-aged life.

Love -- the redux version -- is trickier in mid life. Not only do you have to go through the hard, often confusing work of finding someone with whom you might want to spend a big chunk of your future -- someone who "gets" you and won't bore or annoy the shit out of you over the long term -- but then you have the very complicated task of trying to weave together two lives already interwoven with the threads of children, making a living, and other responsibilities one accumulates as a middle-aged adult. All of these complications act as brakes on runaway love, and while that can be frustrating, it's probably a good thing.

Unlike falling in love in my 20s, second-time-around love at 49 is more cautious. It's like being a good driver who is tempted to go faster, but chooses to drive in the slower lane because it feels safer when you've got a kid or two in the Volvo with you. It'll take longer to get where I'm going, which is annoying, but that's the tradeoff -- feeling safely in control while enduring my own frequent irritating complaint, "Are we *there* yet?"

Listening to My Gut and Kim Basinger

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." -- Kim Basinger

I think it's fair to say I'm a fair person. I've been told that I bend over backwards to be fair to other people. One might think that would be a good thing, but it's a quality that hasn't always served me well. When I was married, I always took my ex at his word, even when what he said was at odds with my nagging intuition. It felt like the "fair" thing to do, since only *he* would be able to explain the truth of *his* inner life. What I overlooked is that one must have the capability, the motivation, and the courage to be emotionally honest, and therein lies the rub. To be fair -- because it's hard *not* to be -- I don't believe that most of my ex's emotional dishonesty was deliberate, but it was a series of lies that stung me all the same. If a friend accidentally slams a car door on your hand, it still hurts like a mo-fo, even when it's not deliberate.

Education is expensive -- whether you pay in cash or in painful emotional regret. It's even more expensive if you keep taking a class and failing, as I did with Intuition 101. One of the biggest things I've learned from the breakup of my marriage is the importance of heeding my intuition. I will *never* take anyone at their word if my intuition is poking me in the stomach and telling me something else. Ignoring what my gut was telling me in favor of my ex's explanations that didn't add up was a very expensive lesson I only began to understand after we reached the fork in the road called Splitsville.

Truth reveals itself in behavior, not words. When someone's behavior and words diverge, intuition is the warning system that alerts you to that divide. If you're lucky like I am, you have at least one close friend who won't let you get away with *any* emotional bullshit created to ignore or deny the existence of that divide. But even if I weren't so fortunate, I now rely on my intuition to do the same thing. And I'm paying attention enough to be able to ace Intuition 101 this time around. Maybe I'll even go on to write the book Intuition for Dumbshits, since I lived that way most of my life. 

Bonfire of the Middle-Aged Vanities

A few days ago, I noticed a guy in his 40s in a Honda Civic with a rear spoiler. A Honda Civic! I can't even believe they *make* rear spoilers for Civics. Isn't that the same thing as stenciling a skull on your fanny pack? You can add whatever you want to your fanny pack, but you'll never change its fundamental essence. It'll always be that unflattering belly pouch worn by people *not* trying to bring sexy back.

It's hard to believe the guy with the rear spoiler bought it for anything other than cosmetic reasons. I am told a rear spoiler is not just a car decoration, but that it has aerodynamic properties that keep the back end of the car on the ground during high speeds and hard cornering. Okay, but the dude had a car seat in the back, so how fast does he drive and how much hard cornering is he doing with a baby on board? I rest my case.

As I had just started to enjoy my smug reverie about the poor guy's vanity, it was rudely interrupted by the unwelcome thought that I'm guilty of the same thing. The frosty pink lipstick that often adorns my lips is the rear spoiler and I am the Honda Civic. Lipstick, or indeed any noticeable makeup, seems like it's for young women -- not someone who is a month away from being able to join AARP. But I like it. Wearing frosty pink lipstick makes me *feel* good. Plus, I hear it's supposed to be helpful with the hard cornering of turning 50.

I just hope frosty pink lipstick is not a gateway drug to other more obvious vanities. I hope I don't turn into the 90-year-old woman who continues to dye her hair a jarringly unnatural dark brown because she thinks her real hair will make her look old. Or the 65-year-old lady with surgically enhanced perky breasts. As a woman, trying to figure out how to be appropriately sexy in middle age can be as confusing as it was as a teenager. Instead of being "too young" to be a certain kind of sexy, the confusing obstacle is being too old. I look forward to AARP sorting it all out for me. In the meantime, I will wear my frosty pink lipstick proudly as I continue to be entertained by the middle-aged vanities of myself and others.

A Small Bit of Parenting Genius

As a single mom, I rely on my resourcefulness, empathy, and quick thinking to navigate the tricky shoals of parenting a teenage girl. That's usually good for about five or ten minutes. After my resourcefulness, empathy, and quick thinking have been exhausted, I am not ashamed to say I reach for something more effective, such as bribery or appealing to her vanity. And when those fail, I know I can ultimately count on the biggest weapon of persuasion in my parenting arsenal -- the Judds. Yes, you read that right. My go-to badass parenting tool is the Judds, the superstar mother-daughter singing duo that dominated the country music charts in the 1980s and early 1990s.

If my daughter badgers me about something I cannot or do not want to tell her or buy for her, I bring up the Judds. If she litigates the hell out of a "no" she's received from me, I Judd it up. Specifically, I rave about how much fun it will be when *we're* on tour together like the Judds -- mother and daughter singing and touring the country in a bus as colorful as our loud costumes. She is simultaneously mesmerized and mortified by my daydream, which temporarily paralyzes her badgering tongue into silence. As an aspiring singer, she is fascinated by the idea of successfully living her dream. But as a 13-year-old girl, she is mortified at the thought that her mother -- her embarrassing mother -- could be so prominently featured in that success. For her, it's the middle-school equivalent of Apocalypse Now. The horror, the horror...

Even though I owe a debt of gratitude to the Judds, the funny thing is, I can't even name one of their many hit songs. I didn't start listening to country music until 2005, long after Naomi and Wynonna Judd stopped touring as a duo. Eight years ago, when I just couldn't bring myself to listen to progressive talk radio anymore, I started listening to a country music station instead. Hearing songs about being dumped or fired or sitting alone in a bar drinking before noon, or other typical country-song themes, was more uplifting to me than listening to the daily barrage of political and corporate bullshit going down in America.

I'm not sure how much shelf life the Judds have left as an effective parenting trick with my daughter. It's worked like magic for the past three years, but I fear its potency wears off the more I use it. When the magic is finally gone, I hope I can pull another surprising rabbit out of my parenting hat -- especially one as improbable as the Judds.

The Pickle Lady

The summer after high school, I worked at a Christmas ornament store in a small resort town in Wisconsin. Selling Christmas crap in the middle of summer is essentially the same as selling anything else that is gratuitously unneeded. The majority of our customers were middle-aged women, many of whom I suspect were shopping junkies trying to get their high on with an inexpensive hit to temporarily appease their addiction. With her milquetoast husband in tow, our typical customer would buy one or two ornaments and be on her way to the windsock store (not to be confused with the store selling windchimes). I may as well have been selling t-shirts or mugs that said, "I like to buy needless shit in my free time."

As you might imagine, it was a boring job -- the type of boring that waves a giant red flag in front of me, inducing mischief in a misguided attempt to stave off death by boredom. One of my favorite activities was spying on the Pickle Lady who worked in the deli at the supermarket next door. I was obsessed with her. Every day I would go to the deli during my lunch break and buy a pickle from her, just to see what she was wearing.

The Pickle Lady was probably in her late 40s, with white tortoise shell cat-eye glasses and a pin-curled hairdo right out of an episode of "I Love Lucy." Banishing the polyester pantsuit of the early 1980s to someone else's closet, she always wore skirts or dresses from the 1950s, including a navy A-line dress with white polka dots that I can picture even today. Her hair, makeup, and clothes were so jarringly old timey -- 25 years out of date in 1982 -- she could have been one of those historical reenactment park actors. Instead of a Revolutionary War woman demonstrating the butter churn at Sturbridge Village, she would have played the part of the greasy-spoon waitress at the 1950s Small Town America historical park. She was a living anachronism.

This is how my 13-year-old daughter sees me. I am her pickle lady, the one she delights in observing for her hopelessly unfashionable looks and manner. When she needs a laugh, she will ask me what I think certain current teen slang words mean. When I tell her I haven't heard that word used on Prairie Home Companion or Downton Abbey, so I don't know what it means, she rolls her eyes and looks at me with a mixture of bewilderment, pity, and exasperation. She doesn't understand my utter lack of giving-a-shit about maintaining an appearance of what passes for cool in middle school. When I remind her that I'm a middle-aged woman, and no, I don't want to wear skinny jeans and a lace peplum, instead of my bermuda shorts and a t-shirt, she looks at me as if I've just told her to put me on an ice floe and push me out to sea.

I find it funny that she hasn't figured out that we have different comfort zones. She has her middle-school comfort zone (surely "middle-school comfort zone" is the biggest oxymoron ever uttered), while I have my middle-aged zone of comfort that includes frosty pink lipstick, regularly dyeing the gray out of my hair, keeping my bra straps hidden at all times, and shunning skinny jeans. Although it's probably more accurate to say skinny jeans shun me.

The simple truth is, as a parent, I will never be cool, no matter what I look like or what I say. At first glance that might seem unfair or harsh, but it's really a gift. It gives you permission to live authentically, which is just Oprah-speak for dorking it up in a big way. Make sure you say "Howdy" if you bump into me at the windsock store as I go about my business living authentically. I'll be the one in the t-shirt that says, "I like to dork it up in my free time."

Huffing the Residue of Hopefulness

My boyfriend Frenchy has many good qualities, but the one I'm savoring today is his ability to recognize something good and stick with it, despite the hard work and the emotional ups and downs that go hand-in-hand with something about which he is so passionate. No, I'm not talking about "us." We're somewhere in the middle of our first draft, not the third major revision. After five years of blood, sweat, and tears, Frenchy got to see his creative baby come to life this past weekend.

Frenchy's musical, which he created with his two collaborators, was performed for the first time in a workshop production, a theatrical experience that is much more than a reading, but less than a full-scale production. A musical, which I've heard described as "a play on steroids," is so complicated to create, it's the theatrical version of writing a novel. It's inspiring for me to see Frenchy's diligence, creative talents, and belief in the project finally reap the reward of having other people experience it in 3D.

Frenchy is a polisher. He sees something that has potential, but is not anywhere near perfect, and he works on it until it's really good. To him, an obstacle isn't a stop sign, it's just a rough edge that needs to be reworked until you get it right. Besides being a quality I admire, Frenchy's "patient, but persistent drive to improve" seems like a good indication that he won't bolt at the first sign of relationship trouble because he's used to constantly reworking things, making little changes here and there. I like that. And I need that -- most of all for the residue of hopefulness created by all his patient, persistent polishing.