The Middle Aged Sage

 “I’m going to kill myself when I’m 39.” 

“Why is that, Tiffany?”

“So I don’t have to be old.”

I’ve never forgotten that conversation, held between myself and a girl in my Grade 11 Basic English class during my first year of teaching. 

I was only about 27 myself, but I was already ancient in the eyes of 15 year old Tiffany. (They were all named Tiffany, Brittany or Courtenay that year.)  I quickly gave up trying to convince her that 40 wasn’t exactly old, feeling pretty confident that she would probably revise her plans well before the due date. 

Far from being a reason to jump off a bridge, middle age has perks that young’uns can’t imagine.  Perks like lower car insurance, and – um…. well, I’m sure there’s other stuff too, but I can’t remember exactly what at the moment.  Improved memory is clearly not one of those perks. 

The great thing about middle age is that you no longer have to care about how you are perceived by others in public.  This is very freeing for the individual, if potentially embarrassing to love ones, acquaintances and others who possibly don’t appreciate the new found feeling of freedom.

I was revisiting these thoughts today.  It began with the trip my sister and I took to Shopper’s Drug Mart Beauty Boutique. We spent a good 45 minutes trawling through the mind-boggling assortment of make-up and beauty products.  Some of these products sound like they actually belong in a hardware store.  Did you know that primer is not just for house paint anymore?  And surely “microderm abrasion pads” are really just “sandpaper”.  Pretty pink rounds of sandpaper, but sandpaper none the less.

 

Lately I’ve become interested in/obsessed with finding some kind of magical potion that will remove fine lines, deep wrinkles and full-on craters of the face.  (I know, I know – the potion exists and it’s called Botox! And in the hardware store it would be caulking…. hmm… I wonder….)



Like Amitabh's beard, my eyebrows are going startlingly white!



I digress. The only thing I needed was a pair of tweezers to keep my eyebrows in check between threading sessions.  It’s not that I mind the occasional stray bit, but I do object to the few wiry pure white browy bits that have recently made their appearance on my face.  Why would my eyebrows be going grey before the rest of my hair?  It’s like Amitabh Bachan’s beard sprouting above my eyes!!

Anyhow, I literally couldn’t wait to put my new tweezers to good use, and as soon as we got to the car, I flipped down the sun visor and got plucking.  It was a little hard to do while Anne was driving.  And at one point, I glanced out the side window and realized that my grooming session was being witnessed by a gaggle of eleven year old girls who stared at me with fascinated horror.  I’m sure that if my tween neice Kathleen had been in the car, she would have been mortified by my behaviour. 

But I’ve got that cool, “I’m-middle-aged-and-I-don’t-care-how-dorky-I-am” groove on, so I smiled at them and kept tweezing even though they clearly thought I had lost it. 

And maybe I have, but it is very freeing nonetheless, to not really mind what others think of your adorable little idiosyncrasies.  This benefit of the aging process was summed up aptly in a birthday card I gave to Anne last year:  “They say that as you get older, you start to lose your mind.  What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much.”