Kim Barnes - Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.

DORIS DAY

How did it get so late so soon?

THEODORE GEISEL

INTRODUCTION

A re you one of us?

Daughter. Mother. Sister. Lover. Friend.

Yes?

Are you a woman of a certain age?

Your aliases, then: Auntie. Elder. Spinster. Ex. Mrs. Robinson, aka the older woman. Mom. Grandma. Wise woman. Crone. Primary caregiver. Friend to the end.

Your password?

Time.

And experience.

Of course. All that water under the bridge you yourself might have floated away on, and sometimes wanted to. Those Terrible Twenties, awash in desire, decisions, despair. The Thirties Without a Thought in Your Head because all of your intellectual and emotional energy seemed already committed: that career, those children, the lover who waited so hopefully for scraps from the burgeoning table of your life. Or didn't.

Are you one of us? Part of the generation that embodies the very definition of change and transition. From the Pointer Sisters to Sister Sledge; from a schoolgirl's love of Jim Morrison to the sexily maternal adoration of Andrea Bocelli; from Diane Keaton in Annie Hall to Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give.

Perhaps you've been a nice girl, bad girl, party girl, girl Friday. You've read Fear of Flying, The Women's Room, The Second Sex, The Story of O, Our Bodies, Ourselves, First Edition, gone braless as an act of subversion, only to find yourself, all these years later, searching Lingerie for greater support, dependent upon salesclerks half your age who have never heard the word foundations in reference to undergarments.

Are you one of us?

You look around and see that the world has changed somehow. The first husband, gone. Perhaps the second has followed like a penny thrown after one already lost. The exciting career you sacrificed so much for has lost some of its luster. Should you give it all up, shift gears, try something new? At your age? You've begun to count the years until retirement. In the mirror, a reflection you hardly recognize: those marks at the corners of the eyes, that drifting chin, the hair disappearing in one place and then sprouting in places you never dreamed it could. One day, you awaken into a new body, just when you were growing fond of the old one.

Here you are: midway, midlife, on the cusp, resting from the uphill climb, ready to coast. You've made it this far, haven't you? You've learned some things. You've earned a rest.

But, then, the parents are aging. They need a little more of your time, perhaps to move them into a smaller home (what is in all those boxes in the basement?), or to help them fill out their living wills. And those unused eggs you've guarded so carefully against accidental conception (all those years of pills, condoms, diaphragms, and jittery mornings after)well, those eggs are aging, too. Instead of kicking back, you find yourself kicking in, finding another hour before bed to arrange for your mother's care, another hour before dawn to exercise, another hour come Sunday to make love, do the laundry, pay the bills, finish the novel, and, perhaps, take a walk, take a deep breath, appreciate the life you have made for yourself.

You circle the block, the neighborhood, the lake. You end up right back where you began.

Are you lost? Are you found?

Here we are, others like you, who have grown weary of anger, tired of angst, fed up with despair. We've discovered we can step through the looking glass of our own lives and still exist. Did you miss out on the psychedelic-mushroom trip when you were twenty? Try the mind-altering experience of a midnight hot flash. That guilt that kept you nailed to the floor of the playroom, your children needy at your knees as you daydreamed of a tropical beach or, more likely, a dark closet where you might sit in singular silence, just for a while? That's been replaced with the solitude and wide-open spaces left by teenagers departing on the Next Shuttle to Adulthood.

But it's not all shits and giggles, is it? Our forties, our fifties, our sixties. Things go right more often than we're willing to believe. Things go wrong.

Maybe it seems that you are living your life in reverse, like Antonya Nelson, say, who was born to worry,... burdened with that paradoxical combination of a hyperactive imagination for catastrophe coupled with a physically exhausted affecther definition of middle age. Or perhaps you've waited, chosen your partner so carefully, picked just the right time in such a mature and responsible manner... only to discover, as Lolly Winston did, that your bodyand your ovarieshave continued on down the road without you. How could old age' be a medical diagnosis, Lolly asks, when I wasn't even forty?

Your bodygiver of pleasure, of life. And pain. Judy Blunt contemplates the summer of firethe forests all around her hometown of Missoula burningas a season of change: I arrived at this new place: middle-aged, my three children beautifully grown, even as the part of me that grew them threatened mutiny, my medical charts a growing litany of unusual bleeding and bad Pap smears. Julia Glass quells the mutiny of her bodybreast cancerwith surgery but decides against chemotherapy so that she might yet conceive the child she longs for, only to undergo a new uprising after the birth of her son. As she struggles with the too-early onset of chemically induced menopause, she finds comfort, if not resolution, in the books of Dr. Seuss that she reads to her young son: If once upon a time the rhythms of my life felt like those of a square dance, now they feel a lot like the dear doctor's madcap poetry....

When you look in the mirror, who is it you see? The girl you were at twenty, or the woman you've become? In She Who Once Was, Rebecca McClanahan explores the desire we feel to retain youth and give ourselves over to the cosmetic knife:... if aging is difficult for those who were only sometimes cute, she says, just imagine how hard it must be for the aging knockouts, the living dolls. Lauren Slater, self-described frowzer, wonders at the debutante-come-lately she miraculously becomes when fitted with a new and expensive suit. Brenda Miller observes from a distance her once-unencumbered self, when, at nineteen, she hitchhiked solo to Grateful Dead concerts and danced with a body unaware of its inevitable cessation: [That girl] has no doubts, no worry, no fear: Those clumsy emotions will belong to her older self, a middle-aged woman who watches from her post in the future, amused but also a little annoyed, a bit peeved with that girl's careless beauty, her navet, a faith that holds solid as an acolyte's.