Ageless

 

So in a joke to my coworkers, I said “Well, I’m almost 40 so you gen-Zers can just suck it”. The fact is, 36 is still a way yet, but rounding up and exaggerating is my jam. We’re in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. So I’d be lying if I said I’m not a tad obsessed with my spare tire and my receding hairline. Every TV and movie ever made about women in suburban life is that they have this hidden boredom or sadness or that their husbands don’t desire them anymore (even the feminist ones where she rebels). It’s tired and old. I wonder whatever happens to the graceful but feisty woman in the suburb, she is with careers and with a life so mundane and undramatic that we all miss it. Guess that’s why no one made it into a movie.

The truth is I love my mundane suburban life. I like my garden. I like my home office. I like the parks and the bike paths. On most days, I like my husband too. (OK, kidding, I love my husband all day). As the world goes back to “normal” – i.e. we are all pretending that Covid never happened; there is this growing anxiety of me in the pre-pandemic life. The “normal” world was built for extroverts. It was built on the back of working-class people and exploitations. The “normal” work is built on dirty politics and polarizing elections. You escape the “normal” world by traveling to destinations like third-world countries where we exploit the locals for our escapism fantasy. 

People always say that marriage is about “waking up next to someone for the rest of your life” like it is always about someone else, always someone else’s responsibility to make you feel happy, feel whole. Aging is about “waking up with yourself for the rest of your life”. You are fully responsible for the happiness and the wholeness of yourself. Self-care is more than bathtubs and candles. It’s the admission to yourself that you’re flawed and broken and that is ok, as long as you continue to invest in yourself long enough to fix all those broken pieces. 

So I guess my life turns out nothing like I’ve ever imagined. I’m like a moderately interesting housewife living in a moderate size house with moderate size savings and a moderately successful career. I’ve come to terms with the fact that no one will make a movie about my perfectly moderate life. And that’s ok.

Part of aging is you are giving so many opportunities to acquire grace, and grief the parts of your youth wild imaginations of what it could be. 

And all the opportunities and tools in the world to build a world that is moderately resemblance what our human psyche allowed to be called “Happiness”