Growing up, I’m not sure I ever really grasped the concept of age. It still escapes me at times. Most of the time, really. I just don’t think about it. How old am I? Sometimes I forget. No, I mean I honestly forget. I have to try to do the math (ouch) of the current year minus the year I was born to get the number, and then try to remember if I’ve had my birthday already this year or not. Of course, my older-than-me husband doesn’t seem to mind that I can’t remember how old he is, or how much older than me he is... It just doesn’t matter to me.
My friend Sarah once said something about how cool it was that we were friends because I was well over ten years older than her, but she never felt like I looked down on her or treated her as younger and less knowing than me. She was right. I never thought about her being younger. In fact, there were many times I went to her for advice and counsel on life matters.
What matters to me more than a number is how a person acts. And how a person acts is generally a reflection of how they feel inside, about themselves, about where they see themselves in life. I shock a lot of people when they find out my age (when I can remember it to tell them, or when I get carded for buying alcohol, which I take as a compliment!). But partly that’s due to how I consider myself mentally. I am terminally 19. Not for any particular reason. It’s a number that has just stuck with me. If I really think back on it, maybe it was a great year for me. A year of freedom, independence, coming into my twenties, whatever. It’s just a number that stuck in my head all these years, and I just live with it there. Maybe when I get even older, that number will shift, but it’s been there for a while now. People who think of age as their burden in life as they get older will, in fact, be burdened by themselves as they age.
Recently, as much as I don’t think about my age as a number, I have been feeling my age and recognizing myself as aging in memories that come to me as I go about my day. They are memories of my mother, who is still living. I am the seventh of eight children, and my mother didn’t have her first child until she was 20, and then we were all born fairly close together. So, you can imagine that by the time I was, oh, say eight, she had to be at least in her thirties, and had already gone through raising several and would have been brooding over several at the time. But, I never thought of her as a number, as an age. She was always just Mom.
I remember once she commented on my muscles, telling me what great shape I was in. I said she was, too, and she laughed. She pushed her finger into my thigh and said, “That’s muscle.” Then she pushed her finger into her own thigh, and I saw the pocketed ripples of cellulite as she said, “This is Jiffy cake!” Mind you, she was and still is in great shape for a woman birthing and raising eight children, she was just aging. (As my doctor sister says, and she would know – “Every woman, no matter how thin, gets cellulite when she gets old.”) These days, I’m not so active. I can still run and bike and swim, just not intensely. And when I look at myself in the mirror while I’m getting dressed, I see the layer of ripply cellulite on my thighs and butt. “Jiffy cake,” I tell myself, poking at it.
We live near enough to the lake that we could go to the beach and go swimming several times a week in the summer, if we wanted. But we don’t. Even when we do go to the beach, it’s to hunt rocks and not just lay out, soak up the sun or swim. I think I may have swum in the lakes once or twice last summer. And this is what I remember about my mother. She would take us kids to the beach and we would swim our little hearts out. We would go to the beach just about every day, as it was only about a mile from the house. And she might come in the water, and she might not. Sometimes she just stayed on the beach. Once all the kids were gone, and I asked her about going to the beach, she said she tries to get down there a few times each summer, on a walk or bike ride. It’s just not that big of a deal when you’re older, and I realize that now. It’s not that I don’t want to go, or wouldn’t go to the beach. I just don’t think about it so much. If I do go, swimming isn’t any big deal. I can do without it. I understand now what I didn’t when I was younger, that my mother was just at an age where she had lived it, done it, and it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know that I really cared or thought much of her behavior then, it’s just that now, I look back and go, “Oh, I get it. This is how Mom must have felt.” It’s just another way I realize that my mother is her own person, just as I am, and having these memories of her being that person, recognizing how she was her own person, I can accept what it is I’m now feeling as my own person.
I look at my hands. They are filled with crackly lines and age spots are beginning to emerge. I remember sitting at the kitchen table one night with my mother, pushing at the skin on the back of her hand, pinching it and watching it slowly go back. I couldn’t do the same with my young, tight flesh and she tried it, laughing at the difference in our skin. “My hands are like Grandma’s,” she said. “Farmer’s hands.” “No,” I said, “not like Grandma’s.” I couldn’t see it in her hands, but she could. And now, as I look at my hands, I realize they look like hers did that night at the kitchen table. I push the skin up in folds, I pinch it and watch it slowly drop back around my tendons. The last time I saw Mom, I looked at her hands. She was right. They do look like Grandma’s, as will mine someday.
“Time only moves forward.” It’s a comforting thing I tell myself when I am having a hard time with something. It helps me focus on knowing whatever it is that’s bugging me is only temporary, that it will end in some way, shape or form. Aging is just time moving forward. It only can. I wouldn’t want to go back in my life for anything. No matter the good, the bad, the losses. Nothing can be regained in this life. Certainly not time, nor youth. No laments. No regrets. I watch my mother carefully when I am with her. I watch her smile, I listen to her laughter. I watch the way she moves and carries herself. She’s shrinking, now, just as I remember her mother doing. Her bones settling in, she’s getting more compact. I see in her what I know I will be someday, and I’m okay with that. I have no idea how old she is right now, but I know someday I’ll be there, and by then, she won’t be here anymore. But, in a way, she will be. In my smile. In my laugh. In the way I move and carry myself. And I’ll know how old I am when I remember her. I’ll know I’m “there,” right where she had been before me.
