Anyway, I challenged you to start negotiating. Look for opportunities to improve your life, I said. Just ask for a sweetener. You might be surprised.

But then I did the exact opposite of what I told you.

Last Tuesday I went to my local gym to see how much it would cost to get a trainer. My workout routine is as old as I am, and I need something I can do at home, because in a few months I’m doing a deep dive into fulltime babysitting.

The sales person told me it would cost $150 to sign up for the training (on top of the gym membership that I already paid for), and $60 a week for one session. Holy crap! Are you kidding me? Pleading poverty, I rose to leave.

But she was a nice young woman, and persistent, so I stayed. I kept thinking of that darned book called Ask for It, and the authors, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, pleading with us women to believe them. To paraphrase: “women get taken all the time because they don’t ask! Men are richer because they ask!” So I asked her to waive the signup fee. My heart was pounding and I felt awkward (as in  cheap, weak, low-class), but I had this weird feeling that Sara and Linda were hovering over me, arms crossed, and ready to hit me with an imaginary rolling pin. So I stuck to my guns. Well, half my guns – I still thought $60 per session was too high, but I didn’t have any more courage.

The girl went to ask her manager. He came back. We talked. Then he dropped the price! I walked away with NO signup fee and $45 a session, good for as long as I want. No, I am not kidding. I felt like crying and hugging these people. I love them, and I love my gym (only fair to say, it’s LA Fitness).

So here’s what I learned, for future negotiations:

1. Before you arrive at the negotiating table, decide what your bottom line is (I failed to do this and it left me sputtering at a time when it was important to appear confident.) My bottom line was $45, a fact I only realized when I walked out of the gym thinking, “I feel good about this price. For this price, I will stick with the program.”

2. Remind yourself, once you’re at the table, that women don’t tend to bargain. This leaves more money for the men. So be a man. Bargain.

Since women usually do not bargain (a documented fact), they have less money later in life (also a documented fact). We need to preserve our cash, girls. And, at our age, after all we’ve been through, we should have the cajones to do it.

We might be wrinkly, but what comes with old age? Power!

The power of knowing you’re worth it, whatever it is. Of knowing you’d rather go without, than feel sick about going along. Next time you’re about to spend money, ask yourself if you feel good about it. Ask the seller if there’s any wiggle room. Ask if they can do any better. Ask to step away to make a phone call. Ask for time to think. Ask for anything, but for the sake of your own well-being, learn to ask.

Why the hell did humans have to get stuck with knowing they’re mortal?

It’s such a burden, and it’s a special gift to humans alone. Animals have no concept (although sometimes I wonder about elephants). Think how comforting it would be to have the limited consciousness of a dog, for example. You eat, sleep, poop, and watch for opportunities. You don’t think about your eight missing litter-mates or parents.

And then this is amazing: we humans adjust. I can go a whole month or two without feeling bad about Dad. What an underrated coping mechanism! We not only get used to the idea that we’ll lose our loved ones, but once we do suffer such a loss, we adapt and move on. The drive to survive wins out over grief, and even allows us to repress the knowledge that some day, we’re going to deliver that same blow to our loved ones.

Recently I noticed Bill was moping around. He was missing his parents, he said, but when I tried to comfort him, he declined. “The pain reminds me  of the love I felt for them. They were good parents.” Bill, who doesn’t believe in a God or afterlife, believes he will live on through the people he’s influenced positively.

I get fearful sometimes in the wee hours, when the arithmetic seems more stark and life more of a crap shoot. Like you, I’ve survived tragedy; I’ve dealt with situations that made me feel almost mentally ill at the realization of a horrendous truth, or some kind of great loss. Sometimes it seems we humans know too much. One way to alleviate that burden is a form of denial: you stay busy and productive, enjoy the sun on your face and the fragrance of new-mown grass, and try to ignore it.

I finally told Bill about my existentialist woes. I didn’t want to bum him out, because he’s always such a Pollyanna and I didn’t know if he could handle my dark side. He shrugged and said, “Life is wonderful, but it IS a ticking bomb.” Cracked me up. I felt relieved. We  know we will die. The choice is what we do with that knowledge.

I’ve pretty much decided to ignore the fact in favor of energetic productivity, and let the chips fall where they may. What about you? What’s your strategy for dealing with this?

Battle Station

But I click on it because it might be important. Proof, finally, that yes I am descended from Catherine the Great.

More likely, one of my cousins in Rushville, Indiana (you know who you are) misspelled a name, which appears to Ancestry.com’s voracious, data-crunching computers to be an interesting new fact. My neck and shoulders hurt, and I think I’m getting tendinitis in my right elbow.

And when I fill in my own little boxes, including my three marriages, my part of the tree will look like it got doused with Miracle-Grow.

But my mother is so excited. My God, after decades of schlepping around a shopping bag containing little slips of paper with the approximate names of unfamiliar maybe-relatives, her computer-adept daughter will finally use her talents for something worthwhile.

Like finding out what Mom’s long-dead mother-in-law was hiding all these years.

Seeing all those connected boxes spread out across the page, those names representing whole lives and generations, is kind of sobering, though. This is my family! All those great-great-great grandmothers and fathers and kids and their offspring, lived and died – you see it, and you can’t help but feel a bit melancholy. Their stories are poignant. Life was hard. Like in Austria/Hungary, my great-grandfather’s family couldn’t offer him any land on which to start his family. The land had run out. These farmers were forced to choose between conscription in the Austrian army (and serve as cannon fodder for the Turks), or leave their parents and grandparents forever and move to the great unknown America.

Hah. One ancestor said the winters in North Dakota were so terrible, they would have been better off in Siberia.

I’ve unearthed ship’s passenger lists that show my ancestors immigrating from Germany and Hungary (I think we’re Transylvanian). Long lists of families. Typically, you see the names of the father (occupation: farmer), mother (occupation: spouse), and eight, ten, twelve kids. Holy hell, can you imagine traveling across the ocean in steerage with that lot? What guts. What strength. My relatives were powered by dreams and desperation.

I feel humbled. All those lives, come and gone. Born and died. Geboren and gestorben.

The span of human existence is short, and right now I am keenly aware of my mortality. I want to savor every minute, before somebody fills in the gestorben date on my Ancestry box. So I’m hanging up now. You, too. Go out and play, and enjoy your precious life.

Homestead in North Dakota c. 1850

But I did make his breakfast this morning, a scramble of eggbeaters, mushrooms, organic spinach and shallots, and sun-dried tomatoes. So it evens out.

Bill is happily retired, but my hair’s on fire. He’s thrilled with my brain-and-heart-bashing efforts to start a new business. I write and teach, and I drive all over hell and back and spend money and blabber about all the cool stuff I’m learning and the people I’m meeting. I mean, he’s lucky, right? To have such a vibrant, interesting wife.

But still, sometimes I can see he’s humoring me with my worrying and contemplating and all. And then I’m also shallow. I was growing my hair longer because I thought it would hide my neck (see Nora Ephron) but ultimately I had to accept that I am too lazy to care and anyway I’m always squawking about being okay with your age and all, but this was a turning point, because I’m never going to try it again. So I gave all my curlers and hair products away, again.

He just watched and waited. He loves my hair short. Is it too Stepford of me to say I’m grateful for that? Good thing his eyesight isn’t that great anymore. In fact, living in a 55+ community is good that way. We all think we look better than we do. Nobody notices my neck.

He acts like I’m the prize, but I think he is. Bill plays tennis three times a week. He’s six three, down to two-twenty since he started working on his cholesterol. Legs up to here, olive skin, and a devious brain. He’s endlessly interesting and evolving. Feels like we’ve been together all our lives, but we’ve both been married before – twice. Sometimes we get our marriages mixed up. I’ll say, “Didn’t we go to Santa Fe that one winter?” and he’ll say, “Must’ve been a different husband.” You’d think that’d be embarrassing but we’re over it. Another good thing about being older.

This week we celebrated our fifteenth anniversary, which means I’m moving into the pole position – married to him longer than either of his two exes. He says with his first wife he was spoiled and entitled; with his second he tried to make amends by being a doormat, but she wiped her feet on him. So now, forged and tempered by heartache and loss, he’s perfect for me.

He lost his wedding ring a few years ago. It fell into the guts of his recliner. We rolled that chair all over the living room trying to get the ring to shake out, and we could hear it, but no good. Short of getting a chain saw. We figured when the chair wore out, we’d do just that, but the years passed and we forgot which of the two identical chairs it was in. Then we gave the chairs to my son.

The other day Danny texted me. He had the ring. I got a box, and on our anniversary dinner, I gave the ring to Bill and asked him to marry me again.

He said no.

Just kidding.

Sure, I had it bad when I was growing up, but I wouldn’t change a thing. It made me who I am today.

I admire the “can-do” spirit in those words – the refusal to be kept down by adversity. Since we can’t go back and change things, I guess it’s good to adapt, but what if adaptation involves denial, and that denial interferes with our ability to enjoy the last half of our lives?

I’ll give you an example. My friend, let’s call her “Carol,” had a horrible childhood, worse than you can fathom, so bad that I’m not going to describe it. Carol says it made her what she is today. Let me tell you, what she is today is heartbreakingly valiant. She labors along, saving the world with her heroic efforts, but never seems to get what she wants or needs. Most of her efforts benefit others.

I had a challenging childhood, so I have the battle scars to speak to this. I ask Carol, “What if we hadn’t had to endure such torture? Who or what might we have become?” She refuses to consider it, as if the answer would open a Pandora’s Box.

My upbringing made me a slave for many years, always putting everyone else first, or hypersensitive to the moods of others, unable to relax and enjoy fulfilling my own needs. I still fight the tendency (like you?) to apologize all the time, and I tend to fidget, doing repetitive movements that substitute, no doubt, for banging my head against the wall in frustration.

What if Carol had been born to parents who adored her and told her how smart and capable she was? For she is a genius, and hugely talented, but has hidden her light under a barrel for almost sixty years. This girl could have played Carnegie Hall, or written the Great American Novel. Instead…not. She’s a hero, no doubt about it. She’s the hero of her life, the same role I decided to shed almost twenty years ago.

I’m sure it’s wrong to extrapolate from just Carol and me, so I’ll refer you to one of the most useful books I’ve ever read, The Narcissistic Family by Pressman and Pressman. An excerpt:

One of the biggest problems for adults raised in narcissistic family systems is that they tend to take responsibility for things over which they have little or no control, yet refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to them today.

I started watching the new HBO series, Girls, but couldn’t even get through the first episode. Everybody is so young and vulnerable. Thank God we get older and, I do believe, smarter. At least most of us. For Carol and the rest, I pray you win the lottery so you can quit working so damned hard and enjoy the rewards you deserve.