Any Shiny Thing - Life after 50

Midlife Fiction

I Would Change a Thing

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Do you ever hear this?

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.

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Reflections on a Birthday

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I turned fifty-eight yesterday, so if you’ll permit me, I’d like to do a retrospective in pictures. [Read more…]

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X-rated Reasons I’m Happy to be a Boomer

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It was never easy. Dating, having sex with a new flame, figuring out the protocols. Now there’s a new reason for being happy you’re old: you’ve figured out sexual navigation. Not like the kids. They’re all screwed up. In Frank Bruni’s latest column, The Bleaker Sex, he says,

Young women are trying to feel the whole liberation thing by having the same meaningless, indiscriminate sex as men have always had.

Bruni quotes Ms. Lena Dunham, director of a new HBO series called Girls:

…modern cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way that she couldn’t quite manage. “I heard so many of my friends saying, ‘Why can’t I have sex and feel nothing?’ It was amazing: that this was the new goal.”

This is why we burned our bras? Okay, nobody ever really burned bras – that’s an urban legend – but I was hoping that Women’s Lib was about being true to yourself, not imitating men.

But to my point, and I did have one: Thank God I’m no longer young, and embroiled in the sexual turmoil of dating and all that follows. If you’re ever tempted to feel bad about being old, consider this: apparently, the abundance of high-def pornography is tricking the brains of young men into preferring their online “relationships” with porn stars over that of their girlfriends. A 41-year old lawyer, single, describes the shift:

I don’t like to believe that porn is replacing anything I have with my girlfriend,” he says, “but she asked me recently why she always has to be the one to initiate things. And she was right; I guess I’ve been fading from her. It’s like all that time with these porn stars was subduing any physical desire for my girlfriend. And, in some weird way, my emotional need for her, too.

Imagine being a young woman, intrigued by a new man, and finding out the first time in the sack that he’s overcooked rigatoni, and then your girl buddies tell you that it’s happening to them too.

It turns out that being twenty or thirty-something, with taut, smooth skin and thick hair isn’t enough. Now young women are expected to compete with porn stars.

Here’s what you’re up against, according to Bruni:

…the buffet of fetishistic porn available twenty-four-seven has made age-old sexual practices seem unexciting. Insufficient, somehow.

Every now and then you see a letter in the advice columns written by a lonely wife whose husband comes home from work and spends the evening in front of his computer screen, checking stocks. (That’s probably code for “pants around socks.”) He’s addicted to porn, the wife laments. How do you compete with that? In my day, porn was found in magazines, and later, the adult section of the video store. Men were happy just to have someone to go to bed with. Now they expect – well, I can’t say it. This isn’t that kind of column.

However, in researching this issue I learned that there are real men out there, guys who are sophisticated enough to know the difference between a real woman and the screen version. (I also bookmarked this website – it’s geared toward young men, so for me it’s like spying on the other side. Fun!)

So here’s my question: have you heard of this new preference of young men for digital girlfriends as opposed to the living, breathing, real thing? Do you think it’s just young men, or is it Boomers, too? What do you think?

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Oprah Struggles to Reinvent Herself

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O Magazine was started twelve years ago. How many articles do you think Oprah Winfrey has published about reinvention? Yet it seems even for the Big O, it’s not that easy. (Boomers everywhere hide a half-smile of schadenfreude.)

Used to be the only time we had to invent ourselves was in our late teens, early twenties.

“What are you going to do with your life?” was the big question. Now we have to recreate ourselves every decade or so due to job insecurity. Capitalism depends on creative destruction, and the United States is the envy of the world in the way our CEOs can toss workers into the garbage whenever the balance sheet needs more black ink.

Most of us are vulnerable. We’re the little guy, Joe Employee. We don’t have much power, unless you’re one of the few remaining union members and even they are pretty much toast. Witness the tens of thousands of highly trained and educated teachers who stay home every day, losing their edge as opposed to educating the next generation. But I digress.

Little Guy, take heart. You’re not alone. It seems Oprah is flailing about in her new life-phase. (Warning: mute this article because otherwise you’ll be force-fed an annoying commercial.)

Apparently Oprah’s reinvention has hit a rough patch. Her new cable channel is sucking wind. I feel her pain because I’ve been there, stepping off the cliff from where you are golden into a place where you are tin. You feel as if you’re twenty years old again, but not in a good way. In your new incarnation, you have little power or authority, and must slave away to rebuild it. But this time you’re forty or fifty or sixty or more.

In my late forties, I left a profession in which I’d established a twenty-seven year history and threw myself into freelancing. After ten years of trying and failing, changing my mind, feeling lost and/or depressed, wasting time, wasting money and learning things I’ll never need, I’ve finally figured out my new career. Apparently I’m a teacher and a writer. I’m so happy, it’s obviously the right choice.

From my new vantage point, I’d give younger people this advice: think of yourself as a small business. You may have to reshape it or carry it to an unexpected place, but this will be less jarring if you plan for it. What would you do if you were suddenly tossed from your current job?

Burnish that business called You, Inc.

WHILE YOU’RE EMPLOYED, learn everything you can, network with those who can further your career, keep your eye out to alternate but related industries, think of side businesses you can build in your spare time for emergency cash, and save your money. Living within your means is the ultimate power over the unpredictable future.

For the older people, my peers, this is something you’ve already discovered. If you need tips from your contemporaries about reinvention and finding work in mid-to-later-life, here are several:

I wish you success and contentment, and I hope you’ll take some comfort from knowing that the great Oprah is struggling, too.

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Easier to Give than Receive

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I like money. I mean, who doesn’t? So why is it so hard for me to accept it from people to whom I’m giving a skill or benefit?

Mika Brzezinsky wrote about this in Knowing Your Value: Women, Money and Getting What You’re Worth. Women are good at giving, but not so good at taking. That’s beautiful, and the world needs more of it, but sometimes we stand in our own way. Mika careened from not asking her bosses for adequate pay, to asking inappropriately (acting like a man would, since that’s who modeled the intervention for her), to asking in a way that was true to her comfort level. The last time, when she asked authentically, it happened.

Part of my problem is that I am starting a new business, so my students were my guinea pigs. I didn’t feel it was right to charge them for something that wasn’t particularly polished, but now it’s a valuable product, so I had to break the news.

I felt like a jerk, but I did it, and they were beautiful!

“Of course; your classes are worth it!” was the general sentiment. I am so relieved, but I still feel kind of clunky. To be honest, I dread when my book is published and I have to take money for that. Not the money part. The take part.

I never had any problem negotiating in a corporate setting, because for some reason that seems impersonal. My problem is asking individuals to open their very own wallet and share their personal cash with me.

Some of it is my upbringing: very Catholic. We were taught to give and give and give until it hurts. And then give some more. From my North Dakota German heritage I got the idea that we only give, never take. And then there’s this timeworn maxim: it’s better to give than receive. Right?

My parents taught me to give. My mother worshiped sacrifice and we kids were indoctrinated. No surprise I supported two jobless husbands. When I met Prospective Husband Number Three, I took him to be interviewed by my therapist. Seriously – I didn’t trust my own judgment. After thirty minutes, Dr. N looked at me and said, “He’s got a job. What the hell do you see in him?”

But I digress. Women still earn less than men, and one reason is because they don’t ask, let alone negotiate.

Here’s a surprise: the younger generations are no better.

When interviewed about their book, Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, authors Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever say this:

A lot of the younger women we talked to…believe that they’re just as assertive about what they want as their male peers. Unfortunately, this is not true. Younger women may assume that things have changed far more than they have, but our studies show that even among men and women in their 20s and early 30s, men are much more likely to initiate negotiations than women.

I’m going to take a stab here and say it’s probably about two things: one, our indoctrination as caregivers and nurturers, and two, the lack of role models. I guess that was redundant.

The situation perpetuates itself.

In the future I’m going to read up on and study more about this topic for my own benefit, yours, and that of my daughters and granddaughters. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making a sacrifice for those you love, but it can’t be all you, all the time. The act of taking cash from your peers may feel creepy, but giving away your work feels worse.

Have you experienced this inability to ask for what you’re worth? Did you figure out a way to overcome it? What’s your story?

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Why Can’t We Die Like Dudley?

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My brother and his wife recently put their beloved German Shorthair to sleep. Dudley was ready. (The photo is not of him). Bro said Dudley told them when when it was time, and they put him on a blanket in the yard and gave him the blue juice (my sis-in-law is a veterinarian.) I am sure they petted him and cried, but it sounds like a pretty good way to go. Dudley died with the sun on his flanks, the smell of grass in his nostrils, and the love of his family all around him. I wish we humans would permit each other such a sweet farewell.

Of course, that’s not how we do it, because human life is more valuable than dog life, and the risk is too great. Instead, we pull out all the stops to keep each other alive in spite of great illness, pain and struggle. Or at least that’s how the general public handles it. Doctors? That’s another story.

In this article entitled How Doctors Die by Ken Murray, a cardiologist reveals that doctors are so averse to the normal life-saving techniques visited on the dying that they even go so far as to have No Code (i.e., no CPR)  tattooed on their bodies. Here is one reason: did you know that in order to properly conduct CPR on a patient, ribs are usually broken? How’d you like your old mom to have to deal with that? Here’s an excerpt:

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

I have had more surgeries than your normal 57-year-old, and were it not for these surgeries I’d have been dead several times over. I think I have a bod that’s inclined that way, so I think about things like this, and if I were to receive a grave diagnosis, I’d forego all the extreme measures and enjoy the rest of my time on earth. What a privilege to have enough advance notice that you could get your files in order (shutting down all my online accounts would take days!) and lay the groundwork for sending your loved ones off into the future comfortably instead of torturing yourself with toxic chemicals and premature hospitalization.

Of course, the problem is that medical knowledge is incomplete, and we can’t often say with a high degree of certainty that all efforts are useless and we may as well go quietly, but if I were lucky enough to get such certainty, I think I’d rather get the blue juice. Wheel me close to the window, hook me up to the morphine, and adios, muchachos.

I hope I didn’t bum you out but I believe this topic deserves more attention. Now that I’ve raised the issue, I’ll drop it. The sun’s coming up, the day is young, and we’ve got livin’ to do.

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