What do your fifties look like?
My mother told me about different age landmarks – 25 you think you know it all, 35 you realize you didn’t know anything and so you set your sights ahead, 40 your sexuality awakens and then you enter your 50s – young lady, she wrote me, this is when you become a woman.
Damn, if my mother wasn’t the smartest woman in the world. What is different about the 50s than the other years – well, you arrive with a story, many stories, a history, a past, several pasts, you are still a sensual being but sex doesn’t define you, it orbits planet you.
Invisible you say – no, that’s for shrinking violets. If you are not seen and heard, it’s because those receptacles are closed in the one doing the looking, the hearing. A woman in her 50s is not trying to make herself small and when she commands a room, it’s not because her dress is too short or her cleavage too revealed, it’s because the years that have gone into her making have created a masterpiece, a prism where light enters and reflects back through a colorful kaleidoscope.
A woman in her 50s is a cathedral whose welcome is akin to being submerged in holy water. Don’t worry about her scorn, there is none, she left judgment back in her 40s when she too was comparing herself to others.
If you think you know what it’s like to be a woman in her 50s, you must be one, because otherwise how could you know?
Friday’s my birthday and I’ll be 55 years old and as I just told my friend, my 50s have been revolutionary. I wish yours to be the same.