Who’s counting?

Dear Inquisitive Reader: To answer your question (“Can you still call yourself a birthday ‘girl’ at 51?”) here goes:

Yeah, even at 51, I can be a birthday girl. If the Beach Boys can still be the Beach Boys and not the Beach Men (or the Beached Men, for that matter), I can call myself a girl every once and a while. Funny number, 51, Bea Arthur age, but I’m still thinking that I’m not as old as I thought my parents were when they were 41, and thinking their “middle age” was remarkably different — which is why, in part, we don’t know how to do this, why there’s no instruction manual.

They were older at our age than we are, and that’s not just wishful thinking or denial. That’s a fact, a bone fide genuine difference. Remember the great movie Marty? (Either version — I know, I’ve written about it in another posting, but it is a great film.) In Marty, the title character’s “old” Italian mother says, “I’m 54 years old, I have strength in my hands, I want to cook, I want to clean….”

54 YEARS OLD.

I don’t think of 54 as old. But they did. And they were right because for them it meant they were of the older generation, that they had fully lived their lives. So there’s a legacy about age and fear and the ending of life that we need to shake off, like a dog shaking off rain or mud. This isn’t ours, even if we’ve rolled around in it and are covered with it. We’re not as old as they were at the same number.

Now maybe you don’t have this same baggage with your family, but my mother (as we all know from another earlier posting) died when she was 47. Think about it: 47. That’s not enough time to pack, that’s the middle of the first half of the second act, that’s a walk-on part in life, a cameo appearence. You don’t even get your name listed in the credits if your part is that brief.

So maybe all that gave me a kind of rush on time, a sense that I better get my act in gear if I’m going to get anything done, leave anything behind me at all, and that’s fueled the writing and the speaking and teaching — all of which have accelerated in order to compensate for having no children of my own, a need to make an impression another way, through words, through convincing myself that my work has made a difference.

This is no brag, it’s a way of figuring out how to justify my life: I get mail from young women writing their disserations in secret in Iran or China or Korea, who don’t have access to my academic stuff on feminist theory or metaphor or whatever, and I send it to them in plain brown wrappers (honest to God) because if they really want it I can’t imagine a better reason to keep doing it.

And that’s part of the business of being 51, I guess, which is figuring out what counts for real and not just the stuff that you know “should” count, but what keeps you doing what you do every day. I would have wished other things for myself — and I still hope for a few secret — shhhh — achievements. But there are some things no longer within my reach, and I’ve made peace with that; I don’t fall asleep hungry for what will never appear on my menu.

What was the old Rosemary Clooney song? “I Love Being a Girl”? And I do — and I also love being a woman, even one who looks like a short Bea Arthur.

One caveat, however: Just don’t believe anyone, woman or girl, who tells you it’s easy.

Image adapted from a photo by Flickr user Westernlady