I fell apart in my mid-40s. The story is messy, like life. Life in a female body, in a world that eats girls, caught up to me and I fell down. Literally. And when I got up, it was hard to stay up.
A curious thing happened in the midst of falling apart, though. I started writing. Words spilled out of me in a ceaseless rush. After a lifetime of yearning to uncork the creative, it happened unbidden, in my darkest hour. All those words on the page have somehow carried me into a new, surprising stage of my life. Creativity sort of saved me.
“Funny, frank, moving, unpredictable. Oldster makes me proud to be old.” - Rona Maynard
I’ve become a little obsessed with the stories of creative women and aging. Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first of her Little House books at 65. Sojourner Truth worked for women’s suffrage and civil rights well into her seventies. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78, when arthritis made embroidery too difficult. Rachel Ruysch, the brilliant Dutch still-life painter, proudly signed her age on her paintings and worked into her eighties. Toni Morrison, our brightest literary voice and a force for feminism and racial equality, worked deep into her eighties. Beatrice Wood — the Mama of Dada — made art until the end of her astounding 105 years, publishing an autobiography, I Shock Myself, at a relatively young 92.
Aging is an effective teacher, if we listen. It counsels patience and acceptance, offers perspective and experience. The decades can whittle away our concern for the opinions of others, prune the unnecessary and allow us to blossom as we are, as we want to be. I care so much less now for protocol, for norms, for the rules of society. Through the cycles, seasons, wins, and losses, it’s getting up and bouncing back that trains us for the marathon. The storms are easier when we’ve survived so many.
We know the Western tropes about women and aging. Clichés abound, from the old blue-hairs in compression hose, playing bridge and griping about the weather, to the plastic socialites, refurbished to a cartoon approximation of youth. Tara Bahrampour writes, “In the end, society’s stereotypes about aging may turn out to be the biggest creativity killers.” She goes on to say, “Older artists can also be galvanized by their own sense of mortality.” Valerie Trueblood, 69, a Seattle writer who didn’t publish her novel, Seven Loves, and two short story collections until her 60s, said age can bring greater urgency to the creative process.”
In Anna Louie Sussman’s, “Why Old Women Have Replaced Young Men as the Art World’s Darlings,” the South African artist Sue Williamson observes, “Women in later life often push aside their anxieties about satisfying the market, and competing with their male colleagues for attention, and just make work which pleases themselves, first and foremost.”
They also push aside the need to satisfy the world’s gaze. Maya Angelou said, “The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it.” I’m not really a dirndl and magnolia kind of girl, but maybe I’ll finally wear those high-waisted Hepburn trousers. A men’s white button down with a popped collar. Some vintage velvet and a Garbo cloche. Maybe I’ll start smoking. Why not?
“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.” — Gloria Steinem
In the U.S., there are more than 60 million women over the age of 45. What are they doing? They’re doing everything. All of the things. They’re raising kids and grandkids, nurturing careers, running for office. Doctoring, lawyering, judging, and teaching. Building, designing, painting, and writing. Getting busy, staying busy, making it all up all over again. In spite of the vagaries and the decades, in spite of a culture that tells us to put up or shut up, women are making joyful, rageful noise and polishing up this old world wherever we see its shine waning. Women are awake and we’re pissed.
If you Google image search the word woman, the results look as though you typed young and white, as well. When searching women over 50, one is smacked in the face with lists. “Women Over 50 with Bikini Bragging Rights.” “The Sexiest Women Over 50.” “Women Over 50 with the Bodies of Twentysomethings.” “Best Exercise for Women Over 50!” The myths live on. Women are bodies. Young bodies are better bodies. Women using their bodies make headlines. How a woman looks is who she is. The Google search definition of woman is the culture’s go-to, a knee-jerk caricature. A grotesque stereotype.
A woman is a story, a history, and a mystery. She is — regardless of her age, shape, color, size, or inclinations — worthy. She’s learned from her decades and she has weapons — so don’t mess. If she likes you, maybe she’ll feed you. Maybe she’ll keep you alive.
I trip over the bullshit platitude, “Aging is great!” It’s not, not always, not even usually. Things break, they wane and wobble. Aging is a fraught landscape, full of pop-up terrors and bland landscapes. We lose people, through apathy, entropy, or plain old expiration. We struggle with previously unconsidered tasks (jar lids anyone?) and find our bodies disappointing our active brains. But we write our own scripts and choose which attitude to wear. Gravity will do its work and the bad news will get thicker on the ground, but we have ideas. We have plans and we’re bringing our lessons with us.
“Listen, the best advice on aging is this: What’s the alternative? The alternative, of course, is death. And that’s a lot of shit to deal with. So I’m happy to deal with menopause. I’ll take it.” — Whoopi Goldberg
Aging, it turns out, is largely about attitude. In Psychology Today, Christopher Bergland writes: “Recently, researchers identified that having positive self-perceptions about the benefits of getting older can create a self-fulfilling prophecy by helping someone stay mentally, physically, and psychologically younger.” There are two women in my life who raged at the dying of the light into their nineties. They struggled, in part, because of circumstance — failing bodies and minds clearly challenge optimism. But their misery was also colored by the way they both staked their value to youth and beauty. They absorbed the lessons and messages of an ugly, youth-obsessed, misogynist culture and spent their decades chasing the things that fit the narrative — the trappings and trinkets, the decor and the decorum. Neither of them wore purple or sat on the pavement when they were tired. They were cruel to their caregivers and their sadness was untouchable. They did not accept inevitable decline, and abandoned creativity. They slid into dementia and left the world kicking and screaming, shells of their former selves.
Conversely, two of the most positive people I’ve had the pleasure to know are women in the same age group. They are sisters, my great-aunts, and they embraced life at each stage. They visited friends and family, loved film and books, and were always looking to learn and grow. They remained curious and creative, making things deep into their nineties. Even with the bad hands that aging dealt — the loss of husbands, the surgeries, the physical decline (the literal bad hands) — they were/are themselves (one until her end and the other still at 97). They took little direction from a culture that ignores them. They delighted in the people they love and reveled in the lives they created.
I can’t know yet which category I’ll land in, but at least I’ve done the research. Forewarned is, hopefully, forearmed. Age is coming for all of us. The decades will pile on until they all fall away. It’s up to us what we make of it, what we create through it. Use the material wisely — oblivion awaits, the fun is here.
Now, I’m 61. After years of looking inward, tending fires and licking wounds, I’m up. I’m well enough, though the trials — menopause, aging parents, needy children, the hard work of marriage, plain old garden-variety aging — are still buzzing about, demanding my attention. I have more patience for the whims of the world and less for the fools that run it. I’m beginning to sense a future, to see the next decade. I’m ready for a chapter of looking forward and around, instead of backward and in. A season of making and learning and working to change the mess all around me. I’ve absorbed a powerful secret — women are badass. Don’t ever count a woman out.
“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” — Betty Friedan
I’ve spent too much time lamenting what was lost and pining for the past. Yes, the knees hurt and the eyes are weird. The walks are slower and the sleep more precious. But the spirit is rising and looking to the future. When I’m 64, I hope to be savoring delicious accomplishment, toasting my winnings, tending to my inevitable and well-earned injuries, and looking toward the next ten years with enthusiasm. Perhaps I’ll have a party, with cocktails and canapés, and I’ll wear whatever pleases me. When I paint my masterpiece, it will be my very own hard-won victory, forged in the fires of trial and error, time and attitude. Or maybe I’ll just sleep late and make a pie. It’s my story.
Previously Lisa Renee published an essay called “Now We Are 60” in Oldster.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
Women, broadly speaking here, are used to not having, living with a garden variety of subsistence. By the time 60 rolls around, we are already agile and primed to express. We understand the value of life. Not that men, broadly speaking here, don't. But where they may struggle with letting go of status or promise of a legacy, we are free from that constraint. We are free, and that gives us the ease to do the things we think are important, for ourselves, our loved ones and for the world. We are fearless.
I celebrate every word of this: huge congratulations for having come to all this clarity, Lisa!
And your 70s can be even better - for me, it’s in many ways the best decade yet.
Rock on. 😊