Photo by Joshua Kessler
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Being 50: I’m a Lucky Woman
By Mary Gordon, May & June 2006
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It is both easier and harder than I expected. I can no longer pull
all-nighters or sleep on someone's floor in a sleeping bag. The sags and
bulges: let's move on.
But there are gains, even more significant than not having to shave your
legs so often. The most important for me is that I'm not the prisoner of
people's opinion that I once was. This is not to say that I will walk among
others of my kind without eyeliner. But I no longer proceed into a cocktail
party in dread of the judgment by some stranger shoving a spring roll into his
mouth. I no longer feel I can't relax in a café until I've heard
that "click" that means that some man has registered that I am among
those women worth being considered.
Even flirting feels different: less a compulsion, more a game. It seemed a
real turning point when, a few months ago at a dinner, I had to decide whether
to have a playful conversation with a nice young man whose hair curled like a
Renaissance prince's or engage a young woman in talk about her interesting
work. I chose the woman.
But this young woman understood me in a way that I am not yet quite used to
understanding myself. She thought of me as an elder. I am still surprised when
people look to me for advice, as if I had a kind of wisdom I don't often
believe I have. I suppose if I looked at my career as if it were someone
else's, at my children as if they were some other woman's progeny, I
might get it. But I'm still surprised that people think of me, that I must
think of myself, as one of the grownups, when so often I feel overwhelmed.
Sometimes like a kid, a work in progress, whose end is far from certain. Will
it be a success story? Or a depressing one about someone who thought she had
things in her grasp, only to discover she'd been deluding herself.
Many of us believed we were going to eliminate poverty and
racism by the time we were in our 50s.
Mortality shadows, far more than when I was younger. I have to understand
that there are things I will never do that I always believed I would. I will
never learn Russian or become a competitive ballroom dancer. Dear friends and
relatives have passed on. There have been health scares: bullets dodged, but
for how long? The yearly mammogram; the colonoscopy. Always approached with a
catch in the breath: is this the one that'll bring bad news?
What can be difficult—or let's use the more positive word,
challenging—about the 50s is figuring out exactly what it means to be
this age. What is—the hateful word—appropriate? There is what I
think of as the fear of being Norma Desmond—the character in the movie
Sunset Boulevard, terrifyingly played by Gloria Swanson—someone trying to
hold on to youth too ferociously and too long. What is the balance between a
healthy concern for one's own appearance—and Norma Desmond?
This kind of thing is particularly hard to figure out because the
possibilities for youthfulness in the 50s are greater than ever before. When we
think of our own mothers in their 50s, it's impossible to imagine them
contemplating wearing a bikini. Plastic surgery was for movie stars. It
wasn't nearly so disreputable to sink into a comfortable middle age. We
couldn't imagine ourselves middle-aged, unhip, shocked by the younger
generation.
When I am about to rail about the aggressiveness of rap music, the lack of
melody in hip-hop, I remember my mother saying she thought Bob Dylan sounded
like a cat in his death throes. Being baby boomers, we are always liable to
think that our sheer numbers make us the norm. It's not easy to be told,
sometimes unkindly, that we're not. So many things have changed, but some
things haven't changed enough. Many of us believed we were going to
eliminate poverty and racism by the time we were in our 50s. Our childhoods
were marked by anxieties about the atomic bomb, our youth by the quagmire of
Vietnam—but none of us was prepared for the age of terrorism.
But there are those moments when it all seems to come together. This past
Christmas, my husband and I and our 22-year-old son were visiting my daughter
and her husband for the holidays; my son-in-law's parents and his
grandmother were there as well. The young ones had sent us oldsters out so they
could prepare dinner. Banished, the five of us walked through the farmers'
market. A 16-year-old boy who had arrived in California from Ukraine was
playing Bach on the violin. We bought figs and dates and flavored olive oil. We
talked about our wonderful children.
I thought of what I'd done in the years since I was my children's
age. And a deep feeling of satisfaction covered me. It was okay to be who I
was: a woman, no longer young. But lucky.
Mary Gordon's most recent book is
Pearl (Anchor, 2006). She lives in New York City and is a professor
of English at Barnard College.
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