Feature Post

Is Sixty the New Forty?

Written by Lady MacLeod from Braveheart does the Maghreb

When I read this headline in the New York Times this week, my immediate reaction was to sit up, raise both my arms into the air and shout, "Yes!". I have been thinking it over however and I am put in mind of what Gloria Steinem said when she was told, “You don’t look thirty.”

She replied, “This is what thirty looks like now.” Perhaps this is what sixty looks like now. With a new emphasis on exercise and eating right more people are remaining very active for much longer. Sixty is not an outrageous age to begin a new career, a new romance, take up a sport, or move to a foreign country. We see actors like Bruce Willis (50’s) and Harrison Ford (60’s) star in action movies, and doing it well. Women like Catherine Deneuve (60’s) still setting fire to the big screen, give us with a smaller stage, ideas.

I am on the close side of sixty and lie about it to no one. In the past year I moved to a foreign country in which I do not speak either of the languages, and very few people speak English. I have begun a new career, and I have a romantic life as well.

Being the exception to the rule is not new to me, but in this case I don’t think it applies. My daughter’s grandmother is 75 years old and runs rings around men and women half her age. She and her husband who is the same age are presently in the Bering Sea in their sixty-four foot boat for four months – quite alone and very much capable of the physical and mental agility required for such a voyage.

The cultural permission and even encouragement, to get out and do more challenging activities as we age is contributing to a generation that is going to the barn much later than generations before, and liking it. We feel we still have much to contribute to the world at large and our own lives in particular.

One observes climbers going up Everest that are sixty and beyond, marathon runners are getting older by decades, and even baseball legends are remaining on the field long after their predecessors had gone. I think this is a trend that will continue. Who knows with the advances in medicine and research how long the life span can be extended.

This generation is also more interested in the development of a true spiritual life, not to be confused with a religious life, than their parents. There is no longer a stigma associated with meditation, yoga, and exercise that also centers the spirit such as Tai Chi.

Tales of study into the creation of human clones, growing new organs with stem cells, and the old standby of plastic surgery lend credence to the hopes of active and attractive centenarians. What was once science fiction may become the scientific truths of the near future.

I think in this day of longer and healthier lifespan we can ask ourselves the same questions we did at twenty. What do I want from this life? Who do I want to be? Do I want to coast along or have adventures, take some chances? It is easier this time ‘round I should think as we are not now encumbered with the responsibilities of parenting a young child, or starting a new career, or meeting our parents expectations. Take that trip you “always wanted to”. Learn to skydive. Flirt with a stranger. Close your eyes and point to a place on the map and then head out.

I think this is what sixty looks like and it looks damn good from here.

Lady Macleod at Braveheart does the Maghreb.
The daily tales of a western woman living in North Africa with the occasional political rant. Posting recently on heat, shopping, emergency medical care, and how to dress for a Moroccan wedding.

He Just Is.

Written by BetteJo from A Bead A Day

“Sweetie I’ll be back in a minute, I need to keep an eye on the pizza.”

Y’know he didn’t even ask anything out loud. He just looked at me in horror. It took me a second and then I explained “Honey, I’m not actually putting my eye on the pizza. It just means I need to go into the kitchen to check on the pizza.” Relief flooded his face. My little literal boy was probably four-ish years old at the time.

He could read by then, which started when he was about two years old. There is something very startling about a boy that age in a diaper, actually reading. He would run from one end of the room to jump up on a chair, back down, across the room to the couch, up on that, back down again, only stopping when he would catch some text on the TV. He would stop, hopping from foot to foot never still, and would read whatever he saw.

“Oh he’s not really reading. He’s just memorized some words, or the commercials.” I got tired of saying “no, he is reading.” I would grab a magazine, a book, whatever was closest “Andy Honey, come here and tell me what this says, Sweetie.” He would stop what he was doing and look at what I was offering. And he would read it. Not always perfectly, but he would do it. And he understood it.

Hearing a pre-school teacher tell me that they didn’t think Andy would fit into their environment very well, maybe we should take him for testing, was frightening. Testing? What kind of testing. “Well” hemming and hawing, “we think he may be autistic.”

So there it was. Someone said it out loud. The precocious reading skills, the hyperactivity and the lack of eye contact, even the way he sat, were all indications that he truly was different. But autistic? There is no cure for autism! He is so smart – obviously I didn’t know anything about autism.

Having him tested just over twenty years ago, the diagnosis was hyperlexia with autistic tendencies. So what the hell did that mean?? I cried about it twice, once when I told my pediatrician the results of the testing and this tiny four foot ten inch Indian woman wrapped her arms around me and I bawled like a baby. Again that night in bed with my husbands back to me because he did not know how to comfort me. After that, we moved on.

There were no answers for anything I asked. Will he go to regular school? Will he be able to play and have friends and someday date and go to the prom and drive a car and get a job and do all the things I always thought my kids would do? Maybe, maybe not.

Oh my beautiful baby boy. So incredibly smart we never worried about his grades, mainstreamed in first grade, it was always the social skills and “normality” we worried about. He is twenty three years old now. We don’t talk about it as if he ever had any kind of diagnosis. He still learns things a bit differently than other people but he has his associate’s degree, a job, he drives a car, he has a website and moderates a second one. His sense of humor is wickedly dead on and quick and while it isn’t evident to the casual observer, he has a soft, sweet heart.

There were no answers to everything I asked. Only living, growing, learning with, and loving, my son Andy.

A Mom with two kids and a crazy amount of cats. New kid on the blogging block, selling jewelry online but more often, talking about whatever strikes me.

You can find me at http://bettejosbeadcreations.blogspot.com

Why I wish I’d Asked

Written by Anthea Rowan from Reluctant Memsahib

My children’s questions – if you closed your eyes and disguised the tones of their voices so that there was absolutely nothing to give away who was saying what other than the words they spoke – are a dead give away anyway.

This is my youngest: ‘Can I make ice lollies?’

This is my beautiful angry-verging-on-womanhood middle daughter, ‘OK, whose got my bloody lipgloss?’

And my son - my eldest - tall, gawky, perpetually hungry, ‘What’s for lunch?’

All children ask questions. They start young. And ask a lot of really stupid, really irritating, really frustratingly difficult-to-answer ones.

What’s that?

It’s a rolling pin.

What’s a rolling pin?

This. The thing in my hand.

Oh. Why is it in your hand?

Because I’m going to roll out this dough and you’re going to cut it into shapes.

Why?

So we can make biscuits.

Why?

So we’ve got something nice to eat for tea.

Why?

But you have to keep trying to answer them don’t you. Even if they can’t see the point of having something nice to eat for tea themselves. Even if you can’t articulate a response that won’t just elicit another Why. Or What.

If you stop answering their questions, they’ll stop asking them and questions are how they navigate their world. Later, asking questions is what makes them nice people to know. Ask a person questions and you demonstrate an interest in them; your questions engage them. Think about people who never ask questions: they’re dull as hell.

Ever wished you hadn’t asked a question? Ever asked a question that changed your life? I have: I asked my husband to marry me. If I hadn’t, somebody else might have done. Or I might have been waiting forever.

Ever regretted not asking questions. Often. There are hundreds I ought to have asked.

Oddly the questions dry up somewhere between adolescence and your thirties. It’s because you think you know everything then. Well you do, don’t you? And by the time you’ve realized you actually know remarkably little and certainly not as much as your parents and grandparents, the opportunity to ask may have gone. Because they have.

There are a million questions I’d like to have asked my dad. He died when I was Know-It-All-Nineteen. And years later, years and years later, I found I needed answers. And they fell into a void. Why did I need answers then? Why? Because, said the kind counselor who listened to me ranting (and asking questions, of course, because recent history, and the knowledge I really didn’t know everything, had reminded me of their value) in our thirties we strive to connect with our parents. So we need answers. Is that what our three year olds are doing? Are their incessant, sometimes unanswerable, questions more than a navigational aid; are they a way to connect with us?

So I ask questions now. I ask my kids, ‘are you OK, you seem quiet?’, “I’m OK, Mum, really. Don’t nag’. And I ask my mum questions. A lot of questions. About her childhood. In India. About my grandmother. About dad.

Some people are like treasure troves. They store gems beneath tightly fitting lids which you need to prize off in order to enjoy their contents. That’s what questions do. They lever lids and draw more than just answers out of people, they yield stories, whole histories, they unwind the very fabric of a person so that you might know them better.

I think that’s why I wish I’d asked dad more questions most.

So that I might have known him better.

And could answer my children’s questions about a grandfather they never met.

Written by Anthea Rowan
Wife, mother, general dogsbody, sometime-writer living in Splendid Isolation in Africa.