Whenever I stand in front of a mirror, I'm always a little surprised to see an almost 60-year-old woman looking back at me. In my head and heart, I'm still somewhere in my 20s — active, energetic, enthusiastic, unjaded, and young with a bottom you can bounce a quarter off of — or, as I often describe it to others, like three toddlers in a trench coat. So seeing the reality of my nearly 60 years written all over my face hasn't yet lost its surprise factor.
Intellectually, I get it. I have kids who are grown and flown. I act out adult responsibility by showing up for work, paying my bills, and cleaning the house regularly. But in my heart? I'm not getting older. Nope. Not me. Still, there have been moments that have taken my breath away because they've shown me how rapidly the years have passed, and that I'm not only not three toddlers in a trench coat, but am actually rapidly approaching the end of middle age and the onset of my golden years. Four members of our team (ranging in age from 29 to 59) recently sat down and shared our experiences of when something made us feel a little long in the tooth.
The 80s Dance
When I was a teen in the 1980s, we had a fascination with the days of yore from our parents' teen years: the 1950s. The popularity of TV shows like Happy Days and movies like Stand By Me showed this quaint era from days long gone by, and more than once, I donned saddle shoes and a poodle skirt to head out to a 50s dance.
So when my teenage kids and their friends started donning neon, Keds, and legwarmers to head to 80s dances, I suddenly understood how my parents must have felt when I pulled my hair up in a high pony and put on bobby socks. (Hint: Old. They probably felt old.) It was one of the first times I became acutely aware of the passage of time and realized that I, former spandex-clad 80s aerobics instructor and Madonna wannabe, came of age in a decade that teens now find quaint and a little charming.
The Campus Tour
Life went on, and my kids went to college, graduated, and got on with their adult lives. And a few years ago, as my husband and I were driving past the town where I attended university, I decided to stop and walk around campus for old times' sake.
It was mid-summer in Eastern Washington, and the sun was blazing hot, but the huge old trees I remembered from my college days shaded the campus, making our walk tolerable. I was surprised to see that what I remembered in my head didn't look anything like I recalled. Buildings were in totally different locations from the maps I had in my brain — what I thought were very clear memories. Time had altered those memories that seemed so accurate to me.
But the real kicker was when a campus tour of incoming high school students stopped near where we were standing and taking it all in. The young tour guide paused outside the math and sciences building and told her charges in a conspiratorial and slightly incredulous tone, "Way back in the 80s, when students took math classes, they had to buy very expensive graphing calculators to do the math work." (Can confirm. My Texas Instruments graphing calculator was not cheap by 1984 standards.)
TV Explained
My Zillennial co-worker Megan, who is about the same age as my children, has had her own moments where she suddenly feels old... it eventually happens to every one of us.
One thing she says made her feel old is, "explaining the good 'ole days of sitting in front of the TV guide channel to see what was coming on to one of my nieces because, no, you couldn't pick what you wanted to watch when you wanted to."
I can one-up you, Megan. When I was a kid, we had four channels to choose from. Oh, and when I was watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show on Nick at Nite when my kids were young, my son asked me what was wrong with the TV because the show was in black and white. I had to explain to him that my family didn't even get a color TV until I was about 10!
Older Than the Golden Girls
My co-worker Kate mentioned that she feels old when she looks at photos of her parents from when she was a teen and realizes she is older now than they were in the pics. I feel the same about photos of my grandparents from when I was a kid — they seemed so darn old to me, but they were younger than I am now. And our Editorial Director Carrie (who is just a few years younger than I am) mentioned that the Golden Girls were all in their early to mid-50s at the start of the show, which is younger than we are now. As icing on the cake, Kate also noted that in the movie Cocoon (1985), Wilford Brimley was only 49 when he played what we all saw as a very old man in a retirement home. Kate turns 48 soon. Oof.
The Eyebrow Hair
There are a lot of things nobody tells you about aging — like random hair growth on your face, for instance. And while my first grey eyebrow hair was a shocker (plucked that thing right out, I did), what was even more shocking to me was that one super-long eyebrow hair that began growing atop my brows a few years back. And don't even get me started on the one that keeps appearing on my chin. No matter how often I trim and pluck, they always come back.
Everything Old Is New Again
As Kate, Carrie, Megan, and I talked about all the things that made us feel old, one concept that kept coming up was how stuff we wore "back in the day" had made its way back around from old-fashioned to runway-ready. For instance, baggy jeans. They were big (pun only kind of intended) when I was in my early 20s, and I wore the heck out of them, but they eventually went the way of mom jeans. Now, Levi's is trying to sell them to us again as a newly discovered Gen Z trend.
Megan also mentions that Hollister's recently released Y2K "capsule collection" looks like everything her older sisters wore in 2002.
Comments From Other People
From the first time somebody in the service industry called Carrie ma'am to the grocery checker who sarcastically calls me "young lady" and then laughs and laughs, there are fleeting moments when you're in the presence of someone else that suddenly bring your age home. For example, Carrie mentions, "wearing ripped jeans (because they were worn in, not designed that way) and having someone in the supermarket ask me if I wasn't a little too old to be wearing that kind of thing (No, I'm not.)"
Carrie also felt old when, "The clerk at the convenience store told me that there's snow and ice outside, so I should, 'be careful out there, Ma'am.'" (Ouch!), and, "Similarly, a delivery guy asked if I'd be okay carrying boxes into my house. This was when I grew my gray hair out."
Which reminds me. Just the other day at the gym, some total stranger (never saw him before in my life) looked across at me from the stair stepper next to mine and said, "Oh — you grew out your grey hair." Just... what? I'd like to point out that I was totally smoking his 40-something tail on my stair stepper, in spite of my grey hair. Only one of us was panting and wheezing, and it wasn't the one with the grey hair. So whatever, dude.
It Happens to Everyone
No matter how young-at-heart you feel, at some point, something will happen that makes you feel old. From waking up with a "sleeping injury" to doing the back exercises your dad used to do, the trappings of age come for us all. Youth is wasted on the young, and aging is inevitable, but it's up to you whether you let it get you down or lift you up. Sure, I may not have the bouncy skin I did when I was in my 20s, but I'm a lot happier in my late 50s. So bring it on... I can take it.
