Posts Tagged ‘Baby Boomers’
Cindy on May 23rd, 2009
âThis is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying so long, who would know?â â Gloria Steinem
Several years ago, the Olay company sent me a T-shirt that reads: âLove the skin you’re in.â The promotion works, like a sticky song on the radio, because I never did get that catchphrase out of my mind.
Most of my girlfriends and I have decided that drugstore creams — including Olay products — work just about as well as the hundred dollar anti-aging potions sold in better department stores. And we should know. We’ve tried them all.
None of us are superficial women. We have college degrees and graduate degrees, sturdy families, and careers we enjoy. But we’re still not sure what to make of the changing faces in our mirrors, so we keep on searching for the elixir that guarantees its promise of eternal youth. No matter how far we’ve traveled, we still regard aging as our final frontier. A cruel adversary to be conquered at any cost.
Which is odd, really, since advertising copywriters keep telling us that “we’re not getting older; we’re getting better.”
So why can’t we visit a drug store or cosmetic counter without being reminded that our faces and bodies need to be altered, repaired, firmed, smoothed, exfoliated, or lifted entirely? En route to a bottle of aspirin or shampoo, we pass beauty aisles stocked with retinoids, beta hydroxy acid peels, and other chemical formulas designed to dissolve our encroaching wrinkles and tell-tale age spots.
Women’s magazines only serve to support the notion that we’re seriously damaged and need to be fixed. (Of course, magazines are all about selling products, so who’s surprised?) Look at all those “mature” fashion models whose careers have been resuscitated to appease our aging demographic:Â They barely look a day over thirty-five. The message to middle-aged women is that it really doesn’t matter what we’ve achieved through education, experience, or sheer perseverance. If we don’t look years younger than we are, well, we don’t look good enough.
My husband tells me that men have aging angst too — although cosmetic issues don’t boggle them quite so much. He’s cool about losing his hair and leaving what’s left in its striking shade of gray. I think he looks terrific and, yes, dignified.
Then again, guys are comfortable with looking âdignified,â and I suspect it’s because we give them full permission to ripen. We don’t marginalize older men the way we marginalize older women. Most guys get on with the natural process of aging — and some of them actually seize the real privileges of maturity.
Not long before Paul Newman died, his weathered face graced the cover of a national business magazine. The photo stopped me in my tracks at a local newsstand. I was immediately struck by the depth and wisdom reflected in those famous blue eyes. And it occurred to me that aging is elegance when it’s allowed to tell its own truth.
Years ago, as a college student, I worked at the cosmetics counter of an upscale department store in suburban Detroit. I’ll never forget a customer in her late fifties (I’ll call her Mrs. Smith) who haunted our counters twice weekly for the ultimate anti-aging cream. She remains an eerie icon of the woman I don’t want to become.
Married to a wealthy businessman, Mrs. Smith was terrified of aging. She’d had several facelifts and other surgical procedures, yet she looked like a sad marionette, a caricature of her younger self. Chronically disappointed, she often came back to the store to return the creams that âdidn’t work.â
Ever so tactfully, we all tried to explain that cosmetics could enhance maturing beauty — but they couldn’t totally reverse the handiwork of Mother Time. But Mrs. Smith didn’t love the skin she was in, and I swear she kept our whole department in business that year. — Cindy La Ferle
– For more columns of special interest to women at midlife, please visit the “MIDPOINT columns” archives at right, under Categories.–
Cindy on February 4th, 2009
“The imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.” — Brenda Ueland
Right now, the landscape outside my office window looks more like the moon than southeast Michigan. Even when the sun shines, my seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is always at its worst in February. Meanwhile, several of my friends are heading to Florida this week. And I’m not.
When SAD strikes, I find it hard to concentrate or to get motivated. I get crabby and impatient and fed-up with people I’m usually fond of. But after years of battling it, I’ve learned that the best antidote — barring a trip to Bermuda — is a long afternoon of guilt-free puttering.
Cheaper than air fare or psychotherapy, puttering lets your mind wander while your body hangs out around the house. And unlike fall housecleaning, which involves physical energy and high-powered appliances, puttering puts you in a Zen-like state of bliss. Not to be confused with slacking, fidgeting, fiddling, or piddling, puttering is good for mental health. In fact, Brenda Ueland, author of the classic If You Want to Write, insisted that long periods of “moodling” (her word for puttering) are essential to the creative process.
Sadly, ours is a goal-directed, work-till-you-drop culture. And since most of us like to boast about how terribly busy we are, puttering is never easy to pull off.
For those who practice on the sly, like I do, puttering styles are varied and highly personal.
Puttering can be the act of sorting through a box of college textbooks in the basement; tinkering under the hood of an old Chevy; or rearranging things on a shelf while you listen to jazz on the stereo. In other words, puttering is a way of clarifying life’s myriad details, especially when it’s done with reverence for the objects at hand. It’s an opportunity to reconsider what we most enjoy in our homes, and to make a mental list of what we’d like to edit later.
Feeling sluggish and blue last week, I decided to putter in the kitchen. Taking inventory of my good china, I lost myself in happy memories of the two grandmothers who had actually used all the serving pieces for holiday dinners. I marveled, too, at how both sets of dishes have survived several moves and kitchen renovations â and somehow outlived their original owners.
If puttering still sounds like a chore you’ve postponed, it’s only because you haven’t found a method that cheers or relaxes you. One man’s notion of drudgery, after all, can be another’s idea of soul craft.
“I can’t explain it, but I enjoy doing dishes,” writes Thomas Moore, a former Catholic monk and author of Care of the Soul. “I’ve had an automatic dishwasher in my home for over a year, and I have never used it. What appeals to me, I think, is the reverie induced by going through the ritual of washing, rinsing, and drying.” Thomas Moore can come over to my house and wash dishes any time he visits Detroit (especially if his visit coincides with another power failure). Meanwhile, I’ll keep loading my dishwasher.
Still, there’s merit in savoring the ordinary tasks of daily living.
A lot of us spend our lives reaching for lofty goals, or at least trying to look productive 24/7. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if so many of us weren’t scratching our heads and wondering what’s missing even after we’ve won all the trophies. (Consider all those baby-boomer executives who can’t wait to retire.)
âMy life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?â observed Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts. Charlie Brown, after all, was pretty good at puttering. — Cindy La Ferle
– Parts of this essay are excerpted from Writing Home –
Cindy on August 13th, 2008
Retirement has been a discovery of beauty for me. I never had the time before to notice the beauty of my grandkids, my wife, the tree outside my very own front door. And, the beauty of time itself.” ~Hartman Jule
Not long ago, Jamie Lee Curtis — a terrific role model for 50-something women — told reporters she was no longer accepting movie roles. She would focus, instead, on spending more time with her family and writing children’s books — so, of course, this didn’t mean she was “retiring.” Curtis has another life — a richly textured life. Regardless, when most of us walk away from major careers, we typically think of ourselves as “retired,” and we have to craft a whole new self image, not to mention a reason to justify our very existence.
Ours is a workaholic culture. While Baby Boomers give lip service to the theory that leisure is good for us, we’re not very good at practicing it. Few of us like to use the words “retired” or “retirement.” Retirement wears the dubious sheen of laziness, suggesting too many hours spent dangling in a hammock or schlepping around a golf course. And if you’re still unable to think outside the old corporate box, you might assume that being retired means you’ve shed your usefulness.
I had this same conversation with a “semi-retired” neighbor I spotted yesterday on my morning bike ride. My neighbor was walking his dog, looking unusually relaxed and happy. Now in his late fifties, my neighbor found himself in “early retirement” when his company downsized two years ago. This year, he’s been working at a part-time job, just two days a week. He spends the rest of his time focusing on interests he’d postponed for years — fly fishing, reading, spending more time with his wife. Of course, he’s had to readjust his budget (like most retirees) but his youngest kid just finished college and his family can manage, he said. His wish list always included studying the major literary classics — and for the first time in ages, he’s making progress. Life is good now, he said, but it took a while for him to adjust to a new rhythm — and a different view of himself. I know exactly what he meant.
I’m thinking of the time, back in the 1990s, when I lost a magazine editorship I’d held for nearly six years. (The magazine had won awards and was respected by its industry and its readers, but, as the old story goes, advertisers weren’t keeping it afloat.) Until the magazine folded, I hadn’t realized how tightly my self image had been tied to my illustrious title of “Editor in Chief.” Even though I was a devoted wife, mother, and homemaker, I listed my editorship at the top of my resume and mentioned it first when people at cocktail parties would ask, “What do you do?”
As my semi-retired friend and I agreed, if we are people of any depth, we are not what we do. Call it what you will — job loss or retirement — career change shakes up our way of being and forces us to re-examine who we are without our labels. Career change invites us to reinvent ourselves, make new discoveries, and even to become three-dimensional at last. Scary? Yes, but also very exciting. — Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on March 8th, 2008
OK, I’m back…. It was very hard returning to Michigan’s relentless, snowy winter this weekend. And while it seems crass and cruel to admit that I just spent two weeks on a beach in southern Florida, I’m proud to boast that I read four good books (and countless newspaper and magazine articles) while working on my sunburn. I’ll be sharing/reviewing these discoveries over the next couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, memoirs of all kinds have been making the news — good news to those of us who love to read, write, and teach the memoir. USA Today recently ran a big feature on the ever-growing popularity of telling our own stories. On the bad news front, several memoirists were exposed in other media, a la James Frey, for falsifying their life stories. Given our shameless culture of celebrity, it should come as no surprise that some writers will do anything — even lie — to get published. We can only hope they won’t ultimately trash the literary credibility of the memoir and other autobiographical writing.
Thanks to a recommendation on “The Think Club” Web site, I got a copy of Michael Gates Gill’s new midlife memoir, How Starbucks Saved My Life. It’s a quick, charming read — and much less self-indulgent than most of the “spiritual memoirs” on the bestseller lists lately. The privileged son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, Michael Gates Gill was educated at Yale and enjoyed a stellar career at J. Walter Thompson until he was fired for being…middle-aged. It sounds like your average midlife crisis, but Gill is a good storyteller, with sparkling anecdotes detailing his privileged background and the (often insane) world of high-end advertising.
Gill admits upfront that his ego-fueled quest for success did irreparable damage to his kids, marriage, and family life. His memoir chronicles his personal and professional crisis — and, amazingly, what led him to take a full-time job behind the counter at Starbucks.
I recently taught a memoir class using William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and found that Gill relies on the same principles of good nonfiction writing: clarity, brevity, and humanity. His prose is crisp and highly relatable. This book should be a hit with Baby Boomers forced into early retirement, like Gill, or those who are questioning their values and vocation. Best of all, Gill reminds us that menial tasks and “ordinary” work can be paths to spiritual awakening, and that celebrity and privilege are rarely more than glimmers on a slippery surface.
This memoir broke my heart with its candor — and I can see why The Think Club chose it as their Book of the Year for 2007. –CL
Cindy on January 7th, 2008
A quick apology to those who’ve been looking for a new blog, column, or e-mail from me this week … My widowed mother has been in the hospital since Thursday; she was rushed there for cardiovascular issues. We’re still waiting for the results of various tests. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending most of my time keeping her company at Beaumont. Later, I’ll be blogging about “life in the sandwich” — a topic of interest to Boomers who are caring for aging parents as well as their own kids and jobs. – CL
