Cindy on September 18th, 2009
There’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Somebody once said that high school is “the mouse race that prepares you for the rat race,” and I suppose there’s a glimmer of truth in that. Like a pair of cruel shoes, my high school days were among the most painful in my life.
I attended a public high school in the early 1970s. In those days, especially if you lived in a small Midwestern town, conformity was key. So there I was, a flat-chested drama club nerd and closet poet in a school where accomplished jocks and curvy cheerleaders ruled. Social life typically revolved around Friday night football or basketball games — but I had to fake any interest in sports. Trying to fit in, I tried out for the drill team but was chosen as an alternate, which meant I had to make all the practices and learn the routines, but I didn’t get to perform at the games unless another member was ill.
Come to think of it, I felt like an imposter throughout most of high school.
My real definition of “teamwork” was shopping for props and costumes for the school plays. And I adored the drama teacher. Not surprisingly, a lot of kids snickered behind his back, secretly questioning his sexual orientation. I still credit him and my humanities teacher for making high school bearable and interesting.
But the English teacher took a serious dislike to me. Of course, it didn’t help that I sat with chatty classmates and talked too much in literature class. Regardless, this teacher doubted my budding writing skills, and wrongly accused me of plagiarizing a term paper on the subject of medieval chivalry — a subject I loved and read about voraciously. She nearly flunked me out of senior English, which pulled my GPA down a peg or two. Not to mention my pride.
In other words, in high school I received little encouragement for the things I truly loved and excelled in. To their credit, my parents had tried early on to send me to a private school that specialized in the arts. I had been courted and accepted by the arts school, but chickened out at the last minute.
Before I go on, I need to insert here that I met some of my very best friends in junior high and high school. I also began dating Doug, the sweet guy who’d later become my husband (and still is), in my sophomore year. You’d think I would consider those years The Best Ever. But they were not.
Twenty years after graduation, I remained so embittered by my high school experience that I wrote a downer of an essay for the Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine. The essay chronicled the awful time I had at the high school reunion Doug and I attended in 1992. Unfortunately, the reunion took place a mere three weeks after the sudden death of my beloved father, and I was in no mood to party with anyone.
Reading between the lines now, I realize that the Free Press essay (which is reprinted in my book, Writing Home) really wasn’t about the 20-year reunion. Though I wrote about feeling awkward in a roomful of grown-up classmates, my unease had little to do with them — and everything to do with repressed grief and the ghosts of my own insecurities. More than anything, I think I was trying to explain how sorry I felt for the creative girl inside me who had struggled to emerge in high school.
So it might come as a surprise when I tell you that lately I’ve been reconnecting with former schoolmates on Facebook — and genuinely enjoying it.
It all began last year when I found Robert, the free-spirited guy who played opposite my lead in the all-school play in 1971. My favorite memory of Robert is the time he and I staged a protest after one of our dress rehearsals got canceled on short notice; we’d been told to move our entourage elsewhere, since the school auditorium was needed for an athletic event. Enraged, Robert and I led a small march (I think there were four of us) to the local school board, ranting all the way about how sick we were of playing second fiddle to the basketball team. On Facebook, I was thrilled and proud to discover that Robert had moved to Chicago, where he became an award-winning journalist and author with several fine books to his credit.
Of course, once you crack open a few pages on Facebook, it’s hard to stop.
Before long, I started hearing from other schoolmates. Earlier this summer, Colleen contacted me to ask why I had stopped writing my column in the local newspaper. I was flattered to learn she’d been reading it for years. When she “friended” me on Facebook, Colleen said she wondered if I would remember her. As she explained it, she’d been “a rebel” in high school, and we didn’t hang with the same crowd. But I did remember. And even though I was a drama nerd, I’d always secretly admired the “rebels.” Unlike the jocks, who were too frigging cool to dress up in costumes, some of the rebels had the guts to try out for the school plays.
From beauty queens to band nerds, my classmates are a fascinating bunch now, and I’m proud of them. Their profiles and family photos reveal that they’ve crafted rich and interesting lives over the past 37 years. One is a psychotherapist; another is a fitness instructor; several work in education, finance, and medicine. Some even share my political opinions, and it’s been fun airing our views in private messages. Others, having been through their own share of medical crises, are at the ready to help with mine. Last week, when I mentioned in my Facebook status that I was struggling to find a neurologist for my mother, several friends sent recommendations — complete with addresses and phone numbers.
All said and done, midlife is a lot more fun than adolescence. It makes us kinder to each other. It sharpens our perspective and thickens our skin — wrinkles and sags be damned.
Like my classmates on Facebook, I’ve endured several crises and turning points, and these have shaped the woman I am. I’ve given birth to an amazing son, come to terms with the loss of my father, and, more recently, watched my only uncle die a slow death from pancreatic cancer. I’ve survived two hip replacement surgeries and learned to walk again. I’ve driven my elderly mother to emergency rooms, and watched my son graduate from college. I’ve happily celebrated nearly 30 years of a nurturing marriage.
But it’s been years since I’ve cared enough to keep score. Grades, trophies, contests, degrees, salaries, and other so-called measures of achievement or popularity no longer mean much to me. Best of all, I’ve finally made peace with my inner drama queen, who now finds expression through writing and the visual arts. I give her free reign now. – Cindy La Ferle
Painting at top: “The Lady of Shalott,” by John William Waterhouse; The Tate Gallery
Cindy on May 30th, 2009
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” — Maya Angelou
Home. It’s my favorite word in the English language. As much as I love to travel, after a long trip there’s nothing that warms my heart more than the sight of the path leading to our front door. If I’m happy at home, everything feels right. There’s nothing I can’t do if the walls around me are sturdy, secure, and beautiful. And when I’m feeling adrift or lonely or empty, home is the only place that can fill the nameless ache in my soul.
Looking back on an eventful Memorial Day weekend vacation, I see that “home” was also the theme for my time away. At the start of our holiday, my husband and I drove to the west side of the state to continue working on the Frank Lloyd Wright home we purchased last year for our future retirement. We spent a couple of days cleaning up the gardens and transplanting perennials before heading out to Chicago to help our 23-year-old son move into the urban condo he bought recently.
It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you watch your kid create the first real home of his own. It’s not quite the same as watching him move into that first crowded room in a college dorm. I suppose you could call it a crazy mix of pride, awe, disbelief, and excitement.
And yet … as deeply satisfying as it is to know that your child can function and thrive independently, it’s something else to realize that his definition of “home” now extends miles beyond the cozy, tree-lined neighborhood where you raised him. He’s choosing his own furniture and installing his own light fixtures. He’s got cookware in the oven drawer and beer glasses in his own kitchen cupboards. He’s planting fresh roots.
Taking after his folks, our son chose a condo with character in an historic building that boasts a variety of gorgeous (and quirky) architectural details — bay windows, mosaic floors, wrought-iron stair rails. (Fun fact: Child’s Play, a cult-classic horror film, was shot in this awesome building.) My husband and I were impressed with the choice our son made — and we left feeling confident that he’ll be very happy there. Still, we felt a faint little tug on our hearts as we waved good-bye and headed back toward the highway.
After arriving home in Royal Oak, we faced yet another midlife turning point. My mother-in-law decided that she was finally ready to look into a home for my father-in-law, whose dementia has clearly worsened in recent months. And so, my husband and his sister drove out to tour the new place with their mother, agreeing that this decision is the right one for both Mom and Dad — though it’s hardly an easy one. “Home” will soon change for my husband’s father in more ways than we can predict right now.
So there you have it. A retirement home in the making for my husband and me. A first home for our only son. A different place for my father-in-law. Our roots are pushing past old boundaries, reaching beyond familiar fences, reshaping home and family for us all. — Cindy La Ferle
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 March 19th, 2009
“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes.” — Sophia Loren
Cosmetic ads continually remind us that we can’t look fabulous unless we look years younger. So what does it mean to “age gracefully” today? Must we color our hair, undergo plastic surgery, and spend a fortune on anti-aging products to meet our culture’s rigid standards of beauty?
That’s my topic in this week’s Midpoint column in The Oakland Press. Which side are you defending in the ongoing battle against aging? Feel free to express your views here or on The Oakland Press site. –CL
*Previous Midpoint columns are archived with links to The Oakland Press (look under CATEGORIES in the “Browse” panel at right). These columns focus on issues of special interest to women between ages 40 and 65.
Artwork shown: “One Grace,” a detail from an original painting by Douglas La Ferle
