The Big Six Oh – S**T! or, “Ah, F**K It”

Sixty came and smacked me upside the head (and the hips and the knees). How the hell did this happen? There must be some misunderstanding.

I’m not done redecorating! I still have the metal tile that looks like a chess board as a gesture to Mike’s memory to cover the nasty old linoleum on the counter of the built-in bookcase that is going to become the coolest sideboard ever when I’m done with it!

I have two bathrooms and a front hall of wallpaper to steam off, and I still have to paint or re-wallpaper whatever turns out to be under there!

My brown hair has so little gray that it couldn’t even get away with being described as “sugar and cinnamon” much less “salt and pepper!”

I’m working out with dumbbells five days a week, doing mat pilates one day a week and yard work whichever day is left that is sunny.  Saturday I was up at six, and until 9:30 weeded the entire vegetable garden, planted some more beans, pulled out the peas that were done,  and raked the creeping charlie and hacked the weeds out of  the overgrown chicken coop so I can now actually see the squash and pumpkins I planted there.  I sweat every day!

But (oh thanks a lot, sixty)  if I so much as eat dinner, I mean a small, healthy dinner, I gain weight. Intermittent fasting can’t be intermittent for me if I ever want to…want …

Want what?

Good question.

I want a job again, a good one.

I want a man again, a kind one.

And I want to stop thinking that changing my personality or my body is the only way to get those things.

I woke up on my sixtieth birthday feeling fantastic, as if a switch had flipped or a weight had been lifted off me. I felt unburdened. Free.

It was my “Ah, F**K it moment.

Through blogging I’ve come across several women of a certain age who described themselves as feeling invisible.

I say, BRING IT!

If I’m invisible, I can wear anything and go anywhere I want! F**k it!

(Just don’t expect me to be inaudible. Singing comes with the package).

I gotta get to be me!

I will not go gently into the cardigan sweater years (although I am increasingly sensitive to cold, I prefer a form-fitting, henley-neck sweatshirt I call my “sexy sweatshirt”).

I’m no little old lady in tennis shoes (I wear Keds Champions – still the most comfortable shoes I have ever or will ever own. I’m not getting paid to say that, seriously. But if you’re listening, Keds, I’ll happily be the not-grey, not-very wrinkly, plump lady with wings (inside sleeves) shakin’ it the way women my age are not supposed to, anymore, in your next ad – and get paid for it).

I will sing, dance, sweat, laugh, overdress in the evening and wear paint-spattered pants to the grocery store the next day. I will openly appreciate male pulchritude with a smile that doesn’t entirely acknowledge the impossibility of being appreciated in return – but hey, I’m invisible! So it doesn’t matter anyway (and more often these days, I oggle appreciate on the sly from behind sunglasses a/k/a/ crows-feet prevention device.)

“I wanna live, not merely survive.”

So there, sixty.

Off to eat my damn dinner, I remain,

Your singing, sweating, gardening, dumbbell-weilding, Keds wearing, man-oggling-because-I’m-invisible-and-ah-f**k it,

Ridiculouswoman