middle-aged women

The Hunchback of Fort Saskatchewan


I cannot remember my Grandma R., my mother’s mother without recalling her rounded shoulders. She had what they used to call a “dowager’s hump”. Mom used to say that if anything about growing old could be avoided, she truly hoped acquiring a hump was one of them. However, she believed the hunchback look was hereditary (and judging by many of my cousins perhaps she is right) and that she would one day be as afflicted as her own mother.

Of course her fears turned out to be nonsense. The tendency to severe rounding of the shoulders might be inherited but it isn’t destiny. Not according to my yoga instructor and my massage therapist, both of whom harp at me constantly to “stop hunching!” A refrain my mother practiced as well as she preached incidentally.

But I write therefore I hunch. Read Full Article

I Am A Tweener Again


It’s like being not quite thirteen again. When I was still wearing a training bra and waiting (not too anxiously to be truthful) for my period to come calling for the first time and feeling decidedly benched in the whole womanhood game.

I have spent a great deal of my life being behind the curve or out of sync at least it seems. I wasn’t dating or marrying when everyone else was. I didn’t lose my virginity in a timely fashion. At my five year high school reunion when the engagement rings were being ooh’d and aah’d over and the baby pictures cooed at, I was sitting at the future spinsters table. Read Full Article

Happy Birthday Madonna! The New Poster Kid for 50


Madonna is fifty years old today. Which is still older than me.

I have been reading about her iconicness and what a great example she is to all we women of a “certain age”*. She is our holy grail. 

If only.

I don’t want to look like a fifty year old who looks like she could pass for forty with the proper lighting and a bit of distance (and a good photo-shopping). And I certainly don’t want to look like someone who works too hard to maintain a passing resemblence to youth because here is where the over forty female cliches come in.

  • being thin is youthful (a thin twenty something and a thin forty something look NOTHING alike)
  • concealer actually conceals (nothing really it just makes one look older sans proper lighting)
  • dressing age appropriate (what does that mean anymore?)

I recently saw a photo of her in a tabloid at the grocery. She was being admired for her hardbody, and I will give her that. The woman is tight but in a scary cadaverous sort of way like Kelly Ripa or Sarah Jessica Parker.

If I am going to emulate something, why would it be her? She talks a good game about health and such but if you look at her face closely – the eyes – you see someone who is haunted. Running to keep pace and knowing all the while she isn’t.