Musings on midlife crisis

I’m 41.  I have blue and purple hair.  I recently got a visible tattoo.  And I’m thisssss close to pulling the trigger on a nose ring. 

The only reason I haven’t gotten a nose ring yet is that a few people have suggested I might be too old, and it would be trying too hard, or seem… I don’t know… like I’m trying to hang on to my youth or something. 

In my head (or in their heads filtered through my head—thanks social anxiety, you douchebag), my nose ring is basically an earring or ponytail on an older man in a ridiculous sports car.  I don’t want to be ridiculous. I don’t want to be some midlife crisis cliché. 

Except.

I do.

For the first time, I’m like… OH!  I get it!  The middle aged guy gets an earring and a sports car because he has always wanted them!  It’s not a crisis.  It’s just… he can now, so he does. 

At least for me, getting a nose ring has absolutely zero to do with hanging on to my youth.  Eye cream and my dermatologist, yes.  Those things are about hanging on to my youth.  But my hair, my tattoos, my fashion, and my eventual nose ring are about embracing the age I am now.  Embracing the ME I am now. 

I don’t have to please anyone but myself.  I have wanted a nose ring forever.  And I’m a damn grown up, mostly, and I can.  I just… can. 

When I was younger, I was completely paralyzed by social anxiety.  I worried about what everyone would think about my hair, my fashion, my appearance in general.  I couldn’t get a nose ring because who did I think I was?  I’ve talked about this before, the leftover gunk from high school, the voice in my head that tells me I will never be cool enough.  Never be pretty enough.  The voice that tells me that blue hair and fun clothes and body mods are for cool people, and I’m not one of them so I can’t have that.

Seriously?  What a crock of shit. 

Is it a midlife crisis?  I don’t think so.  I think it’s the opposite. 

I think it’s a midlife release of fucks.  I no longer give as many fucks. 

I still give one every once in a while, like the day I put on my “Gorgeous 10” shirt and then second guessed whether strangers would think I think I’m gorgeous and think bad things about me, so then I took it off.  Like the day I wore my favorite comic skirt and I put a crinoline under it, but then I took off the crinoline, because this is suburban Maryland and any pin-up type fashion out here is weird enough without adding a crinoline.  Even though it looked soooo cute that way. 

Visible tattoo AND modcloth dress! No makeup.  No fucks.

But those days were noteworthy because that’s not every day. 

Most days, I wear my weird hair and my modcloth dresses when everyone else is in jeans with smooth highlighted hair and I’m happy.  I’m me and I’m happy and I give no fucks. 

I don’t think that’s a crisis.  I think that’s… awesome.  Does getting older mean I can just do whatever I want?  I think it kind of does.  I don’t want a shiny car.  I want a nose ring.  And if people think that’s weird, I don’t have to care! 

I recently wore one of my bikinis in front of a mom from my kids’ school, and for the first time, I didn’t justify it.  I may have talked to her before about the blog, but I couldn’t remember whether I had. I don’t know if she knows I’m a body activist.  She might.  She might not.  I just wore my bikini. 

No fucks given.

If that’s a midlife crisis, I’ll take it.  Bring it on.  I’ll ride this wave until I become one of those old ladies with giant colorful glasses and 4,000 bracelets who look a little crazy but also amazing. 

It makes me excited about the future to think that way.  It’s not a crisis.  It’s a relief.  It’s joy and celebration. 

Bring on the second act.

And the nose ring.

Me with my fake nose ring!  Real one coming soon!

Pin-up at 40

I turned forty this year.  It’s a big milestone, and the first one that really makes me feel different.  New medical tests are required, and my body is doing weird things.  Hot flashes.  My old wrist injury aching when it’s going to rain.  Random eyebrow hairs turning silver, growing extra long, and spronging out from my face, like “Look at me!  I’m a gray eyebrow hair! Helllooooooo!! Do you see me?”

I know how that shining, fabulous eyebrow hair feels.  Sometimes you just want to be seen.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to slip quietly under a cloak of invisibility.  I find myself thinking often of that scene from Six Feet Under, in which Kathy Bates teaches Frances Conroy to shoplift, explaining that since they’re invisible as older women anyway, they might as well get free stuff. 

When I’m in my mom uniform, jeans and a basic top, minimal makeup, at the grocery store or the waiting area at dance class, I can feel the slide of eyes.  An older, plus size suburban mom.  Utterly invisible.

The blue hair helps a little.  A genuine smile helps sometimes too.  But I still feel the slide into invisibility.  Middle-aged.  Overweight.  Nothing to see here.

But I’m not gonna go quietly.

I’m 40!  Do you know how freeing that is?  I am the person I’m going to be.  This is me.  Not to say I can’t reinvent myself in another twenty years.  I totally can.  But pretty much, I am who I am, and I know myself pretty well.  This is me.  Crazy, irreverent, boozy, loving, maternal, potty-mouthed, smart, and sexy as hell. 

I get to just be who I am.  Blue hair.  Whiskey blog.  Obsessed with corsets.  I'm forty.  I get to just be that. 

And I don’t have to be invisible if I don’t want to be. 

So here I am.  Forty.  Overweight.  Mom of twins.  Doing pin-up. Because beauty isn’t a number.  It’s not an age or a dress size or a number on the scale.  It doesn’t come from anyone else’s approval.  It comes from inside. 

And I will not go quietly.  Oh, hell to the no.

All photos are by the amazing, extraordinary Rebecca Palmer of Lifescapes Photography.  Also known as best sister ever.  

A tattoo at 40

So I’ve been planning my next tattoo, a hummingbird and flowers on my shoulder, in honor of the hummingbird that flew into my house this past spring and taught me about getting myself out of depression. 

I remember stressing and deliberating over my first tattoo: a Celtic knotwork, moon phase, yin-yang-ish creation that I designed myself.  I got it on my lower back.  I was twenty-five, and there was no such a thing as a “tramp stamp” yet back then.  I remember being so bummed when those tattoos first became known as tramp stamps.  But it was OK, because my tattoo had meaning to me, and it was something I had designed myself.  And, I was also really glad I hadn’t gotten a butterfly tramp stamp, because that totally could have happened.

I remember sitting on that first tattoo design for a year after I drew it, waiting to make sure I wasn’t going to change my mind.  At twenty-five, it seemed like a huge commitment to get something permanently drawn onto my body. 

My friends all got together and pitched in to pay for that tattoo for my twenty-fifth birthday.  I was so touched by that, both because it felt like my community was supporting the spiritual commitment that the tattoo represented for me, and because I was living on a grad student stipend at the time and had exactly zero disposable income.

The process itself wasn’t unpleasant.  I have a very strong endorphin response to pain, so apart from the initial flinch, and a few extra-ouchy spots, I actually kind of enjoyed it.  I know, I’m weird.  I left the shop high on free brain chemicals, and totally ready to get another tattoo. 

And fifteen years went by.

I wanted more tattoos, but I wasn’t willing to get something purely for aesthetic reasons.  Then my kids were born, and I was like, “Yay!  Kids!  I will always love them, so I can totally get a kid-based tattoo!”

But I didn’t.

It felt wrong for me.  It’s right for a lot of people, but a kid-based tattoo just wasn’t right for me. 

I couldn’t figure out why.  I mean, of all the things I can make an unquestioning absolute lifelong commitment to, obviously my kids top the list.  Why didn’t I want some symbol of them inked into my bod?  I seriously considered a kid-based, mama goddess type tattoo on my stomach.  A reclaiming of the extra skin and stretch marks that so challenged me, a beautification something that was no longer beautiful by societal standards, a celebration of the part of my body that housed and nourished my kids. 

But nope.  My soul or my intuition or whatever it is that makes these decisions knew that wasn’t my next tattoo.  It was right on paper, but it wasn’t right for me.

I was bummed.  I had to keep waiting to get my second tattoo.  Crap.

In time I’ve come to realize why it was wrong for me.  Because I don’t need a reminder that I have kids.  That connection doesn’t need strengthening.  It’s already as strong as it can be.  I don’t need to reinforce that bond.  It’s already unbreakable. 

My tattoos are about making a commitment to something in such a permanent way that I will never forget.  Like a reminder to maintain balance, the knowledge that darkness is just part of a cycle and will give way to light, and that sadness can be accepted and acknowledged in the same way that joy can, without judgment or attachment.  That was my first tattoo.  Or the awareness that bliss is always within my reach.  If my patterns aren’t working, I need to try something else.  The doorway is there, I just have to find it, and it’s probably outside in nature, not on my couch.  That will be my second tattoo.

My children have already permanently marked my body.  I don’t need more.  They are already in the front of my mind most of the time.  I don’t need a reminder.  I need balance.  Something that is just for me.  This next tattoo will be that.

I’m 40.  And I’m finally getting my second tattoo, fifteen years after my first.  I still need to set up a consultation and work out the details, but I’ve crossed the critical threshold and made the decision. 

It was so much easier this time around.  Last time, I made sure it would be on a part of my body that was generally covered by clothes, because at 25, I had no idea where my life would lead.  Maybe I would have the kind of life in which a visible tattoo would be a problem at some point. 

Now I’m 40.  And I just don’t give a crap.  If there is a job or a situation or a person that wouldn’t be cool with a visible tattoo on my shoulder, they can go do anatomically unlikely things to themselves.  It’s so freeing to feel that way. 

There is a down side to not giving a crap, like when I stop doing self-care and stop showing respect for myself because I feel like I’m an invisible middle-aged woman, so what difference does it make.  But the up side is that I can do whatever I want.  I can get my nose pierced if I feel like it, even though my nose is “too big” for that.  I can get a big tattoo somewhere that will show in an evening gown.  I can have ridiculous blue hair if it makes me happy.  Wheeeee!

I know I’ll continue to change.  Fifteen years from now, no doubt I will be fifteen years more fabulous than I am right now.  I look back on my twenty-five-year-old self and she was so full of illusions, so romantic, so insecure, so shy, so worried… Also her boobs were so, so very high up.  And she was lovely.  I wish I could go back and tell her to stop worrying about her body, stop worrying about what people think.

So I’m sending my 55-year-old self back right now to tell me that.  Stop worrying.  You’re great.  Get a big damn visible tattoo, because you can and you want to.  You're beautiful.  Also, get off the couch and exercise, you lazy sack, and go to the dentist.  Stop putting that off.  But mostly, you're beautiful. Don't worry what anyone else thinks.  Just live, as big as you want to.

Live.  As big as you want to.

Because this is it.  This is what we get.  Now and now and now and now. 

Fly out that open door into the beautiful universe and live.

Live.

Too old for blue hair?

I have a big birthday coming up.  Yup, in less than a month I’ll be forty for real.  Now, I refer to myself as a “forty year old woman” all the time, or as pushing forty, but soon I will actually BE forty.  In a complete vacuum, I would be fine with it.  Just a number and all that.  I’m vaguely prepared for shit to start breaking on my body, but I can still do stuff I want to do. 

I have a bad knee from a fall two years ago, so I have learned (for the first time in my life!!) how to do squats properly.  Seriously, no one ever told me to think about sticking my butt back instead of focusing on bending my knees.  Why did no one ever tell me that?  They would say “don’t let your knees go in front of your toes,” but never explained that the way you do that is by pretending you’re dropping a deuce and trying not to get it on your shoes.  But now I have a bad knee, so now I know.  Still, I can still exercise just fine, and nothing else has broken down yet.  I don’t need cheater glasses to read yet, although threading a needle is starting to become an issue.  Maybe I need some of those old lady needle threader thingies.

Oh, and perimenopause is happening.  So, that blows.  Hot flashes, night sweats, and a raging bitch who inhabits my body from time to time.  But whatev.  Some black cohosh, a few extra showers, and control of the thermostat.  I’m dealing.

But the social stuff is harder.

See, since my kids were born, I have been dying my hair funny colors.  Fire engine red, pink, teal, most recently blue.  Here is me with my blue hair.

Not crazy blue, but definitely bluer than anyone else's hair at my kids' elementary school...

It’s not really all that blue.  It’s not like Thing 1 and Thing 2 blue.  It’s just… you know… kind of blue. 

Recently my brother told me my blue hair is ridiculous, because I’m too old for it and I’m a mom.  But the thing is, I never dyed my hair funny colors before I had kids.  I didn’t need to.  I was going to Burning Man and attending parties that started at 11pm and traveling the world. But then I moved to the suburbs and had twins and bought a minivan.  My body, although the same weight as it was pre-kids, was a new shape.  A more… mommish shape.  I was pushing a double stroller, and wearing yoga pants as regular pants, and my fabulous heels were all a half size too small, and I might have had puke on me at any given moment.  I needed something to remind me that I was still me.  So I started messing with my hair.

And I loved it.  I still love it.  But now with forty looming, I am starting to worry about what other people will think.  Am I too old to have blue hair? 

I embrace my mom persona at this point, and now that my kids are in school, they are less all-encompassing, so I can pursue things that make me feel like me again.  I don’t need crazy hair anymore to remind me who I am.  But I still want to keep it. 

The biggest reason is that I like how people respond to me.  People are friendlier, chattier.  Toll takers, fast food drive-thru window workers, random people in the service industry… I can see them snap out of auto-pilot and make eye contact with me in a way that didn’t happen before.  Random strangers talk to me on the street, primarily people who are NOT like me.  Kids talk to me about my hair, asking why it’s blue.  Twenty-somethings who would otherwise look through me as if I were invisible, compliment it and smile, sometimes leading into a longer conversation. 

As weird as it seems, I have many more conversations with strangers as a function of my blue hair, and I love that.  I love finding a connection where there would otherwise be two people on autopilot, just playing roles and not seeing each other at all. 

In fact, the very fact that blue hair is wrong for "a woman my age" is the thing that’s magic about it.  Because it marks me as something other than generic.  Not for my own self-image anymore, even though that was the primary reason I started doing it.  But now, because it makes other people stop for a moment to figure me out.  And in that moment of stopping, there is the opportunity for genuine connection. 

Genuine connection. 

Genuine connection.

My blue hair might be silly.  It is silly.  It’s blue hair on a middle-aged mom.  It’s ridiculous.  And I’m totally keeping it.

Because also? I just like it.  

Is it hot in here?

I tend to run cold.  All winter, I sneakily turn up the thermostat, which gets sneakily turned down by my budget-conscious, warm-blooded husband.  He’ll be hanging out in shorts and a T-shirt, while I wear sweats and hide under a blanket.  So imagine my surprise when I asked recently, “Is it hot in here?” and he said no.  Well, I was drinking red wine, and had been cooking.  That must be it.  The kitchen was hot from the oven.  Yeah.

No. 

It happened again, both us in the dining room eating lunch.  “Am I have hot flashes?” I asked him, appalled, wiping sweat from my forehead and pulling my hair off my neck.  He said that maybe I was warm from the stress of dealing with my son, who had just put me through a challenging parenting half hour.  Yeah, maybe.  Yeah, no.

It keeps happening.  Sometimes it even wakes me up at night and I have to adjust the fan to point on me and pull off the sheets to let the sweat evaporate and cool me.  It’s been about a month, with a flash happening once or twice a week.  I’m having some weird sleep disturbances too, waking up early for no reason (and if you know me, you know how truly weird that is).  I’m 38.  I’m effing perimenopausal.  You’ve got to be effing effing mother-effing kidding me.

So, yeah, that’s happening. 

I went on the interwebs and found out that perimenopause usually starts around age 40, and can take anywhere from 5-10 years to fully resolve into actual menopause.  So I’m not out of the range, I guess.  But damn.  I’m not ready.  I went to grad school, which tends to delay child-bearing, so lots of my friends had babies at the age I am now, and into their early 40’s.  My family is complete.  I don’t want more kids.  But…  menopause?!  No.  Not yet. 

I feel like my mom only just finished hers.  She had a protracted perimenopausal period too, ten years?  Maybe more?  I remember her going to the doc claiming to be perimenopausal (At what age?  I don’t remember.  It suddenly matters.)  I remember the doc telling her that she could still have a kid tomorrow, hormonally speaking.  That lasted a long time.  So I know this is just the beginning.  But it’s the beginning.

I’m trying desperately not to think of it as the beginning of the end. 

The part about no periods sounds pretty good, but I’m on the Mirena, so that is already mostly true.  The part about osteoporosis is scary.  The part about losing my libido is the part that really freaks me the hell out.  My libido is so much a part of me that I can’t imagine what life would be like without it.  I can’t imagine who I would be.  I’m a woman, sexy, hot, curvy, awesome.  I’m scared of those things changing, of feeling less like a woman.  Terrified of feeling less sexy, less sexual.

I know there is more to me than sex.  Obviously.  I’m trying to think about wisdom and crap.  But crap.  Screw wisdom.  I want the big screaming O’s.  I want to boink without synthetic funny-tasting lube.  I want to feel that swing in my hips that comes from knowing that I am one sexy bitch.

Every woman goes through this eventually.  I’m not alone.  I should probably start reading self-help books and crap.  They’ll probably talk about the wisdom of being an elder and transitions and crap like that.  Blah.  Sigh.  I’m too young for that shit. 

In my own mind, anyway.  My body, apparently, not so much.