They say age is just a matter of mind; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Trouble is, a lot of people do mind. They are comforted by articles with headlines like: “LIFE GETS BETTER WHEN WOMEN HIT MIDDLE AGE.” According to a study by one specialist, middle-aged women have become more confident, independent, and organized—better able to cope with life. This researcher said, “Although we didn’t find that life begins at forty for women, we did find that as they get nearer to middle-age, they are more complete human beings.”
I suppose there’s some truth to the man’s findings. What a lot of us would like to tell him, however, is that life begins at forty, all right … it begins to deteriorate!
Women are under incredible pressure to stay looking young and beautiful. Sad to say, they learn that youth is that brief time between buying training bras and wearing surgical stockings. I often say that I’m living somewhere between estrogen and death, but somebody corrected me once and told me to say I’m living somewhere between the Blue Lagoon and Golden Pond.
There are all kinds of ways to tell you’re getting older. For example:
• Everything hurts, and what doesn’t hurt, doesn’t work.
• Your back goes out more often than you do.
• Dialing long distance tires you out.
And, do you know why women over fifty years old don’t have babies? Because they’d put them down and forget where they left them!
The Power of Making Memories
Some of our best days have been spent with our children, and I’m sure you can say the same thing. I believe a true serendipity of getting older is looking back to the times when our kids gave us so much fun—and maybe a few fits along the way.
Once when speaking to a group, I included a section in my talk about “building laughter in your walls” by making a special effort to have memorable good times with your family. A young woman came up afterward and said: “I read your book about today’s experiences being tomorrow’s memories. When I finished it, I told the kids, ‘We’re going to make some memories!’ I took all kinds of pictures of my kids and put them in scrapbooks, and we even made some videos.”
After describing how she made many wonderful memories, she told me about an incident with her son:
“My son, Jimmy, is seven, and one day he came home from school and said, ‘Oh, I don’t have any homework to do—I’m going skateboarding, then I’m going to watch TV, and I’m just going to have fun because tonight I don’t have any homework.’”
This mom told me she was happy for her son, and let him go skateboarding. After dinner he watched all the TV he wanted, and about 9:00 he went up to bed. She and her husband watched TV until around 11:00 and were just getting ready to turn it off and go to bed themselves. She was congratulating herself on having everything ready for the next day, but as she looked up the stairs, there was little Jimmy, a forlorn figure in his jammies. Jimmy said, pleadingly, “I just remembered—I have to have a salt map of Venezuela for tomorrow.”
Now, almost all parents know “salt maps” are what teachers like to assign their pupils so they can drive mothers crazy. After all, it’s mom who usually winds up helping the kid get his salt map together. So there they were, at eleven o’clock at night. Little Jimmy had spent the evening skateboarding, watching TV, and having a great time and NOW it was salt-map time.
Mom said, “Get the salt, get the flour. Now, where’s Venezuela?” And so they tore around getting all the stuff together. “Where’s the blue paint? Where’s the green paint?” Her husband, of course, had gone up to bed. It was not his problem. He was sound asleep, dreaming of Bermuda, not Venezuela.
Little Jimmy manfully tried to help. He sat there, struggling to stay awake as he drew his version of Venezuela, while Mom scurried around the kitchen, making exasperated sounds. Finally he looked up and tearfully said, “Mom, are we making a memory now?”
As exasperated as that mom was that night, she’ll never forget the salt map of Venezuela and those precious words by her little guy. And it will be a priceless memory, one that she wouldn’t trade for anything. As you get older, memories are like gold. They become more valuable than a lot of antiques and other “things” that you collect. I love the following insight on memories. Somebody sent it to me from a church bulletin. I think it makes a memorable point:
As we go through life, each of us is taking a notebook of memories, whether we put our notes on paper, or only on the pages of the mind. As we write, it is important that we note down some little things each day for that time when those notes may be our highest joy. So note the day the lilacs bloomed, the day your little son picked a dandelion for you, the day the bluebirds found the house you made for them. In this age of bigness, the big things will crush us if we forget the words of One who said to consider the lilies of the field, and be not anxious.
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IF YOU DON’T MIND, AGE DOESN’T MATTER
Posted: under Anti-Psychotics.
January 11th, 2011
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