Ask a woman in her 60s or 70s what she doesn’t want to do anymore, and you’ll usually get a pretty quick answer. He refuses to perform. It does not shrink. And he vowed to avoid treatment the next 20-some years more than ever as freedom slowly fades instead of decades.
It’s like when Dorothy stopped apologizing to the Munchkins for landing in Oz and accidentally leaving the Wicked Witch’s house and started walking down the yellow brick road. He may not know what will happen next, but he does it anyway. Even friends and readers admit that the social script inherited from our mothers (shut up, dress inconspicuously, procrastinate) isn’t what our generation of miniskirt-wearing, feminist-leaning independent chicks once were.
Of course, the women I talk to may not be representative of all boomer women. Nobody is inactive pensioners. Like me, many of my friends are in their 70s still works because they want to take care of their rental property or save money for travel. What I have noticed is that the change in us is more of a shift than a vibration. I don’t think any of us planned it. We just “Dorothy-ed” through.
First, most of us have worked in raising children. Whether it’s because we want a more fun lifestyle, the freedom to own our own money, or simply to survive, it doesn’t make much difference.. It’s less like it The Shawshank Redemption”s references about being institutional, and more like a woman busting out to find her own personal Zihuatanejo. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” (Any of you who read me regularly know that I love to refer to movies.)
Well, we are divorced More. This means that we have learned to lick our wounds, hold back and sustain ourselves for a long time or forever, changing the assumption that any part of our body can be. person must be built around marriage. And if we’re ever going to be a couple again, there’s no doubt that the next guy won’t be the guy who dared to leave us.
We live longer. Everyone says aging is relative, and it is. Today, a 65-year-old often plans a year over 20 years closer to the third trimester of life than the epilogue. Why? First of all, medical and cultural age finally named instead of ignore. Women are no longer dismissed by their doctors, and unlike our mothers, we do not treat them like gods.
Our concerns are rightly (publicly) news. Olympia Dukakis, my mother’s generation, has mastered this carefree role as quietly as she has mastered other people’s chaos. The moon struckuntil he finally tells everyone what he thinks. Now there is no need to take it on the chin and keep quiet about it.
We also stopped apologizing for our bodies. Confidence and looks aren’t things we’re ready to give up by the time we hit 60 looks are still what give us a leg up. This is not a contradiction. Many of us consider or revel in the wonders of GLP-1s, Botox, and chin-ups, while refusing to accept aging as its enemy. You can live with taking care of your appearance and accepting how old you are; one is not a betrayal of the other. Why take this sacred thing called life and reduce it to the label? To be honest, this generation is the first to make labels out loud.
Hop. Race, class, geography, and health conditions create different aging experiences, and most public conversations focus on women who have more resources to let go of the old script. Nor have I seen any serious studies showing that rejecting the old script is healthier than embracing it. This is a real loophole, not something I put on paper with unverified statistics. But I can say that the women I am in the company of are not them shyretired old women, they could have been in 1965.
Some women find true peace in a more traditional path. everyone’s life is his own. It’s not about statistics, at least not yet. It’s about personal preference among people in my age range. Bottom line: Boomer women aren’t refusing to age. We are simply rejecting a lifestyle that reflects a time when the world looked very different, when women had fewer opportunities. We grew up with more resources than our mothers to write a new way of life. Whether you call it structural change or generational mythology itself, no one expects our golden years to be even more golden anymore.
