You Know You’re Really a Senior When …

Some idle musings …

• When did all the hair on my arms disappear? I mean ALL of it.
• When did the blue lines on my legs way outnumber the few random sprouts of hair still on my legs?
• When did date night mean being happy you can afford the coupon special at Hardees?
• When did insurance companies wanting to sell you Part A or Part B begin thinking you were dumb enough to send name, birth date and spouses name on an open Return Card through the mail—no envelope. Why not include the social security number too? Oh, and why does applying for Medicare feel harder than any, any college class you ever took?
• When did you start getting on so many mailing lists for old people products? Oh wait, it might have been when buying those zippered compression stockings for your hub from Dream Products (and yes the zippers help!)
• When did owning two Senior passes to all of the National Parks in the U.S. seem like a mixed blessing?
• When did a 15 minute hike up to a Shenandoah National Park overlook—which ended in NOT being able to do the one rock scramble that was there because you were afraid of hurting yourself, and your spouse was already recovering from surgery, so you wimped out—feel like an accomplishment anyway because you didn’t HAVE to do it to feel happy.
  

  After the rock fail: happy that I had the good sense not to try it that day. Another time!

Getting older is not for wusses.

I once wrote a book called You Know You’re a Mother When … filled with all the sleepless nights, disasters and triumphs of early parenting. Exactly the stage two of my daughters are in now.

Back then I was the one to mostly get up with them in the middle of the night because of breastfeeding. Now my husband is the one to get up three to four times because of pain or not being able to sleep.

Not fun however your sleepless nights come.

But as Madeleine L’Engle put it so beautifully, “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

Unless of course there’s dementia. My heart and prayers go out to a friend who just found out that his mother’s second husband has pretty severe dementia and his mother had been hiding it from the whole family until she ended up in the hospital from the stress of being a caregiver at her age.

Getting older is truly not for wusses.

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What can you add to the fun list of things that you’ve discovered about aging, starting with the words “When did …” ? I might do a follow up on this blog or in my column, Another Way.

Or, what stories do you have from the less-fun list of why getting older takes strong women and men?

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Some of you follow both the Another Way newspaper column online and my blog (thank you, thank you). So you may have already read my series on Growing Older with more serious content, plus you can also download a PDF of the series.