On Getting Old.

Or Rather: On Gearing Up for The Last Most Beautiful Third of Our Lives.

Aleah Chapin’s Naked Old Women.

David asks me: How do we want to live the last third of our lives?

This question changes everything.

__________________________

For the greater part of my adult life, I’ve looked about 10 years younger than I really was at any given time. Carded until I was well into my 40’s. I kinda thought I’d always look significantly younger than my age.

Kim doesn’t look a day over 70, people would say as I hit 95.

I have good-enough genes. My body, with the exception of one large (but gratefully benign and operable) brain tumor in 2001, did what it was supposed to do. It gave me easy orgasms, a throttling sex drive, a shape and weight that conformed well-enough to the days beauty standards. I could be athletic if I wanted to be, but also didn’t need to be super-athletic. Most of my days have been mercifully pain free and devoid of serious chronic diseases. And I, quite shockingly, popped out two babies vaginally in my 40’s, without any fertility assitance, and made enough milk to feed them.

I was sure this rigor would carry on, even if it was somehow muted. That for all the things I did struggle with - my brain, my unceasing anxiety and panic, wounds from family separation and adoption, the tumult of failed relationships in my 20’s and 30’s that never seemed to gel into anything substantial, lasting and comforting, a protracted, painful estrangment from my mother, and a penchant for risk-taking and addictive, bad-for-me things - my youthful, healthy physicality won me a kind of lottery and was the one dependable thing I could count on to work properly and get me through.

I couldn’t imagine ever not being full of energy, or not horny all the time or not thirsty for movement and adventure. I thought I might always be able to access that beautiful, fresh, unvarnished sense of youth that is devoid of texture and roughness. No demarcations that proved you had lived through something. I enjoyed being seamless, I guess.

By 38, I had decided I would probably not get married or have kids, and this felt fine. Maybe even a relief.

Then, I met David at The Russian Vodka Room in NYC during the time he was splitting with his then-wife. When it became official, he called me. Four months later we were pregnant with Lucy. I was 39. Edie came at 41.

I had pushed out two babies in 17 months. My body, going into Lucy’s birth was strong, but there wasn’t a long enough time to recover from the first pregnancy before we were into the second. The second time, my body was busted. My body, the one that did everything it was supposed to like a good little girl, wasn’t bouncing back. I couldn’t get back to equilibrium. My doctor kinda mocked me for asking if I could be in perimenopause. You are breastfeeding, he said, you can’t lactate and be in perimenopause. He was wrong. We got pregant again and lost the baby in the second trimester. I was surprised. I was sure my body would somehow pump out another one. It didn’t. The first sign that something was changing.

I stopped thinking of my body as something that would just bounce back. Instead it was something being maligned and something I could malign as well, even as it held its own with my copious drinking and self-medicating. A bottle of wine a night that ultimately worked itself into years of cocktails every evening. I felt irretrievable. I looked like I felt. Irretrievable.

I was no longer comfortable in my body.

I stayed uncomfortable for a decade. This is it. I had a good run was the thinking.

I went on anti-anxiety meds. David and I quit drinking at home. I felt better. We became foster parents. We adopted a couple of kids. It didn’t stick out to me that we were adding children at the same time as friends were adding grandchildren.

Life was still ahead of us. Wasn’t it?

I was deep into writing The Meth Lunches when I started to get the feeling it might not be. Something changed about my brain during the process of book writing. I noticed that I would write pages and go back and read them and they read fresh. Like I hadn’t read them before. This actually helped with the book writing a lot. But I knew something in me was failing, too.

I had to keep copious notes to hold all the thoughts together. In some places I found a new clarity and in others I found murk. My thinking slid into a new vortex - I thought deeply about concepts and put things together and connected them in ways I hadn’t before. I was more expansive. But my memory wasn’t as sharp. I fumbled for obvious things. Lost the engine of thought often, flailing to pick it back up. I forgot what I had written and re-wrote things unecessarily.

And around that time I realized I hadn’t had a period in almost a year.

Just know: It is amazing to not bleed every month. It is fucking beautiful to no longer spend time and energy preparing for the bleeding, having full-on emotional craziness and nervous system break downs because of the bleeding, thinking about buying products for the bleeding, finding money for the products for the bleeding, or remembering to bring things with me in case I bleed, or what color pants I’m wearing in case I bleed through, or worse, wearing a sweater wrapped around my waist to keep everyone from noticing my white overalls, stained red in the crotch. A 9th grade memory from hell.

Don’t even get me started on not having to worry about pregnancies and abortions in this climate of reproductive policing. I am happy I will never need to procure for myself a morning after pill, another abortion, or worry about STDs.

But the changes in my brain and the loss of menstruation hit me as irrevocable change. A march toward death. Something that the young can push away, but I was no longer afforded the luxury. There was an acceleration, these past few years, of my aging, as if my body was hyper-spinning toward its inevitable end. For years no one ever appeared to age much in our 30’s even 40’s. But here in this stage of life, change comes on like a bullet train.

It’s in the mirror and in the bones every day. You can’t not notice it.

And then David’s question: How do we want to live the last third of our lives?

I see that menopause led us here.

A demarcation I needed. To know things were changing. Forcing me to take notice. A sign to adapt. I think about my older girls, Lucy and Edie, now 20 and 18. At eleven, I couldn’t imagine them as adults. They were so immature and young. They, and we, needed that rough, bumpy, loud transition of puberty to get them to wanting to be in the world, secure their futures, live their best lives as their own people outside of us. And maybe we needed them rail at us, slam their doors, and say dumb offensive shit, to force us to give them room. For us to be able to let them go.

I imagine peri and menopause to be the same. This rude, loud, obnoxious call from Nature to let us know we need to shift. That something monumental is happening. Had it not been life altering, maybe I would busy myself enough to barely register it. I could keep looking youngish and deluding myself. Maybe this is why menopause has to be catalysmic.

I now feel my age. And look it. I am in the last year of my 50’s. People ask me if my daughter is my granddaughter, regularly. I used to hate it. But now, I enjoy surprising people with my older mom self.

I am free from cat calls as I walk down the street. Strange men are not discussing what my pussy might taste like, as if I am not standing there hearing it all. No one has grabbed my ass, except for David, and this is all I need. Sexual violence is not something I have to handle on the daily. I love being less visible as a sexual being.

I get to move undetected now. It’s like silent guerilla warfare.

What is important is that I still am a sexual, sensual being. I still get a thrill seeing David’s Jeep parked in the driveway and knowing he is home. Or when he comes back from a meeting and I get a rush of wanting to touch his chest just where the button of his shirt is open. Just as I wanted to on our first date.

David and I decided that living The Last Third of our lives requires what he calls Rich People’s Healthcare.

Health to us is more important than new vehicles, or fashion or living in a bigger house, or eating out at prestige restauarants. We, gratefully, can choose to spend more heavily out of pocket to get excellent medical care in lieu of other fun things. I shifted my anxiety meds, started HRT and went on Mounjaro, which not only knocked off extra weight, but leveled out a lot of appetite spikes that left me tempermental, moody and unbalanced. I feel sooooo much better these days.

I started moving more (still a work-in-progress) and tested for all the usual potential cancer and disease risks. I’m intrigued by death doulas on social media and started following them. What is a good death? I wondered. But then I thought, a death plan is just a birth plan in disguise. And we have been here before. It’s something you hope you can use to get you through the unknowns (of pregnancy, of dying). Experience and maturity tell me these things are out of our control anyway.

Better to focus on beginning The Last Most Beautiful Third of Our Lives.

We cannot ignore that it is here. I start research for a new book. And pick out a bikini to wear this summer - my first since Lucy was 6 months old. Who the fuck is going to look at me anyway? I love and accept my body in a way I never have before. That feels damned near miraculous. David plans to ride the Pacific Coast Highway on motorcycles with Lucy. And climb Killimanjaro with Edie.

Maybe the Last Third could be the absolute Best Third?

I chose the work of painter, Aleah Chapin, for this piece, because I love the way she documents the bodies of these older women. It’s literal. The lumps, the demarcations of living and thriving and surviving and crumbling and rising.

But these bodies are also released. This is older women celebrating and communing together without fear of reprisal or criticism or embarrassment. These images forgo boxing women into products to be consumed, as we have been our whole, long lives. These bodies, these women, us, are in this state of freedom, movement, without the pretense of being posed in the best angles, the most forgiving light. There is nothing to forgive.

This is how menopause releases us.

This is The Last Most Beautiful Third of Our Lives. Welcome to it.

_______________________

END NOTES:

Welcome to The Great Perhaps

No Talk of Dry Vaginas + Flaccid Penises Here. We are embracing the great unknown.

Thanks to my husband, David and some folks in comments for bringing this quote to the fore front. I go to seek a great perhaps is attributed to the French Renaissance writer and philosopher François Rabelais.

It’s meaning is about the greatness of not knowing the next steps. The beauty of an unanswered question. It’s about embracing and going all in on the great unknown, which for us could be death or illness, or new love and new adventure, or changes in who we thought we were. The embracing of a new identity, or just the mystery of being 60, of being 70, 80, 90 and beyond.

What does it all mean? I am screaming in my head. lol. Let’s figure it out. Together.

Stay tuned every Thursday (sometimes Friday if I can’t get my shit together) for a new ALWAYS FREE, never-a-paywall essay. We can also schedule chats, zoom gatherings, around certain issues if people want. And if you have particular issues you’d like us to tackle, DM me or drop them in comments.

Let’s create a community that lifts everyone up and gets us through The Great Perhaps as beautifully and hilariously as we can.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim