TURNING FIFTY

I wrote this a year ago just before I turned fifty - and I am fifty-one in a few weeks. Yikes! Time really is flying! The picture of me is at the age which I wished time would stand still - my wedding day aged a mere 34. My hey-day.....hey-ho.....

TURNING FIFTY

I turn fifty soon. It’s not a shock really, I’ve been testing it out for the past year by saying ‘I’m fifty’ to everyone I meet. Most peoples response is, ‘You don’t look fifty’ which I know is intended to be a compliment but is actually a depressing prediction. If people feel they need to tell me I that I don’t look fifty when I actually am fifty then that must mean that looking fifty is a really bad thing and sooner or later, on some unspecified date in the future I will look fifty – whatever kind of haggish hideousness that’s supposed to look like.  A whole half-century; in the number itself I imagine I can already feel things slipping away; my looks, my health, my children. I don’t want things to change, to keep moving so fast. I thought I didn’t mind getting older but now I feel afraid of becoming old. At the same time I hate the ageism that makes us all want to stay young – pretending that fifty is ‘the new thirty’ when in actual fact fifty is fifty. You don’t get time back – no matter how ‘young’ you look. Why can’t it just be OK to be fifty?

I loved turning forty because everything was in place. I was a published author, married with a child and living in Mayo. I had a huge party to celebrate, not just my landmark birthday but the fact that I had truly ‘arrived’ in my own life. I thought I knew everything – actually at thirty I thought I knew everything – at forty I knew I knew everything. Now I know that I know nothing and you would think that would make things easier? But it doesn’t – it just makes things scary. 

I certainly understand a lot more about life than I did ten years ago, but that is mostly because so many people I loved have died. Knowing more about life has always been something I aspired to, but I am beginning to feel that perhaps blind ignorance is the way to go.

I knew what I wanted my thirties to look like (write a book, find a man, get married, have a child) and my forties (write more books, be wife and mother, get house into IMAGE Interiors) but I have no idea what to ‘do’ with my fifties. I feel I have the writer, wife, mother thing licked now. I’ve had my house photographed for a magazine, I have all the friends I need, I have nothing left to prove. I’m not a madly ambitious person; I don’t want anything more than I have already like a bigger house or more children (joke!) yet there is still something missing. I tell myself I need to start doing what I am doing better – but I’m fed up with judging myself like that.

The deaths of my brother at forty-four and my best friend at fifty last year have begun to terrify me afresh. I feel I am counting out the decades now – whatever way I cut it, there are more behind me than ahead of me. I’m lucky because I have a great life and all the tools I need to carry it on, yet I’ve got this horrible feeling that I may have not having read the instructions properly. That there is some part of me that’s like the new barbeque we bought five years ago, used once, then left rotting in the shed until it became an unrecognizable heap of rotten wood and rust. 

My oldest friends are travelling to Dublin to join me for lunch on the actual day, and I don’t want to spend the afternoon sobbing into my big-treat Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud lunch like the confused, menopausal teenager I am right now -  SO - here is my wish list for my fifties. 

I want to write one really fabulous book a year. I want to be in a loving, vital relationship preferably with my husband. I want to be one stone lighter than I currently am and start treasuring my body so it’ll carry me through to old age. I want to enjoy strong relationships with my children. I want to worry less and have more fun AND I want to learn a new skill. Not something ‘good’ like Pilates or curtain-making – but something frivolous and useless like learning the bass guitar. I’ll be SO good by seventy that I can tour America with some amazing indie band who think it would be cool to have an old, eccentric lady-novelist rocking it out on bass for them. Yay! One decade closer to seventy! Now that’s something to aim for.