50 and Fine with It
One thing about having a December birthday is that you have a year to come to terms with how old you are going to be. So I’ve been preparing myself for the big Hawaii Five O for a long time coming. Looking in the mirror and seeing that the salt and pepper hair I had come to love is now far more salt than pepper, that the back of my hand looks much more like my mother’s than it does mine (I wonder at times if she isn’t typing at the keyboard as I find myself ranting about some nonsense that wouldn’t have bothered me in my ample pepper days).
Beyond the physical landmarks of this milestone passing, there is the mental noise of course — my boyfriend is a much younger man, and I am now eligible for the early bird special and an AARP card. And of course the biggest hurdle of mind mud for me is that I am now 50 years old and still a mess.
My mother use to send me birthday cards each year that would read some version of “may you be FREE this year”. Even though her own OCD (obsessive conspiracy disorder) kept her from establishing any close human ties and she lived as a modern day hermit (or perhaps hobbit, for she was so fond of being in the woods with her dogs), she always felt that “her” illness was somehow superior to mine. In fact, we know now (in the years she has been gone) that it is likely the same genetic trait that causes a hyper elasticity in the joints, veins, and other body bits that is at both the root of her “fibromyalgia” and my name of the game “dysautonomia”.
I know my mother’s pain, I do, especially as I get older. The hips ache and the coat hanger pain in my neck and shoulders brings me to tears at times. Yet because she could “walk” even though often fatigued, and indeed because she chose to live alone, she saw that as the crucial criteria points that determined self worth. I say I have no idea why Mom went MIA four years ago … but the fact that it coincided with when I got my first wheelchair is likely no coincidence. Her expressed fear was that if I used the chair, I would forever loose my ability to walk. I can say confidently now with hindsight, that she was wrong on that mark. During difficult times, I would use the chair on occasion in the house, but for the most part, I only take the purple rollz out when I am going for a walk around the neighborhood or when I go out to store — which I admit is probably less frequent than a hobbit spotting.
But I don’t mind the stigma of the physical limitations of this half century old body. I have a dysfuntional autonomic system and it creates a world of discomfort and obstacles in my life on a daily basis. We all have something, my pain is no different than that of any sentient being. What I DO find myself going up against in my disordered mind are those haunting words of my mother … “may you be FREE this year.” Because she wasn’t talking about being “healthy” … she knew that she and I both had chronic and life long conditions. But she believed with all her heart, that I was somehow weak, unreasonably dependent and otherwise sub-par as a human being because I couldn’t “take care of myself”. I didn’t live alone, oh hell, I don’t stay alone in house without someone else around. I don’t go out much at all — which must make me crazy right?
And of course its not only “mom” that echoed those thoughts of “take a pill” and get over it. There have been many people in my life who truly believed — and tried to convince me — that I was irrational and somehow unreasonable and broken, because I was not autonomous. So for me, turning 50 meant really looking at that and having to decide for myself what it meant in terms of a pass/fail grade on this mid-term exam.
On Tuesday of this week, a dear woman helped my boyfriend and I go out to a little Italian deli. The store is too small for my wheel chair, but I usually manage okay with my cane for short jaunts. On this day, we couldn’t find my cane, and so I thoughtlessly opted to go without it. I sat in the back seat of the car with my lover’s arms around me and his eyes locked on mine with a gentle smile that said you are safe with me, its okay. And we headed out. Its a lovely little store. It reminds me of the New Jersey neighborhood where my grandparents lived and where I spent the first decade of my life. The products on the shelves, the familiar cheese, the bread … it all feels like “home”. But even as I pulled down a number ticket at the deli counter, I could feel the pain strike hard in my shoulders. The postural impact of my body trying to keep the blood returning from my feet was too much and my system did the dance of the dysautonomic. I held my boyfriends hand tight and whispered, “This is so hard”. He did his best to comfort me and press on my neck firm to ease some of the contraction. Yet despite our best efforts and perhaps because it was a longer line than usual for the two pounds of black forest ham that would put a smile on his face for the next few days, by the time I gave the young woman my credit card, my hands were visably shaking and my body was breaking down. I was in tears before I reached the back seat of the car. Frightened and dismayed. It happens like this every once in a while. It does. And yet, when it unfolds in even this familiar pattern I am apt to beat myself up, thinking if only I was “stonger” I wouldn’t let this get to me.
I hated that it was a “hard trip”. The mental story of “you are 50 years old and can’t manage to go to the store without falling apart” was a hard page to turn. In fact, I said it out loud that next morning — when my body was having a flare at the house. Some version of not wanting to be “crazy” though of course I used other mulch-syllabic words to describe a mental disorder. (I realize the word I want here is multisyllabic, but my spell checker is insisting I really wanted to write mulch-sylabic, or mufti-sylabic or multicultural)
And just then, my redneck prince charming held both of my hands and explained to me that I wasn’t insane, I was simply “skeered”. For years of course, I had tried to argue this point with people close to me. That I had a physical condition that at times was so hard to cope with that it caused me to become frightened in the throes of it. But few ever understood. Yet this man, who has watched me over the last year that I have laid in his arms was able to express it so simply, so eloquently and with such dignity onto me that I cried at the sound of his words.
In that one unrehearsed and spontaneous moment he made turning fifty … simply fine. It was the most priceless gift and I will forever be grateful to him.
