I want to earn a Growing-Old-Well badge.  It will take its place of honor next to the Sewing badge on my ancient Girl Scout uniform.  Currently, I’m working on my Feeling-Beautiful-Without-A-Face-Lift badge (though I have had my eyes lifted so I can see, as it was going, my upper lid was becoming a blindfold).

I think of all those badges I sought when I was young, now attained or irrelevant.  Fourteen, first kiss; sixteen, go steady; nineteen have sex but don’t get pregnant, twenty-one, figure out how to have great sex, (I’m still working on that one), get into and out of college, first job, first husband.  Today, health and stability rank at the top of my to-accomplish list.

I want to protect my breasts and colon from cancer and my arteries from heart disease.  I get a thrill from a good cholesterol reading and happiness from aches and pains that respond to Advil.  I love taking vacations and returning home to my family, my friends, my dog and Peet’s coffee.

I get a kick out of seeing a good movie, reading a good novel, and working up a good sweat in aerobics class.  Notice the operative middle way goal of goodness.  Aging has softened my drive for the peaks.  In my fifties, good is the great of my thirties.  Who has the energy for great anyway?  The gym is ten minutes away, CSI is on Wednesday nights, Chinese take-out Fridays. Life is good.

However, there is one great pleasure I pursue unabashedly, the company of my women friends.  These friendships are a stretch of sandy beach on an island where the trade winds are a tender caress and it doesn’t matter how I look in a bathing suit.

Now in our fifties as we sip martinis, we know dark things swimming beneath those blue seas, will soon to surface. Remember the ominous theme music from Jaws: da Dah da Dah… da Dah da Dah. That’s the sound of our mortality and our youth. We all hear it, a distant hum. Sometimes we listen to it. Sometimes we laugh over it. Sadly, it never really goes away because we know too much.

Looking at the lovely faces of my girlfriends, I see a new reason for wanting to live a long life. I want to be part of our collective old age. We are the women who demonstrated, rebelled, experimented. We had casual sex before it was casual. It was just daring and fun. We saw movies when they were films. We suffered the disillusions of Viet Nam and assassinations of our heroes. We demanded more than one path for women, and often we had groin pulls from trying to walk two trails at the same time.

It’s time again to break old molds and build new ones. We are the first generation of women where the fifty decade is astonishingly young and we might measure our future life span as no other generation has before us. Moreover, we do not intend to hide our lives away, alone in a condo in Miami, playing cards in the afternoons. We are about to change what it means to be older women.

The possibility of years stretched out before me feels like summers when I was a child. I remember the last day of school, the clang of emptied lockers, the confetti of discarded papers, the smell of sunlight and dust. Most intensely, though, I remember the enchantment of being on the verge, the heady abandon of stepping off into summer. This was the fourth grade equivalence of anticipating a love affair.

However, as do love affairs, summers end. The difference for us is that our past-middle-aged summer doesn’t end with going back to school in the fall. It just ends.

Beautiful young men call me ma’am. Now there has to be some compensation for that, doesn’t there. Time again to be pathfinders and explorers. Remember our aches and pains still respond to Advil. And whatever else happens, I have every intention of earning my growing old well badge.

I was trying on clothes at Nordstrom yesterday. I looked over my shoulder into the mirror at the panty line wildly distorting the seat of the slacks, when I noticed an ad taped to the dressing room wall.

Does trying on bathing suits make you anxious and depressed?  (What a question!) Do you feel all bathing suits are designed for preteens?  After trying on bathing suits do you feel you need to go to the gym and work out for hours? If you answered, “yes,” to any of these questions, (the ad continued) you need to come in on May 15 to meet Jeanette, our bathing suit fitting expert.” I thought, if you answered, “No,” to any of those questions, you are a man and you’re in the wrong dressing room.

I dread buying a bathing suit, it is the worst part of summer or a vacation.  For most of us over twenty-two, our thighs are dimpling somewhere between nervous anticipation and abject terror.  We are among the world’s most educated and emancipated women, yet bathing suits bring us to our knees.  This isn’t good.

What can we do about this?  Not much actually.  Society won’t let us rest.  The standards serve as constant reminders that our bodies are unattractive.  We feel ashamed and unappealing.  The question is how to handle those feelings?  Here’s some ideas for dealing with the ever-present nagging comparisons and negative self-evaluations.

First and foremost, tell yourself you have better things to do.  Tell yourself your body works.
Then tell yourself I’m too smart and self-aware to be shackled by body image.
Let’s cut our anxiety and lead with our strengths.  Think of the power you would feel if you, the burden lifted if you could look at your thighs and say, Hello girls!  You serve me well. You’re sturdy.  You take me where I want to go.  I no longer want you to take me down the runway to be crowned Miss America.  I no longer want you to give me the credentials to be a movie star or a super model.  You are not the lead line on my resume.

Next point: beautiful thighs don’t make you happy.  Ask any person with beautiful thighs.  “Hello, I notice you have killer thighs.  What do you talk to your therapist about?” Hollywood is filled with beautiful thighs and miserable people with their pain splashed across tabloids and People magazine.

As a young psychologist, I remember seeing a very beautiful woman patient.  I was confused.  Here she was the standard against which all women measure themselves and she was unhappy.  It violated all my beliefs about beauty making you happy.  Then there are all those rich unhappy people, but that’s another story.
What is the goal?  What should we make time for?  What do I have to offer as a human being, as a woman?  Well, for one thing I can make people laugh.  I can help heal people’s emotional wounds. I can share laughter with my friends. I can make my home beautiful.  I make my husband happy. I take good care of my children.  The list goes on.
My thighs are neither an asset nor a detriment in any of these endeavors.  What makes me feel worthwhile are my skills and my compassion.  What make me happy are my health and the health of the people I love.  When I sit in my garden with my dog reading a good novel, my thighs are irrelevant to the peace I experience.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I wouldn’t want to have the standard of beauty our culture exults.  It’s just that chasing it forever doesn’t really give anyone what is really of value. What a waste of my wisdom to keep trying to achieve what I think it will give me, which it probably won’t.  Let’s refocus.  Let’s reach for something else.  Let’s stop reading “Seven Ways to Shape Up for Summer.”  Life is way too short for that.