Oh Man, I Have Hands!

My husband shows me the back of his hand. “40,” he says. He pulls the skin until all the little wrinkles and saggy parts are pulled tight and says, “20.” He giggles at himself. I push the skin of his hand together until it is a mass of  wrinkles and say, “60.” He rolls his eyes at me. After he’s gone, I look at the skin of my hands. Definitely 40.  I also realize with great horror that my mother’s hands have somehow, mysteriously, become attached to my arms.

My mother spent her 30th birthday in the bed. Hers was the generation taught never to trust anyone past the dread age of 30 and she suddenly found herself unable to hang onto 29 any longer. I vaguely remember her puffy face and rumbled Pjs as she headed back to her bedroom and shut the door.

30 didn’t bother me at all.

35 hit me like an evil tornado from the sky, bent on sucking my house off its very foundation. Suddenly, I was “mid-thirties,” not “early-thirties” or, even “late-twenties,” but  “MID-THIRTIES.” The notion of it reminded me of hair stuck in a drain.  So, I figured that 40 wouldn’t be much of a big deal, I’d already had my  middle age “come apart," so how bad could it be?

I vividly remember my mother’s 40th birthday. We’d come home from church and her friends were all waiting in the kitchen for her surprise party. I studied the look on her face-the shock that turned quickly to understanding and then to joy as the realization sunk in of why all those people were crammed in next to the trash compactor-  and I couldn’t get over how very OLD she was. Old, like gonna die in her sleep any minute old, old like her name and “sex“ just could not go in the same sentence old, old like never gonna happen to me!!! old.

It has. And, I’m healthy and I still have sex (ahem, great sex!) and her hands have grown onto the ends of my arms. It’s true. I had noticed it but the truth of it was hammered into my consciousness when Oldest Child, riding next to me in the truck, looked down and exclaimed,

  “Mom, your hands look 

JUST LIKE Meme’s hands!"

I know why I‘ve sprouted these hands. I mean, besides genetics, why. Mom worked in the yard constantly, until her hands grew freckled and tough and the nails were worn down.  I spend every moment that I can at the barn, outside, in the hot sun and the rain and the cold, doing barn things. Sometimes, I plop my dirty hands onto my steering wheel on the drive home from the barn and contemplate what I’d give up to have young pretty flesh, again.








One thing that I’d have to give up to regain my nice pretty flesh is my time spent outside at the barn-the sun and wind and dirt and the work do not “Dawn, No More Dishpan Hands” make. And, I don't want to give up my barn time. It’s, honestly, the only time that I feel truly alive. I am a bit ashamed to admit that. I have a husband and several kids and the only time I feel truly alive is when I’m with a horse, preferably my Horse.

My people need me. My time at the barn is not about something that I have to do, it’s about who I am while I’m doing what I do.  At the barn, I am independent and capable and …ageless.  Perhaps, I am a bit of an adrenaline junky, if it weren’t horses, it’d be motorcycles or skydiving or rock climbing. I just want to  (nod to Bon Jovi) “live while I’m alive.”  I don’t want to be one of those people who sit in front of the computer all day and, then, the TV all night. I’d rather be too busy doing stuff to watch other people doing stuff. No reality show on Tv is worth missing my life for.

Okay, okay, okay, I admit it, it’s for the horse smell, too. Oh lord, help me, that smell! There is nothing else in the world like that smell-subtle, earthy and musky, like an expensive perfume. I swear, some days Horse smells so good that I feel like I should call my husband, alone with the kids at home, and apologize.  

Contact High-Sorta. No, Not Really.

I am ambivalent about reaching 40. Well, in general, overall,  I’m just shocked. I mean c’mon I was part of the “Me Generation.“  Hair Bands were a thing to be lusted over, not mocked. (Really, does Jon Bon Jovi age, at all? That man will probably make catheters and adult Depends look sexy. Why couldn’t he be twice my age + 7??) Every last one of us secretly believed, on some level, that we would grow up to be pampered rock stars. If we grew up at all. Aside from the disappointment that there will not be legions of fans and groupies waiting to serve my every need, there is this complete incredulity that I have actually lived to have had kids and raised a family.

Part of the reason that we were such hedonistic, pot-smoking, ( I only inhaled the second-hand smoke in my middle-school bathroom. No, honestly! Actually, truth be known, I was a religious ice queen but that‘s beside the point)  rebel children was that we were also a generation who was raised with the cold war hanging over our heads, every damn day.  If we were all gonna die anyway, why not have what you want when you want it and lots of it?

“Russia” was responsible for every evil thing that anybody could come up with.  Movie after movie portrayed the world as one step away from complete and total destruction with those of us who managed to survive having to learn to speak Russian out of our badly deformed irradiated mouths.  Speaking of which, do you remember those nuclear bombing films that they used to show us in school? The one in which that playground of children was reduced to ash by the huge, boiling, fire-cloud? Truth be known, that movie is probably single-handedly responsible for some of my more expensive therapy bills. ;P  Afterwards, the teachers would flick on the lights and, while the projector was still whirring away rewinding the film, we were instructed to practice getting under our desks in case of a bombing.

I distinctly remember the moment in time when I realized the disconnect between the film that I’d just seen and the fact that my little elementary school legs were crammed underneath my flimsy wood and metal desk. My desk was missing one of its little, metal, coin “feet”- it couldn’t hold me, my books, papers and pencils upright without rocking vainly against the hard linoleum floor. THIS was going to protect me from nuclear fall-out? Um, no. All this bomb drill “practice” was simply to make the adults feel like they were doing SOMETHING, anything, against the annihilation that was sure to come.  Fast-forward 30 some odd years and I’m sending my own kids to school to sit in flimsy desks of their own.  And, on some level, my brain just won’t accept it.

I am going to keep this blog until the big 4-0 slaps me in the face and then I can say that I did it. I shall slide into my forties with grace and easy reflection on my earlier years.  Oh, who am I kidding? I am totally freaking out about turning 40. There, I said it. And, I am screaming into the void in hopes that some echo of meaning will bounce back to me and  I just don’t care, anymore, what that says about me. My mom always said that the best thing about turning 40 was that you quit caring what anybody else thought. I think she was a little right and a little wrong-I do care what other people think, I just care what I think more.

(Okay, “freaking out,” and “screaming into the void,” may be just a tad melodramatic-I’m “introspective," yeah, that’s the word-introspective.)

There are lots of reasons not to do this, including that the mental remnants of my inner 16 year old rebel-child refuses to bow down to the clichés of the modern world <pout> I WILL NOT have a blog (or a tattoo) like the rest of everybody else in the modern world. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t ( … and, I was thinking dragon on the tattoo, what do you think?)

For my 40th birthday, 

I am giving myself 

6 months of Blog-Time. 

Wow, way to put that 

English degree to work!

It’s Just a Number, Right? RIGHT?!

Can someone answer this question for me? No, please I really mean it…what the hell happened? Where did the time go?  I will be FORTY in almost exactly  6 months, give or take a few weeks. F.O.R.T.Y. Let me say that again in case you missed it the first time…FOOOOOORDEEEEEEEE.

My husband says that the rule for guys dating younger women is to divide the guys age in half and add 7. So, a forty year old guy could, theoretically, date a 27 year old  woman without too much guilt, he is, after all, following the much coveted “rule” about dating younger women. Which leaves me with a few questions, well actually A LOT of questions, but let‘s just hit the high points:

1) Who in six stages of Hades made up this ridiculous rule?  (Ok, only two real questions.)  2) WHEN is he planning on leaving me for the younger, much more plastic version of me?  (She better not be fertile,  I KNOW he can’t afford any more kids, I’m just sayin.’ :) )

So, apparently, according to my wise husband, who would not even entertain the notion of “Cougar,”  this rule does not apply in reverse. I, as an old, worn down, haggard, 40ish woman can not hope to reach backward in time for my own ascot wearing Ken doll. I must be happy with that guy who is twice my age, add 7, which brings me back to my point. My guy would be 64. Sixty-four.  DearHusband, K-Man, gets the 27 year old Victoria Secret’s model, I get Sylvester Stallone (the real one, not the guy who spends two hours in a make-up chair) on a bad day…and waaaaay past the “Rocky”  years.

“When you're in your 20s, you have no idea what the hell's going on or who you are or how the world works. Wisdom is really underrated. We are obsessed with youth, with physical youth, what we look like, and what happens to our bodies as we get older. We forget what happens to our souls, our minds, and our actual human experience. “-Cameron Diaz