The Beauty of Middle Age

Well, it happened. I’ve reached that inevitable crossroads between passing for someone sort of hip and vaguely young to looking like a middle-aged suburban mom on her way to Target. Blame it on the heavy creases between my eyebrows or the gray roots my stylist says pass for blond highlights, but attractive waiters have recently started calling me ma’am, and the advertisements populating my Facebook and Instagram are for back-smoothing wireless bras and Allbird shoes. (Apparently, for my demographic, it’s all about comfort.)

Should I get these?

Even if you see it coming, the end of youth is a hard pill to swallow. Aging, at least as it appears on the face we see in the mirror each morning, happens so slowly, it can be easy to forget time is running out to turn the ship around.

Things start sagging or getting bigger, and we promise to do better tomorrow, until one day it’s too late. You look in the mirror, and your mother’s (or in my case) your father’s face is staring back at you. And while my dad is still very handsome, I’d rather not look like a seventy-year-old man.

But seriously, how cute is my dad? - with the girls last summer

For me, the most depressing side effect of middle age has been the weight gain. Like the lines on my forehead, the extra weight added up so slowly it took a few years to realize I’d gained close to twenty pounds. No matter what I tried— diets, cleanses, bootcamps, even hormones— I couldn’t seem to get back to a body I felt comfortable in. And my expectations weren’t unreasonable. I wasn’t trying to be a supermodel, maybe just wear a pair of jeans without feeling like a sausage.

But weight struggles were hardly new for me. I’ve always been tall and solidly built, but that translates to “big” when you spend your formative years comparing yourself to heroin chic models like Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista.

In my teens and twenties, I believed that shrinking my size was the key to finding the happiness that alluded me.

Reaching an “ideal weight” was never about improving my health or strength or finding joy, and I probably would have sacrificed all three to reach that elusive number on the scale. Rather, being smaller was all about being desirable and worthy of love. From billboards and magazines to Oprah and her wagon full of fat to my first husband (who was considerably smaller than me) and his subtle critiques about the size of my butt or the size of my dinner plate, the world never seemed to let me forget that my body took up too much space. It’s no wonder I viewed exercise and physical activity as a chore and a struggle—something I did, not for enjoyment, but to achieve my ultimate goals of losing weight and looking cute.

Rest assured, I have done enough therapy over the years to stop looking for validation from strangers or deriving my self-worth from the number on the scale.

I even spent a few months, at the peak of my middle-age weight gain, flirting with the idea of giving up the fight. My second husband and biggest cheerleader loves my body at any weight. I rarely put on a bathing suit and I work from home, most days wearing sweatpants and slippers. Why bother trying? I figured I could walk my dogs to get my steps in each day, buy some Eileen Fisher tunics, and order that cheesecake. But life on the couch lost its appeal rather quickly, not because I was still hung up on being a certain size, but because giving up on being physically active left me feeling like all of the interesting parts of life were behind me. It might have been too late for me to pick up gymnastics or rock climbing, but I wasn’t dead yet.

It turns out I was looking at my weight—and losing that middle-age 20 pounds—as a requirement or a gateway to being physical when in fact I had it all backwards. Over the years I learned to avoid activities that exposed me to ridicule and failure and injury and comparison, but in the process, I whittled my life down to such a small story I forgot what it felt like to have fun.

If middle age has taught me anything it is that the world doesn’t care what I do or how I look doing it. I could probably wear rainbow leggings and a crop top to the grocery store, and no one but my teenage daughter would bat an eye.

And while it’s sort of sad to reach a point where I am largely unnoticed, it has also been strangely liberating. With invisibility comes freedom, and with freedom comes new experiences and the ability to fail miserably without anyone noticing, let alone taking the time to point it out.

Sweaty hair don’t care

To test this theory, I began exercising again not for weight loss, but simply because it made me feel good. I stopped drinking alcohol for the same reason. And now, instead of meeting my friends at the wine shop for a glass of Chardonnay or three, we work out together at Orangetheory Fitness and Corestrong (a Lagree fitness studio here in Boise). We occasionally fall off a treadmill or come to class with a dryer sheet sticking to the crotch of our leggings, but it’s cool, because no one is watching us anyway.

Rather than dread my workouts the way I did when I was younger, I look forward to them.

Feeling strong and sore and tired and sweaty reminds me that I’m still alive—that the best parts of life aren’t in the rearview mirror.

My Corestrong workout: the hardest 40 minutes of the day

My butt is still big (more like wide and flat), but I’m too busy celebrating the three-minute plank I did yesterday to care. I’ve lost some weight, but the number on the scale doesn’t really matter to me anymore. I’m more interested in filling my time with all the activities I was too busy or self-conscious to try when I was younger. From paddle-boarding to salsa dancing to cross-country skiing, my latest conquests don’t always end well, but who cares? When I fall or fail or double-over laughing- I’m learning all over again that fun and adventure aren’t found on the couch with a glass of wine in my hand, but out in the world far from my comfort zone.

Post workout Starbucks with the girls

I’m not sure what all of this means—other than the obvious fact that youth is really wasted on the young. Maybe the law of attraction exists in reverse—what we spend time hating about ourselves grows larger.

Maybe letting go of the world’s expectations leads to the love and acceptance we spend too many years waiting for someone else to give us.

Or perhaps in simply inhabiting our bodies more fully and with more forgiveness, we find true happiness. It would have been helpful to learn all these lessons before the years had taken their toll on my body, but better late than never. Despite the wrinkles and the saggy parts, I have learned to love the freedom that comes with middle age and the joy that finds you when the world’s not watching.

Paddle-boarding in Baja with a wedgie the size of Texas, but who cares! No one’s watching. Photo credit: @theluminousseason