What's the difference between aging creatively and aging positively?
Not a heck of a lot. But I've noticed that many women don't think of themselves as creative unless they are artists. On the other hand, almost anybody can imagine she can learn to be more positive. So let's proceed from that idea.
If you want to feel positive about getting older, how do you do it? This isn't a simple question. As you know, our culture doesn't encourage it. Every women's magazine and health magazine offers advice that subtly suggests we have failed if we aren't in the peak of health and still the size we were in high school. I wish!
One of the ways I expand my horizons about aging is to read what other women are writing about it. One of my favorite online sites is called Women's Voices for Change. The columnist Liz Smith recently wrote about the difficulty film directors have finding "grandmotherly" types for certain roles. Everybody tries to look like a young Angie Dickinson, one complained.
That made me go and re-look at photos in the family montages on my walls. My grandmothers sit in those posed family portraits most of us treasure. Both are decidedly plump and grandmotherly-looking. They are actually much younger than I am now but seem much older. I realize again that both died in their 50's, one of a stroke, the other mysteriously of "a broken heart" soon after one of her sons died of cancer at 24.
When I focus on their faces, though, I see something more. They have soft, sweet, worn faces. They look like women who have survived a great many changes, some good, some sorrowful. Both came to America, from Italy and Sicily, as young women who spoke no English. Both worked hard with their husbands, who owned grocery stores in small cities in western New York State. Both were much loved and mourned by their children and grandchildren.
When I think about their lives, I feel profoundly grateful for my own. I have already outlived them by many years. Every succeeding year is a kind of gift, when I think about it. I touch my grandmothers' faces in the old pictures behind glass, silently promising them not to waste the time I have left.
What should I do with that time? Ah, that's the subject of another post.
