Age-y matters

May 15, 2012

“Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” – Satchel Paige

Which I always thought was probably easier for a man to say than a woman.

I have a poll on the front page of this blog asking whether 50 is too old to have a baby. So far the results are 7 for yes it’s too old, and 12 for no. Thank you Colleen and Bernadette for voting in my favor 6 times each! 😀

It’s one thing to have a baby at 51 while we are both still pretty healthy and active, but we are going to have a teenage boy in our 60s. How will we relate socially? Neither of us knows a thing about pop music anymore. Our sweet niece Emily made us a list of pop singers and I did recognize the names Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, but I couldn’t identify a single tune of theirs. I don’t know most of the guest hosts on SNL anymore and forget about the musical guests. About a decade ago, I stopped being able to identify the next generation of leading men in movies. D and I have a joke. He asked me once who was in a movie, and I said, “One of those J guys– Jason, Justin, Jared, Josh.” They all look the same to me–young. Other than that, I can’t tell them apart.

Then again, does anyone relate to the things their parents relate to? My parents are the World War II generation, and my grandmother lived with us when I was growing up. She was born in 1893 and thought it was appalling that my parents allowed me and my sister to swim, especially in front of boys. It wasn’t just the bathing suits she objected to, she thought it was “unladylike” for the two of us to do anything athletic in front of boys. She used to sing “How Ya Going Keep Them Down on the Farm, after They’ve Seen Par–ee” to us from the World War I era. I remember watching The Doors on Ed Sullivan with my grandmother, who thought “Come On Baby, Light My Fire” was the most hysterical song she had ever heard!

F has first cousins who range in age from 22 to 12. We are depending on them to be his cultural touchstones. The older cousins will actually be closer in age to the parents of his schoolmates than we are. My mother and I went out for lunch at Stewarts in Matamoras, PA, this last Saturday. The sweet waitress there fussed over my baby, and she automatically called me mom and referred to my mom as grandma. But, if my 22-year-old niece had been with us, I wonder if she would have made a different assumption?

Anyway, I think I’d rather be thought of as totally uncool than try to keep up with pop culture and just look like an old fool. I mean, no one wants to see a 52-year-old woman try to act like a 20-year-old, right? Well, except for Madonna, I guess.