I turned 80 in June. By some amazing coincidence, all four of us who live in a string of townhouses in our Prairie Hill cohousing community also turned 80 this year! Of the 50+ residents here, we are the only ones who were born in 1945. So we invited our whole community to celebrate our birthday year at a beautiful pond and cabin out in the country. It felt good, getting to that milestone together. However, I've discovered that it is not always fun being an "old woman". I never thought of myself as elderly until this last birthday. But culturally, I've stepped into a whole new category. My first negative old woman experience was with a young doctor. I had some confusing symptoms and called the 'nurse on-call' who instructed me to go to the emergency room immediately. She must have thought I was having a stroke. She even insisted that I go by ambulance, so I took my first ambulance ride, a bit of an adventure in itself. While in the ambulance, they did all kin...
I didn't grow up in a singing family. My mother was told when she was in school that she should not sing, for she couldn't carry a tune! So sad. But my father was often whistling or humming. He was the musical parent, and he had an accordion in the attic. Sometimes his little children (including me) would beg him to bring it down, and we'd sit around him while he played dance tunes. Even though we didn't sing at home, I loved my music class at school. Our music books were full of wonderful songs, and I was always asking to sing some of my favorites. Our school also had a marching band, and we could choose an instrument and get lessons. I chose the saxophone. I was looking forward to marching with my sax when I got a little older, but in the meantime my little brother was born. He was one of those babies who cried a lot and his naps were a treasure. The last thing my mom needed was a daughter practicing a loud saxophone! So I returned the sax, and settled for taking pia...
It seemed I was getting mad at everything last week: our preoccupation with things, wealth, competition, racing ahead to ever new technological achievements. I'd drive down the road and yell at the cornfields, the concrete-covered ground, the rows and rows of fast food places, the traffic jams. Really, I was ripe to find fault with anything. Fortunately, that mood hasn't lasted, and it feels better to have gotten some of that anger out. It's hard to know for sure why I'm feeling better now, but I think it partly has to do with some inner work I was forced to undertake at the height of my anger. Like many of us, I was raised in a household where there was all too much scolding and blaming, and too little comforting. And we all grew up in a world where to get approval we had to be good, to do what we were told, perform well. Our self-worth tended to be skin-deep, gauged by what other people said about us. Even though we might find ways of being "good" in other ...
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