middle age Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

Foiled Again

therestlessnest2013-03-05T17:17:08-08:00Categories: economics, midlife, urban life, women's rights|Tags: age discrimination, Emmanuelle Rivas, hair color, middle age, Oscars|

Wow, there was a lot of gray hair at the Oscars this year. Kidding! Sure, George Clooney’s silver head was in every other cutaway shot. And French best actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva looked fabulously un-dyed on this, her 86th birthday. But even Jane Fonda and Shirley Bassey (75 and 76 respectively), do not dare bare their true hair. Barbra Streisand (70), Meryl Streep (63)—no way. I thought of them all as I sat in a salon chair, 50 or so squares of foil shooting out from my head, flipping through More magazine. Looking like an extra in a low-budget sci-fi film. Feeling morally deficient. I really want to be the kind of woman who can own the gray: Emmy Lou Harris. Jamie Lee Curtis. But I’m not. I’m just not. Not yet. I tried. I stopped coloring my hair for about two years. I thought I was doing OK with the gradually emerging, real, salt-n-pepper me, until I saw a photo in which I resembled my grandmother. Not my stylish Seattle grandma: no, I resembled my dear, frumpy Finnish-American grandma, whose hair was the same steely gray I now saw on my own head. And what is so wrong with that, you might ask? What’s wrong is that I often work with people 10, 20, even 30 years younger than I am, and I can’t yet afford to frighten them away by resembling their grandmothers. I literally can’t afford it: in the often arbitrary world of self-employed creative professionals, the wrong first impression could cost you [...]

Leaves, roots, flowers, fruits

therestlessnest2012-07-19T07:09:17-07:00Categories: midlife|Tags: middle age, permaculture, work, writing|

Leaves, roots, flowers, fruits. When you’re in a searching mode, you hear clues everywhere, even on the call-the-gardeners radio show. What could this mean, I ask myself? I know they’re talking about crop rotation, but what could it actually mean to me personally? Act. Observe. Be Open. I recently went to a yoga class for the first time in quite a while and this was the phrase the teacher repeated and riffed on. Act. Observe. Be Open. My mind raced as I stretched into unfamiliar positions. What could it mean? Maybe… take action, but be observant and open as you do? Now, I’m trying to put these pieces together. I am trying to act, observe and be open as I rotate into a new phase of my working life, but it is one tendon-straining reach. I have to fight the urge to curl up instead of act. I have to fight the impulse to constantly judge myself, instead of gently observing. And I don’t want to Be Open, I want answers now. So back to the gardeners and their formula for crop rotation. Leaves, roots, flowers, fruits. I’m guessing the idea is to rotate the same patch of dirt from year to year between plants grown for their leaves, roots, flowers or fruits, respectively. So: one year lettuce, the next year carrots, then daisies, then berries? Something like that. Viewed from a metaphoric gardening perspective, I think what I’m trying to do right now is a little crop rotation. It’s not always a pleasant job. You [...]

Grown-up Brain

therestlessnest2012-07-12T12:12:33-07:00Categories: brain, dementia, fitness, midlife|Tags: Alzheimer's, Barbara Strauch, middle age|

Sitting in my email inbox is a message with this subject line: “Five memory-killing foods you should NEVER eat!” But does this email tell me what they are? No, of course not, because the spammer who sent it wants me to click on their hack-trap link. The email is from someone named “Alzheimer Cure,” whose address is gaynell at brendy dot lookharbor dot info. Hmmmm. Clearly, Gaynell, you have not heard the good news about the middle-aged brain. Turns out I am not a), so dumb and desperate I’m going to open your email or b), on some grim downward slide that started around 25, when my brain peaked, and will continue until I keel over. Clearly, Mr. or Ms. Gaynell at Brendy dot Lookharbor, you have not read the book I just read: The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, by New York Times science editor Barbara Strauch. This is a book is packed with good news: the kind of news that tends to slip under the radar because it is so counter-cultural and confusing to our youth-worshipping media world. Strauch’s mission is to bring us up to date on the brain research of the past few decades, nearly all of which refutes the prevailing cultural brain myth of our time: namely, that young brains work better. She does not deny the specific ways in which youthful brains have it over middle-aged or older brains, which mostly have to do with speed and short-term recall. But she paints a fascinating picture of the ways in [...]

Thank you, Mary Margaret

therestlessnest2012-02-02T07:22:06-08:00Categories: midlife, politics, quiet|Tags: gay marriage, Gregoire, Haugen, middle age, Parker Palmer, Same-sex marriage|

Please help me in my campaign to prolong Mary Margaret Haugen’s moment in the spotlight. Already fuzzy on placing that name? She’s the conservative, church-going, democratic Washington state senator from cozy Camano Island who, like our church-going democratic governor, had the courage to change her mind. Thanks to Mary Margaret Haugen, gay marriage is almost certainly going to be legal in our state, very soon. How I admire a politician who thoughtfully and deliberately Changes. Her. Mind. This is not what we love to call “waffling.” This is the human brain doing what it does best: considering new ideas. Pondering them. Reflecting. Praying. Departing from long-unquestioned assumptions to ask and answer questions one might never previously have thought to ask. This is why gay marriage is such a linchpin issue: because it is getting rational, thoughtful people all over the American belief spectrum to think in new ways. To have new conversations. I’ve been reading a book by the Quaker writer Parker Palmer called A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life in which he talks about how damaging it is to live a life in which “soul” and “role” are kept firmly separate, our outer selves orbiting further and further from the compass of our true, inner selves. Politicians, perhaps more than any of us, are expected to wall themselves off in this way, keeping firmly out of sight any quirks or views their constituents might reject. Gay marriage has given them, and us, a chance to ask: OK, how do I really, truly [...]

55

therestlessnest2012-01-18T09:30:12-08:00Categories: midlife, Uncategorized|Tags: faith, forgiveness, middle age, self-esteem|

I’m turning 55. What a great opportunity to flagellate myself for all that I’ve not done or done wrong. For all the ways I’ve fallen short! This is how the habitually self-bashing person thinks. Maybe I’m not alone: Maybe it’s how a lot of us think. A wise man about a decade older than I am once said to me, when I made some routinely self-deprecating remark at a church meeting: “Hey Ann, you know that stuff we hear every Sunday about forgiveness? That’s supposed to start with yourself. That famous line about loving your neighbor? It’s ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ remember?” Many’s the new year I’ve vowed to be kinder to myself. And in many ways, I have, over time, learned to be much kinder to me than I was as a teenager. Back then, the way I treated myself resembled the way Jane Eyre is treated at that awful orphanage. You’re ugly, you’re not a good person, you’re terrible at sports, you’ll never be popular because you’re just a big loser, went the script that ran in my Orphanage Headmistress head. Things have improved considerably since then. One of the ways in which I now try to treat myself more kindly is to accept my lack of self-confidence, rather than trying to make it go away. I used to think I shouldn’t talk about it, but talking about it can be a way of getting a little help from my friends, or at least getting them to help me laugh at myself. For [...]

Are We Old Yet?

therestlessnest2011-12-14T11:20:11-08:00Categories: dementia, midlife, Uncategorized|Tags: aging, Alzheimer's, middle age|

It’s kind of touching, isn’t it, the way we fifty-somethings insist on calling ourselves “middle-aged.” As if. People: I read in the paper this morning: the average life span in America is still 78. Half of 78 is still 39, no matter how you slice and dice it. I remember being 39. I do, really. I remember thinking people in their fifties who couldn’t say the word “old” were kind of sad. At 39, I had a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, a novel I so hoped would find a publisher and a freelance career I had allowed to dwindle. My 65-year-old mother’s disturbing memory lapses were soon to be given the dreaded label that would define her final descent: Alzheimer’s disease. At 39, the statistical middle of an American life, I did not feel young, middle-aged or old; I felt seasick. I had jettisoned the ballast of a secure job. I believed motherhood, marriage, writing and my mom’s desire to be a hands-on grandma would be my anchors for the next decade or so. Looking back, I see my younger self as touchingly naïve. Surely not at any sort of mid-point, any sort of stable axis. But are we ever? And isn’t that what’s so ridiculous, really, about the whole notion of a “middle age”? Because of course we don’t know whether we’re going to get 78 years, or 98, or maybe only 28 or 58. So when exactly should we call ourselves “middle-aged?” What we do learn, as we churn through the decades, is that whatever [...]

Desert Rain

therestlessnest2011-11-30T08:24:46-08:00Categories: dementia, hiking, midlife, Uncategorized|Tags: desert, middle age, Tucson|

It was pouring as I drove my tin-can rental car up the hill outside Tucson. This is crazy, I thought. Crazy that it’s raining in the desert, and crazy that I haven’t turned back yet. I listened to the news as I splashed along. An 85-year-old man, known to have dementia, was missing: went to the supermarket, never returned home. I pulled into the Tucson Mountain lot. The rain suddenly stopped. So I grabbed my knapsack and began to follow the first trail I saw. A hundred yards from the car, I hesitated, confused. The trail had disappeared. Or rather, there were suddenly half a dozen trails: all formed in the past hour, by rivulets of rain. Whatever footprints might have once marked the real trail had been washed away. There was no one else around. This must be what dementia feels like, I thought. I turned around and spotted a stone shelter just above the parking lot. My beacon: When I turned around, I would head straight for it. I knew I was in no danger, not really, yet I felt queasy: do scorpions come out after a rain in the desert? Rattlesnakes? I had no idea. Could the clouds gather again so quickly and rain hard enough to cause a flash flood? Probably. I felt small and humble and not very smart. But I pressed on, thirsty for a little fresh air and exercise. Twenty minutes, then I’d turn around. 40 minutes later, I made it back to where I started, dry and unbitten [...]