Edel Coffey: Don't be panicking about your age - think of all the adventures yet to come
Edel Coffey: old notions be damned - you are alive, which is better than the alternative. Photo: Ray Ryan
I was in a clothes shop in Dublin last week, queuing up waiting to pay. As I stood in the queue, bored, I noticed a woman in the line beside me. She was buying a slinky magenta-pink dress. The cashier ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the dress and I stole a glance at the woman. She was probably mid-fifties and looked a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer. Ice-blonde hair, brilliant bone structure and a huge smile. She caught me looking so I told her what I was thinking — the dress would surely look fantastic on her.
She deflected, as many Irish women of a certain age are wont to do, and replied that she had a brutally honest daughter at home who she would probably run the dress by before wearing it. I suggested that maybe she shouldn’t bother asking for the daughter’s opinion at all and just enjoy wearing the dress instead. “I’d rather know,” she said. “If my daughter is thinking it other people will be thinking it too.” I had to think about that one.
This woman had nothing to fear from wearing this dress, I thought. This woman looked to me like she could wear the original Michelle Pfeiffer black patent leather cat woman outfit if she wanted to. But the old notions of what we can and can’t get away with as women of a certain age were clearly at play. As a doomy phrase floated up from the recesses of my mind, ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, one of the worst crimes an ageing woman can commit, I smiled and conceded she was probably right.
I had been thinking about age-related happiness over the last few weeks for a few reasons. One reason being the high-profile octogenarian marriages that had been reported in the news. Kerry GAA legend Mick O’Dwyer marrying for the second time at the age of 86, and the astronaut Buzz Aldrin marrying for the fourth time at the age of 93. Another reason I was thinking about this was because the oldest woman alive, Maria Branyas, was newly announced. She’s 116 and is on Twitter with the gloriously arch bio: ‘I’m old, very old, but not an idiot.’ (Underestimate her at your own risk.)
But while the octogenarians seem to be living their best lives, the demographic that I belong to — working women in their 40s with small children — seems to be in a state of panic and attrition, torturing ourselves about underachieving in our careers, not spending enough time with our families and self-flagellating our bodies as they refuse to defy free radicals and gravity and continue to age in spite of our best efforts. We watch in horror as the edges of our jawlines grow craggy like the high cliffs of Connemara, the ones that are visited only by the hardiest of rams with three years worth of wool growth. We wonder is it time to finally get botox.
I’ve noticed a lot of women my age are genuinely worried about the transition from young, sexy, relevant women into what they assume will be the opposite of all that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. My current icon is the 59-year-old actor Philippine Leroy Beaulieu who plays Sylvie in Emily In Paris. Her wardrobe is to die for, she has a young boyfriend and she is supercool and sexy. I think the most damaging (not to mention self-fulfilling part) of the ageing process is how many of us believe our lives will be over after the age of forty or fifty or whatever your number happens to be.
And being alive automatically gives you the right to live your life however you want to, to feel sexy if you want to, to fall in love, to wear a gorgeous slinky dress no matter your age. The only person who says you can’t is you.
For me the recent news stories about people getting married in their 80s and living enjoyable lives right into their hundreds made me feel hopeful that there is much to look forward to in middle age and beyond. It can be patronising to delight in stories of older people falling in love and marrying, as if it wasn’t something they have as much of a right to as anyone else, but that’s not what I was thinking about at all when I read these news stories.
I was thinking more about the people who are currently panicking about age, worrying that their lives are over, believing that their most vital years are behind them, when actually there is much to look forward to. These news stories made me think of all the adventures that are to come, not necessarily romantic adventures but certainly all the living that is yet to be done, and all the good things that might still happen, all the personal or career goals we might still achieve, all the magenta-pink dresses we might yet wear.
