Today is my fiftieth birthday. I feel it's a bit unseemly to mention this, which is why I do so.

I celebrated this morning with 9:30 am Zumba class. It seemed important (although I did Tweet that any injury would be taken as an omen). I started with crunchy knees and now they feel fine, which tells me that I'll never be able to stop doing this. Given that I'm healthier than I was twenty years ago, and the gym has turned out to be a stress release like no other, literally, I wasn't planning to stop now anyway.

So what's changed? I've spent the last few years wondering if every twinge was something to be ignored, coddled, or seen as a harbinger of doom. My relationship with my body has always been troubled, but that's gotten a bit better (due in large part, no doubt, to the gym). Some changes I'm not at all pleased with, but they're not recent enough to be alarming. Others I don't mind. I thank Hillary Clinton for giving me a bit of pride in my age and gender. I haven't had a huge number of good role models for aging, and every time I saw one of her appearances last year, I felt hope that I could maintain authority and poise as I get older.

What I don't like is being arbitrarily shuttled into a new category I don't care for simply because I woke up today. The "45-54" demographic will give me comfort for a while, and then I guess I'll go through this all over again.

I do have a sense of "What have I accomplished so far and when the heck am I going to get around to doing something significant?" I have also had this feeling every year of my life since I left college. This year is going to bring some great changes and, I hope, some motivation and stability. Those will be worth quite a lot. Enough to counterbalance the age on file with the pharmacy, surely.

When I was much younger, I took comfort in the idea that aging would be normalized by Baby Boomers, who would provide positive examples for me and change the focus on youth culture.

What I see instead (quite literally: on TV, in movies, in the inescapable deluge of advertising everywhere around me) is women who are not accepting and promoting natural aging, but availing themselves of an ever-growing array of cosmetic procedures. I regularly contemplate whether there is a public role model anywhere for me of a woman who isn't giving into that pressure. Politics, maybe, but the lacquered, hairsprayed culture there doesn't appeal.

And if I were a public face, would l do the same? If I had money not earmarked for another purpose without the attendant guilt of using it for my own vanity, if I could make a good argument that not altering my appearance so I seem younger will hurt me professionally (a real possibility, I sometimes think), if I didn't notice that particular procedures result in their subjects all looking somewhat the same...

I think I'm strong enough to hold out. But while I realize being content with my looks was not nearly as common in my past as I like to believe it was, it's hard to see the changes in my face and realize that they alone are going to cause me to be taken less seriously, will push me into a position of less relevance when I'm still struggling to feel relevant in the first place.

If I sound a little resentful, it's because I am.

My recent 46th birthday has reminded me why I started this blog. On my mind today, articles from Slate/Double XX:

Emily Bracken complains about being in her 30s

and,
Laura Helmuth says we shouldn't care at all

Why do I care? I fear losing relevance.

Because this culture values beauty, and equates it with youth. I don't have financial capital of my own. I don't have a powerful job or political influence. If I don't have so-called "romantic capital," I'm not sure what I do have, and I fear becoming culturally invisible.

Do I really believe this will happen? Not most of the time. I still believe style and social skills are damn near the same as beauty. And I'm not old enough yet to give up on achieving some of those other means of power--which, I realize, have been designated by a male-dominated, money-led, Western culture. It would be better for me not to care, and to work towards bringing forward some other ways of feeling engaged and relevant. I'm not too old to do that, either.

But do I stand in front of the mirror more than I used to, cursing the changes in my face and hoping I am not fading rapidly into invisiblity, becoming a person who may as well expect to be treated with disrespect? Yes. I do.

"How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days." ~ John Burroughs

Link from Jezebel

Why do some women think that life is over by 44?

(Apparently the survey was conducted by a sanitary napkin company, if that tells you anything. Also, as if--barring hysterectomy--I'd have been lucky enough to be through with all that by my mid-40s.)

Some part of me feels that I should like the fact that people evidently find Sarah Palin, who is three years older than I, attractive enough to make "VPILF" jokes and such.

Unfortunately the woman's views and apparent personality bother me so much that I feel all those people are in some way deranged.

It's funny 'cause it's true

Seen in comments on Shapely Prose (Friday Fluff, 8/8/08):

“Life begins at 40, because you spend your 30s fixing everything you fucked up in your 20s.”