Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-07-05 - 7:49 p.m.

Rain Dancing

Not that you asked me, but here's what I am thinking today about middle age and women.

I way like what's happening on my inside. I'm steadied down, less reactive, more easily amused.

I'm way not liking what's happening on my outside. Way not liking it. I'm supposed to not care, I know that; I should be WISE enough to not care. Yep. "Those aren't stretch marks, they're the beautiful badges of your courage." (To which Shirley Valentine replied something like, "Oh, bullshit.")

I gots more badges than a freakin' Eagle Scout, here.

"Who will love us when we're old?" lament the single middle-aged women. I look in the mirror, and I don't feel so much like hitting the dance floor. I don't even feel like sanding my heels or waxing anything, anywhere.

These are the mistakes of our youth, come around to haunt us...the fleeting men we didn't marry when we were young, the men we finally did marry and couldn't stay with. Who will love us? Single middle aged men - who else? Who else would we have? Do those taut asses and sleek ponytails of the young men call our attention now? Only to make us think, "My daughter would fall for THAT guy."

Do we look at the middle aged men and think, "Ah, you must have been something when you were young?" We don't; it isn't in us. We see men who grew up, and men who never did, in all varieties of carapace, never mind. But then we go home, and hoist our breasts in the mirror, and gauge our value, our viability, our loneliness.

And then we laugh, together or alone, because we are easily amused. We're amused by our own vanity, the least vain of us. We joke about where the grey hairs appeared last, hold the frightening visages of our mothers up for others to see, stomp our feet together in the firelight, make that good safe juju.

The women's hogan is a safe place to be.

I'm surrounded by women right now, as it should be, because I am grieving, and women grieve together. Women say the things that may not be true but they are right: "You're better off without him," "The bastard didn't deserve you." They're only sounds, the keening and wailing sounds we make together. It doesn't matter that you may or may not be, or that he wasn't. It's not important. "I love you more," they say, and this may be the real truth under it all.

We become crones together, in the good sense, the earned sense. We rest in our shared history and rhythms, here where the stretch marks can be our badges, the crow's feet our wisdom.

In the women's hogan we do not wonder who will love us now. We know.

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