Turning sixty has positive advantages. Free travel throughout London, concessions at cinemas and galleries, no national insurance and a small (in my case very small) but welcome pension. With luck nothing creaks yet, you feel no different to when you were half this age and since you are now famously ‘invisible’ you no longer have to cross the road to avoid building sites (I haven’t had to do that for a while, admittedly). For all of which I say, hooray.
The children have left home and are doing okay. The husband has gone as well. So now what?
There are no rules for people over sixty. The rules that applied to our parents don’t apply to our generation. We are younger and our expectations are different. We have maybe a third of our lives ahead of us and we don’t intend to spend them sitting quietly in front of television (or anywhere else). We think and feel half our age but we know, clearly, we are not. At half our age we had not had kids, seen them through school and university and out into the world while trying all along to be supportive but not suffocating, at the same time looking after elderly and increasingly frail parents, doing our best to keep the balance between family, motherhood, wifehood, daughterhood and career; we feel we still have the energy of a thirty year old, if not even more because we are less likely to waste it getting into a paddy about things beyond our control such as stalled trains that will deliver us to our destination ten minutes after the curtain has gone up or the vital interview or the meeting was supposed to take place.
We make good workers because we are experienced and calm and enjoy the work for its own sake and not because of what it will lead to. (Convincing employers of this is another matter of course since most of them will be half our age and may not like telling someone twice their age what to do.) We are concerned with the here and now rather than the what-might-be-when because, frankly, life is getting shorter.
We are as sexy as we ever were, with the added advantages of experience and the freedom of knowing we’re not going to get pregnant. We are realistically if regretfully aware that the face that looks at us in the mirror no longer represents the thirty year old we still are, that sleeveless dresses and short skirts are beginning to look doubtful on us but jeans and dropped-waist trousers are still perfectly okay; we are trying to strike the balance between middle-aged fuddy-duddy and ‘cool’ – which is a word we probably wouldn’t want to use naturally if only because it makes our kids wince. We are up to speed technologically, just about, we can socially network like the best of them (though we may be unsure about whether or not to register for Facebook; the answer to which depends partly on how much we want to avoid embarrassing our kids, who in their turn are invariably watching carefully to see whether their ageing mother is turning out more like the Queen Mum or Barbara Windsor).
Somewhere along the way some of us have parted company with our partners, probably through our own volition. Having done so we are now looking for replacements, on the internet or elsewhere (though where elsewhere?), and finding little joy because the men of our age seem so old, and the whole prospect of starting up a brand new relationship from scratch, whether or not sex is involved, is terrifying. We probably have our own homes and are reasonably financially independent so we’re not looking for breadwinners, or someone to father our kids. We want companionship and a good laugh, but dammit, most of the men of our age are out there chasing women half our age.
We are still working and will have to keep on working till we drop, because we have spent our lives following ridiculous professions like writing and acting, earning what we can when we could, which was usually not much – hence the small pension – and never able to save much; or maybe we gave up work for the kids and to look after elderly relatives (hence again the small pension and lack of savings). Still, working keeps us actively in the world and concerned about the world, and that has to be a good thing.
But most importantly, we are sixty and we know it. We know we feel fit and young now and that in ten years’ time we may not. Whatever it is we want to do we have to do it now. It may seem a selfish way to think but it isn’t always possible in life to be selfish, which is another reason to indulge now.
Which is why I am doing what I’m doing.
