For years, possibly even decades, I have suffered from a malaise I call Pre-Birthday Syndrome (PBS). In the week or so preceding the big event, I suffer from dread and denial in equal measure. How can this be happening to me? Didn’t we just have one of these a year ago? How did I get to be so old? Where did my smooth taut skin go? My comely butt?
People will feed you all kinds of crap about aging: These are the golden years; with age, comes wisdom; you’re not getting older, you’re getting better.
I’m here to tell you this is mostly bunk.
Your body, for one thing, is going to start acting in ways you never could have anticipated. I feel like I can date my physical decline to five years ago, when my left ankle turned wonky, forcing my arch to fall in such a precipitous manner that I had to wear a brace for several weeks.
Then I contracted Covid in April of 2023, and my system didn’t shake it off as it should have as the virus seemed to morph into long Covid, which may have destroyed the retina in my right eye, so that even after four surgeries vision in that orb is like looking out with your face pressed up against a screen door.
I’m still dealing with issues of fatigue, and that may be a constant for the rest of my life. And can we talk about macular degeneration?
More painful than my own decline has been watching friends head into hospice care and then the great beyond. My very dear ex-husband suffers from dementia and lives just down the road in an assisted-living community. It’s hard to witness the man I fell in love with 50 years ago struggle with confusion and memory loss. This is another thing they don’t tell you about—that divorce is not as final as it seems.
Birthdays are a time for retrospection, some of it ruthless. I recall years ago reading that Barbara Bush, the proud matriarch of a dysfunctional dynasty, claimed in her nineties that she had no regrets. And I recall thinking, Well, lady, you really should. Their names are George W and Jeb.
As for my own regrets, I have many. I often wish that I had taken my master’s degree in art history and sought out a museum internship program. I think I might have been far happier working in a supportive environment of art lovers rather than thrashing around in the choppy waters of freelance art journalism for 30 years (not that I haven’t had some whomping good times).
I sometimes regret not having brought at least one child into the world, but it’s the biggest crap shoot on the planet and by the time I was ready, my marriage was seriously on the wane. I can see what great satisfactions my friends’ children bring to them, and I know that I could have produced a near marvel of human engineering (in spite of my genetic predispositions for bad hearing, fallen arches, and a family history of fondness for the grape).
And there are some pieces of real estate I very much regret letting slip through my fingers, specifically houses in Montauk and Massachusetts, and several apartments in New York City. But real estate is boring, so we’re not going to go there.
I would have liked an enduring relationship with a male of the species, too, because it must be wonderful to have a loving partner in old age. But in spite of all my efforts, recorded in the now defunct Substack called “Rotten Romance,” I was never successful on that score.
But speaking of romance, I recycled many of the tales into fiction (along with a handful of new stories) and entered a contest last fall. And lo and behold, a perfectly legitimate and respected publisher called Press53 in North Carolina handed me a contract for a volume to be called “Bad Romance” a couple of weeks ago. So sometime next year, I will have a real live honest-to-god book in my hands!
This does not mean I’m abandoning you, dear readers, though I might veer away from the art beat now and then. I will continue to send out a weekly Substack, with occasional guest writers, for months, maybe even years, to come.
As my mom used to say, “There’s a dance in the old dame yet!”
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