Ask a woman in her 60s or 70s what she doesn’t want to do anymore, and you’ll usually get a pretty quick answer. He refuses to comply. It does not decrease. And he promises to refuse treatment The next 20 years as slowly faded, not decades of more freedom than ever.
It’s like the moment when Dorothy stops apologizing to the Munchkins for landing in Oz and accidentally tripping over the Wicked Witch and just walks (well, dances) down the yellow brick road. He may not know what’s coming next, but he does it anyway. Even friends and readers admit that the social script inherited from our mothers (shut down, cover up for invisibility, procrastinate) is signed up by this generation of once-miniskirt-wearing, feminist-leaning independent chicks.
Of course, the women I talk to may not be representative of all boomer women. There are no sedentary pensioners. Like me, many of my 70 year old friends still work because they want to take care of their rental property or save money for travel. What I’m noticing is that the change in us is more than just an appearance. I don’t think any of us planned any of it. We just “Dorothy-ed” our way through it.
First, many of us worked while raising children. Whether it was because we wanted a hectic lifestyle, the freedom of having our own money, or simply to survive, it made little difference.. It is less similar Shawshank Redemptionreferences to being institutionalized and more to a woman trying to find her own Zihuatanejo. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” (Any of you who read me regularly know that I love movie references.)
Well, we divorced More. This meant that we learned to lick our wounds, persevere and sustain ourselves for a long time or forever, changing the assumption that any part of our lives personality should be built around marriage. And if we do get together again, the next guy will definitely not resemble the person we finally had the nerve to leave.
We live longer. Everyone says aging is relative and it is. Today, a 65-year-old man often plans more for 20 years, which is closer to the third trimester of life than the epilogue. Why? First, medicine and culture finally, instead of being ignored, it is named. Women are no longer fired by their own doctors, and unlike our mothers, we do not treat them like gods.
Saying our concerns are valid (in public) is new. My mother’s generation quietly absorbed this role of the underdog, the same way Olympia Dukakis absorbs everyone else’s messiness as a given. The moon has struckuntil she finally tells everyone what she really thinks. No more taking it on the chin and keeping quiet about it.
We also stopped apologizing for our bodies. Confidence and the visible aren’t things we’re ready to give up when we hit 60, though Appearance is still what gives us a leg up. This is not a contradiction. Many of us seek or enjoy the wonders of GLP-1s, Botox, and liver treatments while refusing to treat aging as the enemy. Caring about your appearance and accepting your age can go hand in hand; one is not a betrayal of the other. Why this sacred thing that we live and reduce it to the mark? I honestly believe this generation will be the first to shed labels out loud.
OK. Race, class, geography, and health conditions create vastly different aging experiences, and much of the public conversation relies on women with more resources to buck the old script. I also haven’t seen any solid research showing that rejecting the old script is healthier than embracing it. This is a real gap, not something I’m papering over with statistics I haven’t checked. But I can tell you that the women I keep in their company are not them shythe old women retired probably in 1965.
While some women find real peace in the traditional way. everyone’s life is their own. It’s not about statistics, at least not yet. It’s about personal preferences among those who share my age. Bottom line: Boomer women aren’t giving up on aging. We simply reject a lifestyle that reflects a time when the world was very different, when women had fewer options. We grew up with more resources than our mothers did to write a new way of life. Whether you call it structural change or generational mythology itself, no one is waiting to make our golden years any more golden.
