Full disclosure: I hate the winter! I am a bit of a Grinch, nay a Scrooge, tbh*.
But… I am trying to embrace it, and for a while there I was stoic: autumn leaves, golden colours, fresh air, bonfires…
Nah. I am over it now. Our reality is freezing bedrooms, pools on the windows, mould on the walls, mud everywhere.
And worst of all … another approaching birthday.
Arghh. How can it have come around so fast? Last year on my birthday I got a flat tyre and fell over in the shed. That feels like yesterday, and forty seven was bad enough, but 48?
And the worst part is that 48 will not feel bad at all when it comes to 49. And whatever number is after that, oh Christ on a bike. I am nearly f@cking fifty.
You see, the thing is, I can’t be. It’s not long ago that I was young – an ingenue, a wide-eyed fledgeling teacher learning my craft: an inexperienced parent feeling my way: someone who still believed they had a book in them, and the time to make that belief a reality.
For a long time, I have been denying my age. And I would still be doing so but for a few annoying little things that are making it tricky. My eyesight, for one. I turned 47 and boom. Needed glasses. And the hand I fell on last year, cruelly and poignantly on my actual sodding birthday? Never been the same since. My hair – the hair that I never liked because it was dry or had split ends and never held a curl…well now it’s shot to sh!t. I wish I’d appreciated it years ago. Turns out it was TOTALLY F@CKING AMAZING.
And then there is always the “hormone issue”.
I was a slow developer, psychologically in particular, and I spent years trying to be ok with bodily functions. You know the ones I mean. The ones that give tomboys like me the heebeejeebies. I would deal with such things with a neck-down approach, in much the same way that I later dealt with pregnancy: don’t look down, don’t talk about it. Pretend it isn’t happening.
But over the years, I grew to marvel at the wonders of the female body – I felt part of a sisterhood. I had overcome certain feats to get to the point where I was sort-of comfortable (ish) in my own girly skin (one being a secret solo mission on a bike to a faraway Tesco to anonymously purchase certain items that I disguised in my basket with superfluous sh!t like deodorant and… oh God what was the third thing I bought…? My memory is leaving me… Coke? Yes, a can of Diet Coke ) and I no longer hankered after being male and joining Cubs. That’s not to say I was ready to discuss such stuff out loud. I don’t even do that now.
And as for now, all I can say is that the body I had grown to understand is apparently a mystery once more…
Shhh. Stop talking about it.
Some of my children are ADULTS. Others are possibly cooler than me – at times. All of them are people in their own right, who make choices and put me in my place – and help me to use my iPhone when I have those moments where nothing on it makes sense and I am pressing and pressing and pressing the silly buttonless screen to no effect, apart from my rising ire.
And another weird thing: I have begun to look back on the 90s as some kind of hedonistic, sun-soaked, free ‘n easy time where wrinkles and grey hairs were for others to worry about. Parties, clubs, shiny happy people**, it was all so much fun … when 1976 seemed like just a few years back, and I wasn’t ashamed to say it out loud when I had to give my DOB. In fact, I often made myself older. Imagine that now!
Everything that refers to the 90s – One Day, Saltburn, all the boy band reunions that have been happening recently, is making me nostalgic, and those classic tunes that TikTok has hijacked are taking me right back. I can’t decide whether to be happy about reminiscing, or sad that the decade is consigned to History. Either way, where did that time go?
In the blink of an eye (23 years) I am teaching again in the classroom I had when I was 24, looking out of the same eyes, onto the same walls, and with most of the same crap still bunged in the same cupboard. I know I have changed, but some days I forget, and I am right back there, in 2002, playing VHS tapes at the end of term, marking a register with a Biro and being annoyed that I have the same number of spots as some of the pupils. It is like I have entered a legit* timewarp. So weird.
I find myself listening to current pop artists (Chappell Roan is a genius) and realising I am old enough to be their mother; feeling impressed by and strangely proud of these young people who are taking this here and now by storm, bravely challenging stereotypes, and at the same time feeling slightly possessive of the legends that emerged back in the day and are wiser now, older and all the more impressive as a result. Take Robbie Williams for example. He’s mellowed very nicely indeed. And as for Terry from East17, he’s all grey and cuddly! Bless.
Yes, I am definitely in my nostalgia era*, looking back to what I knew instead of what is ahead. Maybe life is less scary that way. But possibly that’s not the best mindset. After all, it’s now that really matters.
I had a realisation the other day, an epiphany as I pondered minutes and seconds and how they are over in a flash and that’s how it goes down*, until a year has passed, then a decade and so on and so forth until…. you die. It’s all too much to comprehend. How can we live life if we blink and miss it? If all the things that matter are so fleeting? I suddenly understood that life is not divided into seconds, or even minutes, but moments, experiences, events, indeed – eras. These are the things we experience, good and bad. That is what makes up a life. And if you can be consciously present in any moment, then there is nowhere else you need to be. Thinking like that made me feel a bit better.
And so I venture forth towards my imminent birthday, trying to be all mindful and conscious and present, because this right here is a moment, as I sit amidst the detritus strewn over the kitchen table, listening to the old dog snoring in his bed and one of the Little Seymours belting out a line from Wicked!The Movie somewhere in the distance.
I will try to be brave and look forward, too. But I may also allow myself to reminisce a bit; after all, I did have great hair once, whether I believed it or not, and was definitely giving* a touch of Cindy Crawford**. Even if it was just in my dreams.
(Note to younger self)
*All cool phrases the kids use nowadays.
*** An aged model, a supermodel no less, a 90s icon. Had brown hair like me.
** I wasn’t even very cool in the 90s, to be fair.
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