How to turn 60 if you’re ageorexic*
*That’s a fear of getting older
Bikinis. Botox. Fat freezing. Fillers. CHRISTA D’SOUZA has used every trick to fight her advancing years. Now, as she celebrates a milestone birthday, is it finally time to grow up?
UNLIKE me, my partner loves a birthday party. Thank goodness then, that lockdown hit when it did and his grand plans to throw me a big, splashy 60th were scuppered. All those ‘amusing’ greetings cards and jokes about the cake collapsing under the weight of the candles — uggh, I truly dodged a bullet there. But as a columnist who champions older people (and indeed wrote a book about the menopause years before it became ‘trendy’ to do so), I realise how letting the day pass
unnoticed makes me a traitor to my own cause. How can I call out examples of everyday ageism in this newspaper if entering my seventh decade is something that I’d prefer to keep private?
So here I am officially celebrating my birthday with you. And if you want to know what it actually feels like…on one level it feels broadly the same as it felt turning 59 or 58 or 57 and so on. So no big deal.
But on another level it feels completely, utterly, wrenchingly preposterous. An outrage, in fact. How on earth can I be the same age as my granny was when I was 18? How can my mother have a 60-year-old daughter?
Unlike 40 or 50, 60 is not just a number: it’s a huge, huge milestone. Don’t let Madonna or anyone else tell you otherwise. The stark fact of the matter is that in a piddling 20 years (the last of which went by in a flash), I will be 80.
Perhaps we should call 60 something different — Fifty Ten say, to ease us in more gently?
These are the thoughts that have me sitting bolt upright in my bed at four in the morning nowadays.
But then, no wonder, given my history of ‘ageorexia’. Ever since my mid-40s, I’ve resisted ‘coinciding’ with my biological age — as the famous feminist writer Simone De Beauvoir once put it — wearing the mini skirt, packing the bikini, believing middle age happened ‘only if you were ornery or slovenly enough to let it’. So of course turning 60 came as a shock.
AND yet, as I sit here at my kitchen table in the warm light of day, I have to acknowledge what a relief it is finally to be here. For in a way, my 50s felt like being in limbo. I don’t want to write them off, because they were fun and productive, but there was something equivocal about them, something which felt neither here nor there — and that, in retrospect, was confusing.
In contrast, there is nothing equivocal at all about turning 60. No fooling myself that I am still of ‘cougar’ age. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, I am now, officially, in the youth of old age as opposed to the old age of youth.
Yes, it is daunting. Sixty? Moi? Every time I see it written down, I get a little jolt. But while it feels daunting, it also feels liberating. Might 60 be when I can finally act my age?
My 50s were fun, but also a bit of a no (wo)man’s land. In our parents’ day we knew exactly what 50 looked like and how it should comport itself.
But thanks to the leaps and bounds made by science and technology, not to mention the acceptability of cosmetic intervention, 50 now feels fuzzy, indefinable.
Or maybe contradictory is the word. If 50 really is the new 30 and the decade we are supposed to go clothes shopping with our daughters and our sons’ girlfriends and prance about the beach in our string bikinis like Liz Hurley, where does the menopause fit in?
How come nature hasn’t acknowledged the goalpost shift, too?
Encouraged — or should I say taunted — by role models such as 55-year-old Liz, and Demi Moore (57) and Cindy Crawford (54), not to mention all those Silicon Valley moguls investing billions in the longevity industry, we kid ourselves into thinking that if we up the amount of hours at the gym, keep taking the HRT and throw yet more money at the latest miracle beauty treatment, we can somehow halt the ravages of time.
But we cannot, as the menopause — which hits us at the same age it has for hundreds of years — proves. And maybe that dissonance is what is making us feel so, well, neither here nor there.
Our 50s, I’d argue, is when we are at our most porous to the enticements of the anti-ageing industry. No wonder it’s worth more than €44billion worldwide. It certainly made a packet out of me — and will probably continue to do so.
For years, I’ve been going to a lady called Magda for coolsculpting — where fat cells are killed off by being cooled to near freezing — which has done wonders for my mummy tummy.
Then there’s the twice-yearly Botox and filler I get from my miracle worker of a doctor, Suha Kersh (thank goodness her surgery is finally back open).
As I write this, I am test-driving a new home laser device on my jawline and this afternoon I’ll be taking a Pilates class on Zoom. After I’ve taken the dog for a twohour walk, that is. You should see how obsessive I’ve become since lockdown about my 20,000 steps a day.
But turning 60, I can’t help wondering — especially on that last killer hill I make myself do every damn day, rain or shine — to what end exactly? It’s not as though I’m in the market for a new partner after all. I’ve been with mine very happily for 24 years. Everyone wants to be healthy and trim for as long as possible, but is that my goal: to be buried in a size 10?
I’m proud of myself that I can still (just) wear a bikini, but the waistlength hair and the cache of lovingly distressed denim micro minis I’ve got in my bottom drawer in the hope of going back to Mykonos this summer? I think it is time finally to say goodbye to them.
If there is a cut-off point for ridiculously long hair and minis, for me it is now. The problem with
Since my 40s, I’ve resisted my biological age, believing middle age only happened if you let it
thinking that 50 is the new 30 or 60 is the new 40 (and so on) is that it prolongs the inevitable and prevents us from ever properly ‘coinciding’ with ourselves.
As the veteran newscaster Anna Ford told me back in 2007, the goal, once you get older, is for ‘the inside and outside to match. Feeling cowed and afraid inside and looking calm and dressed beautifully with the right nail varnish — which was what I did when I was younger — is not the key to happiness, it is the treadmill of failure’.
Having the inside match the outside. Now there’s a thing. And why the hell not when there are almost one million over-60s in Ireland. Like the picture of Dorian Gray in the attic, the buck has to stop somewhere.
Of course we are going to turn 60 (look at me!), just as we are, of course, going to turn 70 and 80 and 90 (if we are lucky), and then eventually die. Even the most blinkered ageorexic has to face up to this. But there is a block, isn’t there, and it all leads to our societal taboo around death. Like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic, it is there and at some point it cannot be ignored. It is no coincidence that quite a few of my contemporaries, both male and female, are just now succumbing to cancer and serious health problems, that more people in my sphere are actually dying. Nor is it a coincidence that the heart disease I have on both sides
I’m proud I can still ( just) wear a bikini, but the waist-length hair and micro minis have to go
of my family and have always chosen to ignore has just revealed itself on a recent routine scan.
I may kid my ego on the appearance front, but I can’t kid my body. Ever so politely, it is telling me it’s not as robust as it used to be and needs a bit of help. I’m now one of those people who have to take beta blockers and blood pressure pills. I’ve also had to start wearing glasses for reading in bed. (Did you know your long-distance vision gets better as you age, your short-distance vision worse?)
People say hunched shoulders and white hair are the best semaphores for old age. In my opinion, it’s the act of having to hold a menu away to read it. And without my reading glasses, that’s now what I’m going to have to do.
There are other little betrayals of my real age that I’ve begun to notice. The achiness in my hip joints after too much Pilates; the need for subtitles on everything, not just foreign language shows; the indigestion after eating certain foods (thank goodness for Omeprazole, I say).
Then there is the sleep thing. It’s always been a joke in my family how I can sleep for Britain. Now, more and more, I find myself up emptying the dishwasher before anyone else rises — a sure sign, don’t they say, of advancing years, as though your body is telling you to grab as many conscious hours as you can before it’s too late.
If this all sounds a bit doom and gloom, that is not my intention at all. The combination of Covid and this milestone birthday has been a big reality check, for sure. But I am glad it has finally happened.
If I could reel back the years, I’m not sure I would have done anything differently. Like many of my female contemporaries, I’ve worked hard on myself since I became menopausal — and I do believe there is no reason whatsoever to feel invisible just because you are no longer clinically fertile.
In fact, in many ways life gets better not having to worry about periods and contraception.
I’m lucky, I wasn’t felled by hot flushes or depression or weight gain the way many women are, and because I am mixed race, my skin didn’t suffer much premature ageing. I look back with fondness on my 50s not least because it was nice to be told I looked younger than my age, and also nice to feel equal and included in a world that so fetishizes youth.
But I’m on a hiding to nothing if my self-esteem is based on how others perceive my ‘outsides’. Now I’m 60, it may be more sensible to try garnering self-esteem from how others perceive my ‘insides’. (I’ve always known this, of course: its just hard when you walk into a party to put it into practice.)
You can help with this. If we ever meet, don’t feel you need to tell me I look great for my age; tell me instead how interesting you think I am, or how funny or good I am at listening, because from now on, that’s how I want to be judged.
This is not a clarion call to ‘give up’ — I’m never going to stop taking care of my appearance. It’s an invitation (to myself as much as anyone) to consider ‘letting go’, to accept what ‘is’ about myself, rather than trying to improve on it in any way.
The myth that 50 is the new 30 is a seductive one that I bought into, but it meant only accepting myself conditionally. Maybe it was just a matter of time, maybe I needed to hit 60 to realise there is no end goal, there is only now.
JOHN LENNON wrote ‘life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans’, which I never really understood, but now I get it with blinding, almost spiritual, clarity. No more promising myself life can properly start when I can fit back into my pre-lockdown jeans. Or fasting before a summer holiday. No more (or rather less of) the What If-ing.
If I sound as if I’ve had some sort of epiphany, I haven’t. Nor have I lost all ambition. But turning 60, especially during lockdown, may have made me ambitious about different things. As one clever soul once defined it, ‘happiness is really, really wanting…what you already have’.
This is a hard thing to do when our culture so depends on keeping us in a permanent state of wanting, but being in lockdown with my family — relieved of the Fear Of Missing Out — has been a gift in that respect. (So, by the way, has muting any Instagram feed which doesn’t pivot on dogs, cake and flowers.)
How great to realise how much I enjoy the company of my partner and two sons more than anyone else; how that is what ultimately fulfils me; how the best summer holidays were about being together and not really about the magnificent setting at all.
Lockdown will end, obviously, and this bubble will melt, but if there is one thing I want to take with me back into the hurly-burly of normal life (that is, if I ever actually go back to it), it is the notion of acceptance.
At 60, I can finally say I’m fine as I am. In the interim, I may start writing up a guest list for my 61st. Why not celebrate what may turn out to be the best decade yet.