As women enter middle age, we like to think that we mature with at least some modicum of grace and dignity.  All hope dies aborning!  Growing old brings more things to worry about, but worrying does not halt the aging process. 

It’s more than just adding another year onto our chronological histories.  We spend small fortunes on creams, lotions, and even machines designed to banish wrinkles and stave off dreaded “turkey necks.”  Who wants to be mistaken for a turkey, especially around Thanksgiving?  Our selective memories forget that Ponce De Leon, the Spanish explorer of old, came up empty handed in his search of the Fountain of Youth.  And why did Ponce have to be wrong but Sir Isaac Newtown so dead-on right about his theory of gravity, commonly known as “What goes up, must come down?”  At a certain age, things start to sag … everything, in fact!

When peri-menopause rears it’s ugly head, our husbands’ knees start knocking as they look for safe places in which to take cover from our legendary mood swings.  The prelude to menopause has been known to last a good decade, or rather, a lousy decade!  Our hormones make us sweet little lambs one minute and vicious lionesses the next.  At night, our men folk shiver in the frozen tundra of air conditioning as hot flashes take hold of us, as nasty and unexpected as dousing with a bucket of hot water.  Watching us rip off our clothes in the throes of hot flashes, our partners assume that we want to cuddle.  Not!!!

Hair is another primary concern.   At a certain point, the grays become so coarse and resistant to hostile takeovers that commercial hair coloring is more or less futile.  I used to wonder why I saw the same little old ladies in the salon every time I went for my monthly cut.  Now I think they’ve never left the chairs.  Worse yet, I’m becoming one of them.  And then there is the issue of volume or rather, the loss of volume in our hair.  I read a hot tip the other day in the woman’s magazine that I buy weekly at the checkout stand.  It advised me (seriously) to take a small dollop of shave gel, and run it through my dry hair.  This trick was sure to build volume.  Well.  I wound up looking like Ben Stiller from the famous scene in There’s Something about Mary.  Ewwwwwwww!!!

Men also have their own woes as they age, but I give them no sympathy (why is a man’s gray hair considered distinguished while a woman’s is seen as dowdy?).  Still, men moan.  When their own grays become as rampant as weeds in an unkempt yard, they turn to Just for Men and when the weeds thin out, we are “treated” to those horrible comb-over ‘do’s.  Speaking of hair, there are those dastardly and extremely rude hairs that keep growing out of men’s ears along with elongating nose hairs.  Some men just don’t seem to notice that Tarzan could swing on those vines and save Jane and Cheetah in one fell swoop! 

In a man’s more mature years, a spare tire is not just a survival implement in the trunk of his car.  And why is it that while a man’s caboose begins to shrivel, a woman’s will broaden?   God has one heck of a sense of humor.

Of course, a man’s most dreaded concern is the need to ingest “that little blue pill.”  If a man has a problem in the bedroom, his macho self-image goes down the tubes along with … never mind! 

Both sexes do share the same concerns, however.  We are anxious if our spouses will still be alive to enjoy the Golden Years with us, or if we can just blow the term-life insurance money on a one-way trip to Bermuda.  Financial and health issues also plague us, including the thought that we may lose our mental faculties.  “What’s to worry,” I say, “if we can’t remember what we’re supposed to worry about?”

This country is going to hell in a hand basket.  If the rotten economy, the corruption in government and Corporate America, not to mention global warming, do not get us first, we should live so long as to tear out our thinning silver hair worrying about the aging process.  I advise us all not to sweat the small stuff, or at least the stuff we cannot change.   I say we should live, laugh, love, and hope that we are here to see another day!