September 20, 2007

Confessions from the Carpool

40s Somethin’, All Right

By Shana McLean Moore
Times Columnist

My 40th birthday is just around the bend. In fact, it’s coming at me like a teenage boy in his daddy’s sports car with a backseat full of girls he’s trying to impress.

Sigh. I’d much prefer to think that middle age was still taking its sweet time to get here— much like a silver-headed granny driving the precious cargo that is her grandchildren as she takes the maximum speed limit to the letter of the law and then drops it by five miles per hour.

At whatever speed it traveled to get to me, I suppose there’s no point denying that it did. So I sit here pondering the advice and declarations of my senior sisters, who warned me years ago that it pretty much all boils down to gravity.

“Oh, honey, you start waking up in the middle of the night and then, before you know it, you’ve got bags the size of those Prada totes that are sold for thousands on the pages of Vogue.”

“My upper arms make me look a lot friendlier than I feel with all that waving they’re doing.”

“How much do you love it that Britney Spears’ rump has started to sag? If that youngster is suffering from continental drift, it’s no wonder my land mass is a case of full-scale plate tectonics.”

“The only magazine cover I could ever grace is one of those topless tribal tributes in National Geographic. Hmmm. The Suburban Tribe of Almaden? I might as well go in for the piercings and have my people get in touch with the editors.”

The funny thing is, I only seemed to notice when my pals were talking about gravity in the physical sense of the word. You know, in the way Sir Isaac Newton intended it to be. It never even occurred to me that there would be a sense of emotional gravity to come along with it.

Yes, I realize this makes me a little too literal, and also explains the rash that climbs up my neck whenever someone brings up the subject of poetry. All I know is I should’ve spent as much time preparing my psyche as I did my vessel when I assessed myself with all those rounds of Body Part Limbo while doing my best Chubby Checker impression of “How low can you go?”

Now that the Big One is upon me, I see that the emotional issues that invade a middle-aged mind have twice the gravitational pull as their physical counterpart. I’m no physicist, but I am thinking that if you don’t take conscious steps to counter them -- or dress in 50 pounds of magnetic shield -- it’ll be enough to suck you into the depths of the earth’s core.

You see, at 40, all of a sudden it makes sense to ponder whether you embarked upon the right path in life, instead of forging ahead robotically while whacking away at the wild tundra in front of you, as you did throughout your 30s. You can’t help but wonder if one of the choices you made along the way might have led you to a different career, different relationships, better health and finances. And as you get all Robert Frost about your own “road not taken,” you also cope with the fear that own your parents might soon hit the end of their path, or that your children are starting down one you don’t approve of.

These issues invade your busy mind the only chance they can—when you finally have a moment to catch your breath. After work. After your volunteer commitments at the school. After you chauffeur the kids to their sports and hobbies. After homework. After dinner and laundry. OK, and after a glass of wine and an episode of “Desperate House-wives.”

It’s got me thinking that our physical slide may have very little to do with Newtons’s theories, and way more to do with Eeyore’s. But you won’t find this girl sticking around in a boggy place too long. I’ll be skidding out of there whenever I can, because even an up-and-coming granny knows when to put the pedal to the metal. And, sugar, this joy ride has nothing to do with impressing teenage girls and everything to do with preserving the sanity of middle-aged ones.

Shana McLean Moore is a resident of Almaden Valley. She invites you to listen to her free podcast and read more of her columns by visiting www.caffeiantedponderings.com.