Kicking My Own A$$, Part I

I will admit it. I am a food racist.

I love white food.

Bread, pasta, biscuits, cake...all receive a big "Hell Yeah!" from me.

And, as most of you know, it was a long,cold winter and, being unable to grow a fur coat, I have put on another layer of a different sort.

Ten years ago, I could lose fifteen pounds in a couple of months. All I had to do was eat a little less and exercise a little more. But that doesn't work any more. Now I need to try something drastic. My "Kirb Appeal" this summer will be NewThirteen, trying to weigh what I did at 13. (This is a HUGE joke, peeps. At thirteen I weighed 101. Like the song. Now? I would need to remove all my insides PLUS a leg in order to weigh 101. Which I believe would be drastic.) And lest you think I want to LOOK thirteen again? Let me correct you. That would involve braces, headgear, and perhaps the ugliest wire-framed glasses on the planet. Nope--I'll settle for losing 15 pounds and looking 50 instead of 51.

I have done lots of research these first two weeks of summer, and I will be blogging about some of the things I've learned about dieting. (By 'learned' I mean read with a healthy dose of skepticism.) For now the easiest, albiet the most painful, choice is to give up a lot of my white food.

Alas, little Biscuitville, I hardly knew ye.

Look into the crystal ball

Spending this week (please bring drugs and/or liquor) with my mother has been like getting a glimpse of the future.

And the future isn't pretty, peeps.

It's not just that your body begins to betray you and you are not young and cute and energetic anymore, as if that's not bad enough.

It's that you become an OLD PERSON.

It was funny...when I told people I was coming back here to care for my mom for a week, they invariably asked her age. And then it was, "Well, that's not old."

I am here to tell you...seventy-seven is old. Your body breaks down, your memory has glitches, and you develop old person habits like accumulating tons of junk "just in case" and that unmistakable "old person smell."

Yesterday, I mentioned that getting old was not for the faint-of-heart. But neither is staring at the person you will most likely become.

I will begin stockpiling liquor as soon as I get home.

Welcome to New Thirteen!

For my birthday, I decided to resurrect myself. Not in any religious way, because I am pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool Heathen, but in a metaphorical sense.

Those of you who have read my blogs in the past, know that the last two years have been an internal struggle--my kids have left home for real, finding their own lives in which my role is peripheral. So now that I'm not a mom anymore--what am I? And then it dawned on me...I am who I was before I was a mom, just older. (And more wrinkly, and heavier, and more tired, but pretty much the same INSIDE.)

In discussing this with friends (both real and imaginary) as well as complete strangers, I found that there are an awful lot of women out there who feel the same way. We love our children and (for some) grandchildren, but we are also jazzed about not having complete responsibility for anyone else's lives...just our own. And while we can't get back the twenty-plus years we've spent putting other people first, we can move forward putting ourselves at the forefront. We can choose how we spend our time, and most of us want to spend it doing things that make us happy.

These observations led to the birth of "NewThirteen." What is it? Right now it's a domain name attached to a website that's not only incomplete, but a total mystery. I'm glad that my $50 investment comes with the toll-free number of a guy who will, in the special language of computer geeks, tell me how the heck to set the thing up. After that, NewThirteen will be a website dedicated to all things fun for women of a certain age. It will be a clearinghouse of information about cool things to do, see and join...without having to worry about being judged. Eventually, there will probably be advertising, and I hope that someday there will be guest blogs. And if this website helps just one woman (or man, for that matter....this is not a "no boys allowed" club) decide that who she was is really still who she is, then that's a good thing.

So, for all you women who don't want to go gentle into any dang good night...welcome to New Thirteen!

Here's an interesting premise...

http://blogs.tvland.com/prime/137-make-a-complete-and-utter-fool-of-yourself/?xrs=synd_facebook

The Years After "Lears"

Back in the late eighties, I was offered a subscription to Lears, a magazine marketed to women over thirty-five.

I was mortified.

I was probably in my late twenties at the time, and I thought to myself "WTF?" (This was before WTF was part of the American lexicon, but I always was cutting-edge.) Thirty-five? That was OLD! Did I look thirty-five? Really? Because if I did, it was time to get out the straight razor.

Lears was the brainchild and baby of Frances Lear, the ex-wife of Norman, who charged her husband a whopping $112 million for his freedom. I like to think she believed in the power of her age, and Lears was a big eff-you to younger women who may have had longer hair and better legs and boobs that hadn't yet made an acquaintance with Mr. Gravity, but they didn't have the moxie of those of us who had been around the block a time or two. (Of course at the time, I was still the former, not the latter.)

After Lears folded, the slack was picked up by More, which markets itself to women of a certain age. (They don't really say what age, but one can infer they mean 40+.) More takes less of an "eff-you" attitude and more of a "forty is the new twenty-eight." These are some of the tag lines in their direct-mailing campaign: "The prime of your life...is the time of your life!" and "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and "Maybe you had to play by the rules growing up. Not anymore!"

So here I am, not twenty-nine anymore. Mr. Gravity and I are on intimate terms. Not only am I 40+, I'm 50+. And according to More, forty might be the new twenty-eight, but fifty is the new thirteen. We may be cutting our hair and doing digestion commercials like Jamie Lee Curtis, but we are stronger and smarter and more determined than ever.

And that's an awesome second act.