Hit 40 or God forbid 50 – and unless you can swank around in skinny winny jeans and be stick thin like Teri Hatcher, wear straightened hair and flick it back like Jennifer Aniston and dress for the beach at work, forget it , you are now officially a non person – under the radar, a non event.
Problem is, nature has ideas of its own. Once you're 'of a certain age' so ghastly that you can't put a number on it in polite company, your body is pulling in a distinctly different direction from Teri Hatcher's. You look more like Judy Finnegan, more Fern Britton, than Helen Mirren. You look, and this is the point – increasingly like your mother.
No more cream cakes
Glimpse yourself in the mirror or in a shop window and you might think you are your mother. You've got her walk, her chin, and you're probably saving bits of leftover food in cling film on saucers in the fridge and asking for tap water at restaurants - like she does. The difference is that you're multi-tasking in double figures, with your career as well as a family to run, while these days your mum's out at line dancing with her mates, at creative writing, or watching Watercolour Challenge with a nice big cream cake and a glass of wine.
Letting yourself go in my mother's day was going out without a pair of tights
What's different is that your mother was allowed to grow old. She had her hair set, she wore twin sets, tweed, comfy shoes and waved her fingers at people or scowled at youths who dropped litter. She ran the cakestall at the WI and people treated her with respect (people were actually a bit scared of her). She was not expected to compete with young women in the looks stakes. She was above it. It didn't matter that she bought cashmere jumpers to last, got wrinkles, or wore half moon glasses on a useful chain round her neck, it was expected of her. It wasn't that she 'let herself go' as the dreadful phrase goes, letting yourself go to my mother was not making the beds till 11am, eating in the street, or going out without a pair of tights. She wasn't expected to compete with me, borrow my hipster jeans, fancy pants or Bay City Roller scarf. She was allowed to look like Fanny Craddock, or Margot Leadbetter – and people gave her service at the Co-op and took her seriously.
>Face lifts, botox, and liposuction, are all so accessible that you'll be able to get them at Tesco soon. When my mother was my age, cosmetic surgery was something Alan Whicker made TV documentary programmes about in Hollywood. It didn't happen in Surbiton, let alone Stockton on Tees, but now it doesn't seem that we have many excuses not to. We should be able to choose to grow old the way we were meant to and concentrate on enjoying our newfound emptying nests, backpacking in the Himalayas and achieving our goals at work. Because being middle aged is about so much more than trying to look like your daughter. Get over it.
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