My changing relationship with my body, at 50, and resisting HRT
My relationship with my body is much better than it was in my 30s or 40s and while HRT doesn't play a part in that, there are other things that I do which are helping me feel good.
I keep remembering I’m 50 and feeling a bit shocked. Not shocked in a bad way, but shocked by the break-neck speed of the passing of time. A lot happens, all the time, and time passes extremely fast, too. A few days ago I was in a cafe called No Comply in a small town in western Massachusetts, eating a bowl of rice and tofu with ginger which was the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in several years, while nearby a woman, who was probably in her mid 30s, was feeding supper to her toddler and small child, who spread their food around them and strained to be let down from the table, wiping rice on her purple embroidered top and constantly touching her. She had brown curls pulled back from her wide brow and a tired, faraway look I remember when my children were much younger, of slight disengagement in order to manage the overwhelm she must have been feeling. My children were with me, but Evangeline was playing patience and Dash and Lester were occupied by an old arcade game on a far wall.
Watching her gave me a jolt of recognition that I’m no longer the mother to very young children. I still feel like I am, but watching her reminded me I’m not. And with that I’ve moved from one age, into another age. I’m not a young parent any more. And before you say, 50 isn’t old, let me say, I know. I know that 50 is also not old OLD. It’s not 89 or 93. But it’s not young YOUNG, either.
Someone recently said to me, after he asked me how old I was, “50, huh? Can’t pretend you’re young any more, like you can all the way through your 40s” and while it stung a bit, there was truth in that sting. My friends who are 46 seem like young whippersnappers from where I’m standing over here.
But becoming 50 feels really good. I feel strong. I know myself, and I know my body. Ageing brings with it a shock, because it happens suddenly. My face and my skin has suddenly changed, but the way I feel about my body now, at 50, is more positive than it’s felt for most of my life. I’ve changed the way I think about my body, although that hasn’t happened accidentally. I’ve made that change in my relationship with my body happen.
And because I’m on holiday at the moment, swimming and eating, reading a bit then eating some more (and even writing that reminds me I’m not the parent to young children any more, either, as even languorously “reading a bit” is quite hard with very young children) I’ve been thinking about my body. I think that being on holiday tends to make most of us think about our bodies, more than normal, in good and bad ways. When we were trying to work out where to go away this summer, Pete read me a review in the New York Times about a corner of Massachusetts with especially good food, detailing a cafe specialising in feta and honey croissants, and honestly, I never thought I’d be writing these words, but he had me at feta and honey croissant. And of course, there’s nothing like eating feta and honey croissants, consecutive breakfasts in a row, then putting on a bikini, to make you think about your body with a keener eye.
My relationship with my body changed, a lot, in my late 40s, almost all for the better, despite the sudden ageing process that happens, when you suddenly realise that you quite often refer to events that happened somewhere in your early twenties, which feel like about 12 years ago, but are actually more like 30 years ago. When that happens, you definitely know you’ve got older. But I wanted to write about the way my relationship with my body has changed, and why I, mostly, feel better now at 50 than I did at 40, or 30 or even 20.