ACCEPTING MIDDLE AGE (HELIUM.COM)

Memoirs: Accepting being middle-aged

Will someone please tell my 22-year-old daughter that I really am middle-aged? She keeps talking to me like I'm her child. She doesn't even live with me, but she feels she must keep me going by telling me how to spend my money, organize my time and keep my house. Thank you for listening, and if you told her, thank you very much.

I am middle-aged and I am happy with that status other than my daughter's controlling treatment of me. I don't believe I have ever been happier at any other time in my life. Today I know who I am and what I want.

I am a 59-year-old ex-hippie, still free-thinking, eccentric woman at heart who just wants to learn the spiritual art of compassionate loving every day at Earth School, which I attend faithfully. The classes are so much more enjoyable now that I finished anger, rage and jealousy. Those were so much harder than physiology, geometry, and economics at regular school.

I get up excited to begin my day every morning. If that isn't accepting of who and where I am I don't know what is. I quit my day job some years ago. Today I work solely as a freelance writer, which pretty much means that I spend all my days, every day, playing at my computer until it's more than past my bedtime. I love my life. I really do. I thank God for it.

I write stories about things from the past as well as about things from my imagination. I write poetry, which surprises me because I hadn't tried since I was in my twenties. And I write the articles which supposedly pay the bills. I write articles about things I like to research. I can't write about something I don't want to learn about. Like anything having to do with real estate or economics. All the help wanted ads want someone to write about those two subjects.

When I get up, I try to read something spiritually uplifting each day. It gets my day off to a better start. Then I journal about what I read, what I learned at Earth School the day before, or what I'm thinking and feeling then. Then I pray. After that, it's time to bring the body to meditation and hope the monkey mind will come. I figure if I just keep sitting in that straight-backed chair each day for at least ten minutes, one of these days something's going to happen. I'll stay longer and really meditate, or I'll finally give up on the whole idea. But I don't want to give up, so I refuse to do so.

I'm a much kinder, gentler person than when I was younger--pick any age, teens, 20's through 40's. I was always in a snit about something it seems to me looking back. Life was never going my way because I was controlling, and it took me half a lifetime to learn I wasn't in charge. Pity. Pity and shame. My husbands and significant others and children had to suffer with this shrew of a monster who was a controlling, screaming bitch. I blamed all of it on PMS. It turns out I also was bipolar and didn't know it. Today I take medication which helps a great deal. With that and the help of Prozac for depression, it's a brand new life for me after years of suffering.

I am so grateful I made it to middle age. I am surprised I didn't kill myself or that someone I angered didn't put me out of my misery. My children have forgiven me. We have pretty good, loving relationships with the exception of my daughter's control issue, which she comes by naturally.