How Did I Get Here?

Another birthday? I thought I had made it clear I wouldn’t be acknowledging any more birthdays. Forty was fine, fifty was nifty, sixty was sexy, but with only one more year until I join the septuagenarian set, I’m ready to stop the clock.

How did I get here? Just yesterday I was graduating from college, eagerly anticipating a career, plus marriage and a family. It was an exciting time with most of life still ahead. Then, suddenly, I was retired with grown children and grandchildren. What happened? Maybe our new condo is in fact, a time-travel machine or perhaps an alien abduction has compressed the years known as middle-age. Senior citizen? Medicare? Golden years? “Bah, humbug!”

Last summer I attended my fiftieth high school reunion only to be greeted by a bunch of old people. How could these gray-haired, slightly chubby, unrecognizable strangers be my classmates from high school? Then I passed a mirrored wall and realized I fit right in. How was it possible?

Maybe this awareness of approaching old age is what keeps me writing. It seems like I have so many stories to tell and so little time to tell them. I’ve sent my latest novel, I Want to Go Home, to my publisher, and now I’m working on a memoir of my childhood growing up on a dairy farm. I have a desire to preserve these memories for my children and grandchildren. I have a need to process them for myself. 

I always intended to age gracefully, whatever that means. That was before old age hit me over the head with an iron skillet and brought with it all its little aches and twinges. That was when I could diet for a week prior to any impending event and lose ten pounds. That was before I looked in the mirror and saw my mother staring back at me. That was before the AARP magazine started arriving in the mail. Who ordered that, anyway?

Ann Landers, the famous advice columnist, once wrote, “At age 20, we worry about what others think of us; at 40, we don’t care what they think of us; at 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.”

So, maybe the seventies will be my decade of freedom. Yes, freedom from doing what others expect of me, freedom to accomplish the goals I didn’t have time to accomplish when I was busy with a career and family, freedom to live my life boldly, to feel and act authentically without worrying what other people think. Oh, that’s right. They’re not thinking of me at all.

Cindy L. Freeman is the author of two award-winning short stories, a novella, Diary in the Attic and two novels, Unrevealed and The Dark Room. Coming soon: I Want to Go Home. Website: www.cindylfreeman.com; Facebook page: Cindy Loomis Freeman. Her books are available through amazon.com or hightidepublications.com