InsaneJournal

Current mood:

embarrassed

Oh gods, I'm getting old...
Let's be honest here. The "71" in my 'nick refers to my year of birth. As in "1971". So this year I'm going to be hitting 37, and it's starting to scare the bejazus out of me.

The grey hair I'm okay with. Yeah, there's more of it, but it's still overwhelmed by the brown, and it isn't showing up at the end of the plait, so I can pretend it isn't happening, and tell myself it looks like highlights at the top. The laughter lines are just starting to show around my eyes, but I don't mind those so much - certainly not enough to be rushing around trying frantically to prevent them from showing.

But this morning, I was trying to read the fine print on a container of lip balm, just so I knew what it was I was putting on my cracked lower lip, and I couldn't focus on it. I tried moving the thing in closer, like you do, but that didn't help either. So then I moved it away, and it came into focus. And I went "oh shit" inside my head, because that was one of the first signs my parents were getting older - their backs were fine, their hearing was great, but their arms were too short to hold the phone book where they could read it, and they had to get bifocals to deal with being long-sighted. It was just something which clicked as "I'm getting old" in my head, and consequently, I'm feeling just a little cranky at the moment.

Another nasty side of this is I'm aware my parents are getting older. They're thirty years older than I am, and while Mum's parents both survived into their nineties, Dad's father dropped off the twig in his seventies, and that worries me. Dad's been showing signs of starting to get a bit frailer these days, and it's just a bit worrying, because I love my parents, but I don't want to be in a position where they're relying on me. Too much responsibility, and responsibility is something I've been spending years running from at high speed. There's also the nagging fear of the familial expectation that I'll look after my mother if she becomes a widow. Now, I love my mother dearly, and I respect her a lot as a person, but if we spend too much time together in the one house, we drive each other completely and utterly insane. This means that rather than doing the "good daughter" thing, and taking Mum in, I'm much more likely to be looking into the cost of retirement units and villages for Mum to move into. So of course one part of my brain is running around in circles like a headless chicken panicking about what the family will think of that...

Ah crud. I think I'll go shower, get dressed, and play something needlessly juvenile on the Playstation, in an effort to forget my age.