Middle Adulting

Last week I got a blister on the joint of my big toe that sidelined me for a few days and if that’s not a depressingly accurate illustration of middle age, I don’t know what is.

The circumstances leading up to this situation was as follows:

I speed walk a few miles every morning for exercise. I go out year round. I go through a fair amount of shoes and boots. So, take one ratty, janky threadbare pair of sneakers holding themselves together with spit and defiance that had started to rebel by bothering my feet in small ways since the winter. Add a large portion of procrastination and laziness on my part in ordering another pair. I couldn’t seem to find seven minutes in my day to look up my Amazon order history and click “buy again,” but I had plenty of time to watch half a season of The Good Wife. These two things are unrelated and you will never convince me otherwise. The result was a monster-sized blister angrier and more irritated than a Karen who’s wandered outside of her Sandals resort. It really was far too painful to wear shoes let alone do anything that put much pressure on the area. I found a brand of bandages designed for this kind of thing, plastered one over the tiny volcano on my foot and thought Judy Blume never warned us about this part.

This is the kind of thing that takes you out in middle age. It’s not suffering from oxygen deprivation as you wait in line to summit Everest. It’s twisting an ankle because you missed a step on the stairs in the house you’ve lived in for the past 17 years. It’s wrenching your back as you reach behind the driver’s seat to fish out the ball of reusable grocery bags that have fused into a rat king configuration of canvas and braided and nylon handles. It’s taking the dog for a walk, slipping on a patch of ice, and banging up your knee. In the fourth or fifth decade of your life it’s frozen water, not nuclear war that should really keep you up at night. And speaking of nature—I realize she’s out to get us all, but it feels like she especially has it in for middle-age people. We’re her soft targets. Not only have we royally screwed up the planet, but we’re brittle in all the right places. We’re too tired from all the laundry folding and tracking our tweens through their smart phones that we’re not paying attention to much of anything. Here’s Nature: Oh look! A bunch of 40-somethings at a morning yoga class in a park in Fresno. Let’s see, it is a sink hole or microburst kind of day?  

The road to middle adulting (and maybe Middle Earth..we don’t know!) ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

My mom’s parents came to live with us when I was in grade school. They were a sweet, lovely Italian couple. We built a small studio apartment just behind our house, and I still think about coming home from school and smelling the delicious yeasty scent of fresh baked bread and the earthy aroma of pasta sauce simmering on the stove top coming from their kitchen. Having that intergenerational experience was a gift that I never fully appreciated. It gave me a window into a whole other culture and way of life. It also offered a primer on old age—what to expect when you are way past the point of expecting. I was probably the only second grader who knew her way around bunions and could speak to the perks of using an elevated toilet seat.

In America we do a solid, though totally terrifying, job of preparing people to live well into their 80s and beyond. But this middle adulthood is a fumble. No one has the blueprints. It’s a free for all like in the first chaotic moments of a Zombie apocalypse movie, but stretched out over decades. It’s a constant marshalling of defenses in the form of multivitamins and assistive devices and stronger eyeglass prescriptions and cleanses and liberal use of the phrase “sleep hygiene” in your everyday conversation. Middle age is the Universe’s way of putting you on probation. The creams and supplements and sci-fi biotech fixes are great, but they don’t change the fact that we’re mousey creatures existing on someone else’s timeline.

My partner and I are middle adulting together, but I don’t think we’re having the same experience. For him, my situation was a non-event. For me it was an existential crisis. One I tried to drive home by referring to my foot as “dead” and “dying.” He wasn’t buying it. But at some point he’ll sneeze too hard and bust some capillaries in his face and then what will he tell people? Waiting to summit Everest, right? Honey, aren’t we all.

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Lens Zen!

In keeping with mid-life-is-stumbling-around-in-a-fog kind of theme, here’s an image I took recently on a beautiful, peaceful foggy morning. These boats are living their best lives and have unlocked the secret of it all: chill the F*&^ out.

Fog-getabout it! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography