Asha Iyer Kumar :
The 40s are confusing times for a woman to straddle. You reckon you aren’t young any more because your friends threw a party to declare you over the hill the moment you touched two scores, more for their own gratification of adding you to their growing ilk, than in celebration. There is a mean sense of pleasure that friends derive when you hit the fence and they promptly hand you the title. And then, five years or so later, you reach a point when you wonder which territory of age you are trooping into: Young, old, middle-aged, or some foggy patch in between?
The trouble with the mid-40s is that although you still can carry off a modish outfit with élan, the silver hair is a big giveaway and a severe let down. It is relatively acceptable to look ‘graysful’ at 50 something, when you have literally touched middle age, and have gone through its travails and have even started to look and dress accordingly; but in your 40s it is savagery.
Despite the new leaps that female fashion has taken, getting silver glaze on one’s tresses for style is not a popular Asian trend.
Grey is still an anathema, the first appearance of it triggers panic, and you waste no time in getting a gooey coat of henna on your pate first because henna is safer than dyes. Then someone tells you henna over a period of time can make you look like a walking Olympic torch. Gosh, picture that! So you ditch the herb and turn reluctantly to the chemicals.
Now there are some of us, who just can’t look our age. Especially with those of us who don’t have a tantrum-throwing young thing to tow around or a fussy teenager to rave about, it’s all the more difficult to take an age call.
The downside of it is that we are taken to be babes in the wood, with no worldly wisdom whatsoever, and so, the whole world turns its counselling guns on us. Thank you, but we are old enough to know the basic life lessons, we want to say; these are occasions when we wish that the greying strands would show up a bit more to keep the self-declared advisers away. It is ridiculous, I know. We women are mortified when we start ageing and look it, but we want to be treated with the respect our true age warrants.
I remember an old neighbour, nearly 15 years younger, refusing to call me ‘didi’ (elder sister) because she firmly believed that I fibbed about my age. On the other hand, I have youngsters of that age calling me ‘aunty’, and some who are about my age or slightly older addressing me as if I were Mary’s little lamb.
A relative recently was amazed that I could make dosas and keep a house so well. That’s a real compliment for a 45-year-old homemaker with 16 years of domestic experience!
The man at the supermarket thinks I am faking it when I struggle to read the product details on the package, a cousin thinks I am too young to talk of retirement plans, I think I am young enough to bounce around in long skirts and dresses, yet not so young to wear skimpy designer blouses, young enough to giggle at SMS jokes, but old enough to be taken seriously when I talk about graver aspects of life, young enough to be teasing, but old enough not to be trifled with… Oh, how I sound like a confused adolescent transitioning to adulthood!
It makes me wonder, are these subtle symptoms of the proverbial mid-life crisis? While men get naughty at 40, why do we women just get knotty? Isn’t the mid-life phenomenon an even, unbiased handout to both Adam and Eve? Dear God, tell me please.
(Asha Iyer Kumar is a freelance journalist based in Dubai)
