I try to avoid clichés, both in my writing and in my life, but I find the living part harder. Certain behaviors just seem to stalk you in middle age — tracking your sleep, worrying about protein, traveling the world to become better at pottery. I haven’t done this last one yet, but a friend does, and her Instagram stories give me FOMO.
Whatever it is for you, it’s likely to be something that used to strike you as hopelessly boring.
“Birdwatching,” a woman my age recently wrote on X. “Eventually, it comes for us all.”
I’m not ruling it out.
I’ve avoided golf because the outfits don’t suit my body type, nor can my knees handle pickleball, so I’ve settled on gardening. There are lots of obvious benefits — fresh herbs always at the ready, no cyclospora — but that’s not why I do it. Now past childbearing age, I like being able to bring forth life again and nurture it. Unlike raising human children, the price of failure is low (I can always go to Trader Joe’s if aphids infest my broccoli), and it gets me away from screens. I would like to tell you that it makes me sanguine about the cycle of life — everything is born, blooms, then goes to seed and dies — but I’m no closer to accepting my own mortality than I ever was. No, it’s the godlike feeling of conjuring shoots from seeds, soil, and water, and observing their daily progress that fills me with joy.
In the winter, when there’s less to do in the garden, I have a different activity beloved by women of a certain age: genealogy. Did you know that’s how it was spelled? I didn’t until a few years ago, despite having worked as a copy editor, because what twenty-two-year-old cares about her ancestors? Back then, I was more concerned with finding someone to make descendants with, but now? When my husband is busy with his own foreseeable pastimes (naturally, he’s on the board of our neighborhood association), I barely notice his absence, so deep down the rabbit hole have I burrowed on FamilySearch.
“Ben Franklin is my fourth cousin ten times removed!” I announce when he gets home. “And I’m about equally related to Emily Dickinson and John Wayne.”
I have accepted becoming sexually invisible, except on the rare occasions I wear a skirt and makeup. When I am noticed, half the time I recall with a jolt the ick factor of unwanted male attention and the need to smilingly extricate myself so I can get back to playing Words With Friends. I’m okay with no longer giving main character energy, as the kids say, and being relegated to a supporting role.
“Oh, God,” said a friend recently while glancing around at a wedding reception. “We’re the old people no one cares about.”
Indeed, we were.
It’s unlikely at this stage that I will achieve anything to earn me a Public Figure title on FamilySearch, so I warm myself in the waning limelight of my forebears, who fought wars, survived pogroms, and braved the Atlantic Ocean in a wooden ship with no motor. I will never found a new branch of Christianity or have a pond named after me, but if they survived smallpox and mustard gas and their children dying before antibiotics, I can withstand a little reduction in status.
As a filmmaker whose entire business has contracted, I’ve been managing my own expectations for a while, but I’m not ready to fully give over to hobbies. My role models have always been artists who continued working all their lives and whose lives were almost certainly lengthened by their sustained passions.
My favorite aunt was a Broadway actress who auditioned and performed into her ’90s. I wrote a small role for her in one of my films when she was in her ’80s, a gift in my estimation, since she often complained about not working enough. Two weeks before the shoot, she called to tell me she might not be available because she had “booked a commercial with Jimmy.”
“Jimmy who?”
“Gandolfini!”
Her husband, a painter and longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker, continued drawing until dementia stilled his hand. He died at 96 and she at 100. You don’t get to that age by protein-maxxing alone. It requires purpose. That and the seemingly quixotic belief that you’d better keep up your craft because you never know; tomorrow, Jimmy might need me to co-star.
So, despite the siren songs of mah-jongg and book clubs, I still insert butt in desk chair every day, cranking out new scripts and pilots that I know have only slim chances of getting made. I do it not because I am desperate for money and recognition, as I most certainly was in my ’20s, but because it’s what nurtures me. I actually do enjoy the process, an idea I once rolled my eyes at when it was delivered by successful people on panels who no longer worried about making their rent.
They were correct, though. Writing is what keeps me sane and from becoming an alcoholic like a good number of my ancestors, the lesser-known ones.
As in the garden, there’s no assurance the crop will succeed, and even if it does, I may end up watching a squirrel enjoy my ripest, juiciest strawberries from the safety of the roof. I just wave at him. He lives here, too, and unlike me, can’t shop at Trader Joe’s.
When I was younger, I was determined to stand out from the crowd because I believed the alternative was mediocrity, a fate worse than death. In truth, very few fates are worse than death, and finding out you’re not so different from everyone else is something of a comfort. I’m less attached now to the idea of my own uniqueness and more forgiving of my ordinariness, my failings, and yes, my predictability.
It isn’t so bad, savoring the quieter habits of this particular life stage. I may no longer dazzle, but it feels like enough to be the main character in my own story.
Check out Tatiana’s Substack here.
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This is lovely- your wit and insight are spot on! What a fun read.
Really enjoyed this. So funny about the spelling of genealogy- I also just recently learned it wasn't an -ology. There is a random pond somewhere waiting for your name.