Older.Grayer. Slower.

There's nothing like sitting in a technology workshop with a room full of Gen X-ers to make you realize that old is not just a state of mind. This was the scary realization I came to this past week.

Forget all the attempts to persuade myself, otherwise: the hair color that hides my tell-tale grey roots; the anti-aging regimen that keeps my face from collapsing like California along an earthquake fault line; the chrome-colored trenchcoat that makes me feel youthful and more or less hip.

Outwardly, I can convince myself--and pretty often the general public in the right light--that I have stalled the biological clock. And then it happens. I'm asked a question that forces me to prove that no matter how young I may feel or even look on a good day, my brain is functioning on decreased capacity. I’ve begun to understand there’s a new meaning for the term “gray matter.”

The workshop was a two-day, twelve hour intensive on how to use a program called Joomla to create websites. Piece of cake, I thought--I can do HTML code in my sleep; I should be able to manage this without staring blankly at the computer screen when asked to download and unzip a file. Everything was going fine until our instructor decided it was time for a "quick review.” To my mind, this is the equivalent of playing "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" buck naked in front of your colleagues, and without the big money prize as motivation. Personally, I've never been good at group Q&A's, even with all my brain cells intact. Same thing with brainstorming sessions at work. Fire questions at me in a group setting and I go completely Anna Nicole. Call it "oops anxiety." I'm sure I'm not the only one who goes mind-numb under stress.

This time, though, it wasn’t anxiety keeping my tongue still. It felt more like my brain was a vast jar of peanut butter and whatever I was trying to get at was stuck all the way down at the bottom.

Okay, I thought, maybe it’s just info overload, which was my lame attempt to salve my growing inferiority complex. But the thick-brain symptoms continued for the rest of day and into day number two. It’s not that I didn’t know the answers; it’s just that I seemed to need a few nano seconds more than everyone else in the room for the information to leap across my synapses and form intelligent language. I decided it was more prudent to stay mute rather than embarrass myself by answering “eggplant” to a question about top menus versus main menus simply because eggplant was the first thing that popped into my head while the actual answer was lolly-gagging around my neural network.

Then came the moment-of-truth event I’d been avoiding—I asked a question.

“What if I don’t want a module to show up on all my sub-pages?”

Our instructor Brett who, enviously, has all of his brain cells in perfect working order said: “Where would you go to manage your modules?”

My notes is what I wanted to say. But since he was standing right behind me, expecting me to brilliantly maneuver my pointy arrow over to the correct tab that would prove I knew the answer, I could hardly be blithe. It took a few moments of anxious lip-biting, but I finally and insecurely said: “The module manager?”

That’s when it hit me: inside my fifty-four-year-old head was an octogenarian brain. Age may have made me wiser, but it had also made me feel like a conspicuous idiot in a world of rapid-fire data access. For me, it wasn’t just an intellectual awareness, it was also an emotional one. I grabbed my lunch and went out to my car where I sat crying into a handful of napkins. Even worse was that I resented feeling distraught about it. So I couldn’t grasp complex information as quickly as I used to. What was the big deal?

Well, the big deal was this: a lot of things about aging sneak up on us gradually: wrinkles don’t suddenly appear on perfectly smooth faces; our bodies don’t speed along one day and tremble on shaky legs the next. Aging gives us time to adjust to the changes that take us from one stage of life to the next. Aging tends to be, thankfully, slow.

But there are climatic moments—like scenes in a movie where everything changes when a shower curtain is drawn back and the knife blade comes into view—that leave you gasping and clutching at the arms of your seat. Fear, anxiety, distress, all come exploding to the surface.

Ultimately, the fact that my cognitive abilities are slightly more sluggish isn’t a major crisis. It’s not even enough of a crisis to make me tear into the Reese’s peanut butter cups that are stashed in my carry bag to sell for a fundraiser. Although I’m tempted. It’s just one of those “getting older” things I’m still trying to accept semi-gracefully like all the other changes this time of life brings.

Waistcapades

I've been dragging out the dark colors more these days. And those unfriendly sounds you hear from me in the morning? Grunting. Scowling. Bitching and moaning. And a lot of mourning. Why? My waistline is disappearing.

This is how bad it's gotten: I've traded my obsession with the scale for one with a tape measure. And I cheat. I know that cutting off my circulation is a form of self-deception; that I'm deluding myself into a size six when I'm really closer to an eight. But I look at it this way--if it keeps me from reaching for the slice of chocolate cake or downing a bag of cheedar cheese rice cakes, I'll be healthier in the long run. I just wish I would be healthier with a waistline.

This isn't a fact that caught me off guard; in fact, battling bulges has been a part of my life story since--forever. The words "baby fat" came out of my mother's mouth while I was still pre-pubescent and I clung to that explanation well into my teens. Then suddenly one summer between my sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays, the baby fat melted and, tah-dah, I had a waistline at last! You better believe I flaunted it, sister.

You wouldn't think this was such a big deal unless you saw my father's side of the family. Waistlines were not in the genetic code. They're Italian, afterall. Spaghetti, meatballs, garlic bread, stuffed rigatoni, lasagna along side the Thanksgiving turkey....this kind of diet doesn't make for hourglass figures. But, still, I craved one. And until I got pregnant in my late 20s, I somehow managed to keep a whittled waist despite blue cheese burgers, double stuffed subs, Burger King chicken sandwiches--fried not broiled--slathered with mayo. Oh, to be 25 again and have a metabolism.

By the time I hit my 30s, I lucked out. America was discovering step aerobics, Jane Fonda, and wearing sweatbands as a fashion accessory. I was merciless. Three nights a week of one-hour workouts courtesy of the school community education program. Circuit training at the health club. If I had known then that this would probably be the last time I'd ever squeeze into a size three, I would have posed for more pictures.

Then came the earthquakes. A divorce, single motherhood, a bankruptcy. Bing, Bang. Boom. Even though I was an emotional wreck, I never ballooned to outrageous proportions. Still, for the first time in my life I had to shimmy into a girdle to control the overflow of tummy flesh. I was mortified. I mean, my mother wore girdles. Even worse, I became petrified that matronhood was just around the corner. You know the look....flabby skin dangling from the upper arms, the doublechin, the saggy boobs, a hefty bag of junk in the trunk. The evidence was all around me. Literally. Around me. It's like that saying, "Denial isn't a river in Egypt." My own version is this: "Middle age spread isn't something you schmear on a bagel." Meaning: There are some things about aging we simply have to accept, deal with, or let it go. 

I'm at the "deal with it" stage. The measuring tape, as looney as it sounds, gives me a visual reminder that my days of fast food feasts and the endless pasta bowl at The Olive Garden are gone. And my frantic anti-girth regimen seems to be having some beneficial outcomes: according to my latest labs, my glucose and cholesterol levels are all below the target range.

Still, I'm hoping there will come a day when I'm ready to toss in the tape and say the hell with it. It might have been in my 60s until I caught a tabloid photo of actress Helen Mirren looking svelte and un-matronlike in a bikini. For the love of God, you post-menopausal women have to stop posing with your clothes off! It's demoralizing.