Jackie McGregor: Midlife may bring a Titanic sinking feeling, but we can still sing in the lifeboats
As the words left my mouth, I knew my metamorphosis was complete, I had turned into my mother!
My son and I were lunching in a café, when I uttered the immortal line, “You should take off your coat or you’ll not feel the benefit when you go outside!” my son frowned.
“Are you ok mum? You look odd,” he enquired.
“Sorry, I appear to be transitioning!” I spluttered panicking, yet still managed to run an appreciative eye over a passing mince pie.
“Sounds painful. Are we having dessert?” he asked.
“A moment on the lips is a lifetime on the hips!” I quipped in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, it was my mother’s! Curses, I was a gonner!
I had felt the stirrings of change some years back, little things I was doing mimicked mum, my increasingly regular need for a sit down and a “wee cup of tea”, my incessant search for comfy shoes and the way I kept pulling back my sagging jowls and examining my face. I’d also taken to staring at the backs of my hands in horror, as I watched the ageing process creep across my youthful skin, replacing it with what looked suspiciously like two crocodile pelts!
Mum frequently did this hand examination. She would often remark how her ageing body alarmed her.
I’d roll my eyes when she constantly lost her glasses, which I now do daily. Looking back, I wish I’d been a little kinder, reassured her she was lovely, instead of dismissing her feelings with annoyance.
She was 40 when she had me, I suppose I didn’t want to think about her growing old.
There are six stages of a midlife crisis, denial, anger, replay, depression, withdrawal and acceptance.
Midlife is the period between 40 and 65 years of age, it has been described as a transition in women’s lives and I seem to be transitioning into a transvestite!
Just like mum, I have developed an appetite for rhinestone encrusted, cruise-ship- entertainer-style clothing that, frankly, wouldn’t look out of place on a RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant.
Mum also had a rampant sequinned jacket and beaded garment addiction that she continuously fed. My father dubbed her, “the Magpie” because of her love for shiny things.
My alter ego, “Sparkles McGregor,” also has an insatiable urge for ostentatious fashions. Perhaps the psychology behind this is the desire to stand out in the crowd, as midlife makes us feel we are fading into the background.
My son shook me from my midlife musings enquiring if I wanted a mince pie. Somehow, his query made me decide to fully embrace midlife.
Yes, I was becoming just like my mother, and if I was half the woman she’d been, I’d be lucky! Mum abhorred the changes of midlife, but frankly, it was nothing compared to what she faced in her later years, battling Alzheimer’s.
I’ll never be as young again as I am today. No one knows what lies ahead, so I ordered the mince pie with lashings of cream, recalling the words of writer Erma Bombeck, “Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.”