Recently, I started going to this book club with my mother. The book club features a group of older, Mormon women with whom I have nothing in common. Our last book was Circe by Madeline Miller. The main topic of conversation was the book’s comments on aging. Circe admires how humans can age and get wrinkles. As humans, we can look weathered and show reflections of our past experiences. There is a sense that we only have a limited amount of time and for these women, there are certain things that must be accomplished. For example, marriage. Most of the women in the group are wives and mothers meaning that they have achieved the highest titles that any woman can aspire to according to the LDS church. Two of the women were not. They steered the conversation towards how their age has made them less desirable wives. For them, their lives will never feel complete or satisfying because they are single and since they’re over 30 apparently there is also very little hope of a happily ever after. Another woman brought up a story about her mother’s 80th birthday. They went to a restaurant to celebrate and there was this young waitress with blue hair. Her mother and her friends picked on this waitress and kept saying that she would never get a man with that blue hair. But what these older women didn’t understand was that my generation doesn’t care. We age, we dye our hair, we get piercings and tattoos, and we do it all for ourselves without any thoughts of what men might think. We live our lives and we get married later or not at all. So back to those two women. One of them I have known all my life because she’s my mother’s friend, and I have always admired her because she seemed to know who she was, she was an individual when all I knew growing up were married women. I resonated with her because I felt like it was okay if I never got married and she validated that idea. The other woman I didn’t know and seemed to have a huge issue with how she’d gotten older but to me, she was so pretty. Sure she had wrinkles and the normal signs of aging, they both did, but to me, they looked good and looked their age. What’s the problem with that? Isn’t the goal of life to have experiences and to grow from them? During their talks, I realized that Circe and I had something in common which also affected how I had interpreted the book when I first read it. To them, a woman who didn’t care about aging was revolutionary but to me, it was a story I’d read a million times. Circe was written for my generation but theirs hadn’t caught up with us yet.
Still, I must admit that while this idea is interesting and slowly becoming the new normal for women, Circe still reflects some of the older ideals. She chooses to be human and to age once she finds a man who loves her. Thus we perpetuate the old thought that you can let go of your appearance once you find “the one”. But we could also look at Circe in an alternative way. She goes through all of these experiences and has all this time to learn and to grow but once she feels ready and satisfied with herself she chooses mortality. She accepts death. Once we have lived our lives and grown into who we’re meant to be, we die. I’d like to think that I’ll die when I’m really old and once I can accept it. This is, quite literally, the oldest dream. My generation can put our lives online for everyone to see, we can gain an immediate audience for our every thought and/or action. Through this, we can live out loud and we can age and die knowing that we put it all out there for the world to see. So maybe, in this world, we can finally reject the age-old fear of aging.
