Growing Old Gracefully

I am destined to have gray hair. (I also never know if the correct spelling is grey or gray, and I'm a really good speller.)

My mother has it, though she "frosts" to cover it up. My father had a full head of thick silver hair. My grandmother has white hair when once she was blond like me. White. No color at all. Now my wiry whites are poking through my dark roots. I am not one of those women who fear what I will look like when I'm old. I don't care for plastic surgery or worry too much about wrinkles. But when I start digging through my scalp, looking at the grays, I am reminded of just how not young I am. I am there. On the brink of a full head of silver hair. Once I get there, I'll have to decide "do I go for it, embrace it" or start the upkeep that will last a lifetime? Dying. Highlighting. Toucher-ups on a monthly basis. I get highlights now, but if I let it go for longer than I should nobody really notices. But once those sneaky, weird, coarse hairs (why do they have to grow straight up off of my head???) take over, I will probably start a stricter regiment. Or I could just shave it off, Britney style!

Passing

Reading this blog (http://stephanieklein.blogs.com/) made me want to answer her question: how does one go on after losing someone so special, so important to them? I often have thoughts of someone close to me dying. Whether it be my grandmother, my sister, my husband, I can start crying immediately. I know I can get through my grandmother's death. She is 99, after all. But it is the thought of those people who aren't old, of them dying before me when I would rather be the one to go. I don't want to live through that pain.

I have lost people in my life, and a lot of that loss was tragic. My grandfather and great-aunt and most recently "the woman we call grandma" have passed, sadly, but not devastatingly. My young cousin (car accident), my uncle (cancer), my father (again, cancer) died, devastatingly. The last, of course, being the hardest.

How did I get through that time? Then, thinking back, how did he get through losing his brother, his only brother, before his own cancer appeared? How did my 99-year-old grandmother get through losing her only two sons? Grief is so debilitating, how can we be so resilient? I guess our bodies go on, but we are forever changed. Emotionally scarred, hoping nobody can see the pain still lingering just beneath the surface. And the fear of having to survive loss again. Who will it be? What is going to happen? Would knowing the future make it easier?

I look back and see how I was going through life in a such haze just before, and after, my father died. That was the worst time of my life. My boyfriend, whom I loved so much and had hopes of marrying, dumped me. The roommate I was living with was moving in with her boyfriend and breaking our lease so I was homeless (in a sense) and my father was dying. I lost 10 lbs and looked terrible. How did I hold a job? How did I maintain my sanity? Even now, if I think about my father, about the love I had for him, of how he will never meet my husband or my children, I can weep. Not cry. Weep.

Maybe the hard times we go through make the easier times that much better? Or do the hard times just remind us that life is not meant to be easy? I still can't get a voicemail from my mother without freaking out that something is wrong. "Her voice sounded weird", I'll tell my husband. "Something is wrong." He reassures me, but I think he doesn't know. He hasn't been where I have been. But he has. We all have. Loss and grief tie us all together. Just as birth and love and happiness do. With the good, comes bad and vice versa. So count your blessings when you have them. And really cherish the good times, and the laughter. Moments are fleeting. And that is how we get through the shit. Knowing that "this too shall pass". Wise words spoken by my mother ever since I was little. I didn't realize then how true those words were.

The Air Up There

I have been accused of being an airhead before in my life. I never really believed it; after all, I feel that I am an intelligent person, well-read, educated. But one can be smart and also an airhead, I have come to realize. I guess that is why we have the term "absent-minded professors". That term wouldn't exist if they didn't.

When somebody asks me how my weekend was on Monday morning, I stare blankly back at them trying to remember what the hell I did the two days prior. Sometimes I have to say "I feel like I did something, but I can't remember what it was" and then once I depart the elevator, I will remember that I went wine tasting or celebrated a friend's birthday or whatever it was. But I end up looking like a total ditz because I couldn't answer a seemingly simple question.

Other examples would be leaving the house with the one thing that I told myself to remember. (Doesn't everybody do that?) Talking like a valley girl, with the "likes" and "whatevers" doesn't help my cause. (I'm working on removing those words from my vocabulary.) In college, my roommates called me The Great Spacecoaster... It started out as Spacy Tracy and then evolved into something more. I didn't really understand why. I mean, was I any worse than the rest of the people attending my college, one affectionately referred to as Stony-onta? It couldn't be true.

How can somebody like me, somebody so organized, so prompt, so responsible, also be an airhead? Am I so involved in the moments of my day, that I forget the other things I am supposed to be remembering? Too many thoughts/projects/things in my head, pre-occupying me so that I will leave my coffee on the counter of a cafe after having just bought it and only realize it when I am 10 blocks away? I suppose I should just be happy that my college nickname did have the word "great" in it!

Eyes Wide Open

I hate stereotypes about men and women. More accurately, I hate falling into those stereotypes because the fact is that I do because they are SO true!

My latest realization that all men are created equal is when I count the amount of times my husband asks me "where is the (fill-in-the-blank)?" Where are my shoes? Where is the mustard? My wallet? My keys? The car parked? The thing is, he will immediately open the fridge and panic. He can't see what he's looking for! But is he truly looking, or is it just easier for him to ask me? He says it's part laziness, and part thinking that I went and moved his stuff. Sometimes he will go into a teenaged-type tizzy, thinking that I threw something away because growing up, his mother used to do that to him all the time.

Which brings me to what I call his "Depression-Era Mentality". I do not throw away his things because he knows exactly what he owns and he would be very, very upset if I so much as toss out the old white t-shirt that says "Bahamas" across the front and has pit-stains. I do not throw anything of his away... EVER. He's a hoarder and believes he needs everything he has. The problem is, he just can't find it when he needs it.

The crazy thing is, I'll usually do know where the thing he's searching for is. I can be on the phone with him and direct him to the right spot. Today, though, I couldn't remember where or if I put something away. Of course, I am the one to put something somewhere, because that equates to cleaning up, and we all know that men do less of that than women. See, I'm back to stereotyping, but I swear it's the truth. It was true for my father, it's true for my brother and it's true for my husband. We women just get so used to getting up, finding the item for the man within a minute, and sitting back down.

Unfortunately, today, on my hubby's birthday, I could not remember if I moved his very important item. He had to rely on his own eyesight. I had to ask him if he was "REALLY looking, like eyes-wide-open-looking on not just scanning the room." He got angry; his day would be ruined if he couldn't locate this thing. He called back a minute later. He found it. And blamed me for moving it.

You Are Mean and I Hate You

Sitting in an office setting (aka, maze-like cubicles with paper thin walls), it's a given that you will hear other people's conversations and probably get too much information on a daily basis. I'm nosy; I don't mind learning about who has late charges on their credit card, or who is searching for the perfect daycare for their kid. What I don't like is the loudmouth currently sitting near me.

She (who shall remain nameless) is one of those people who talk out loud about everything they are doing "OK. Open file. Yes. Yes. What??? Who the fuck worked on this? I mean what the hell! Oh, it was you, Joe. Why did you do this?" And on and on. Add a nasty tone to the perpetual updates about what she is doing and now I've got a problem. I do not like her. In fact, it's edging into hate.

Yesterday, one of our colleagues had made a pound cake and went around offering some to everyone. One thing we office folk like more than free booze is homemade goodies. So the witch takes a piece and then loudly, after taking a bite, says "God! This is too sugary! Too much sugar! Jeez!" To me, that is SO rude. Someone goes out of their way to bake a cake for the office, and you loudly complain, so that the chef will definitely hear you.

So these are my words to her, the witch: You are rude. You think so highly of yourself and of the work you do, that you think nothing of demeaning the people around you, chiding them, making them feel like they suck. You have a comment about everything, a question about everything. If there is a meeting, you have so much to say that a 15 minute meeting turns into 45 minutes. You are snotty and unapproachable. I don't like you. And I will do everything I can to avoid you even though your cubicle is right across from mine. Keep your distance, bee-atch. I may be quiet, but I'm not as nice as you think.