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Throughout my life, I've had some great role models. I attribute my getting through some of life's toughest times to those people I looked up to. One of them was my grandmother. Gram was in midlife when I was born -- just a few years younger than I am now. So I got to know her when she was showing up in the world as the person she really wanted to be.
Gram was descended from slaves and slave-owners. She grew up in rural Georgia outside of Columbus where her parents and everyone else she knew were sharecroppers which was just a step above slavery -- a hard life with few to no rewards. Gram went to school through the 8th grade and then felt the pressure of the times to get married. At 15 years old, she married a distant cousin who became my grandfather and the first of her five husbands.
Around that time, an industrialist in Detroit named Henry Ford distributed posters throughout Georgia offering work to Black men for more than they could ever make sharecropping. Neither of my grandparents had ever ridden in a car but that didn't stop them from hopping on a train headed north to take advantage of this new opportunity.
At age 16, Gram had a miscarriage that nearly killed her. Throughout her life, she would have more of these near death experiences. But she was amazingly resilient--surviving the great flu epidemic of 1918, smallpox, 45 years of diabetes and Legionnaire's disease in her early 90's.
In hard times, Gram supplemented the family income by cleaning houses, making chit'lings for political fundraisers and--she would kill me if she knew I was telling you this--making moonshine. During prohibition, Gram was well known for the corn liquor she made in her attic still. In her later years, Gram would remark on how she'd never done anything illegal. Funny how she didn't like to be reminded about the moonshine.
Gram also gave out beauty tips. Now I never saw her wear make-up but her skin was flawless with very few wrinkles even in her last years. According to Gram, the secret to her fountain of youth was that she never went to bed without putting cream on her face. During the Depression, when she didn't have a nickel to buy face cream, she used lard!
Though her life was never easy, it was rich and full and she shared the wisdom of her 97 years in liberal doses. She often remarked how she liked the part of getting older where she could say what she meant and mean what she said and no one dared challenge her candor.
I always thought you had to have someone to look up to -- someone like Gram who left huge footprints to follow. But getting older is such a different process these days. Who do look to for inspiration in this new age of aging? Who are your role models? According to Best Kept Secret, women in midlife:
Know we're anything but invisible but, with a few notable exceptions, from politics to pop culture, we're not always easy to spot. If you're searching for role models or simply seeking a kindred spirit who "gets it" like you do, you'll have to do some digging.
And from Kathy Caprino at Fifty and Furthermore:
The role models of previous female generations, in general, didn't offer guidance as to how to achieve, maintain, let alone conceive of living a healthy, balanced and meaningful professional and personal life. Today's midlife women may have grown up believing they could "have it all;" but now that they have it, they're not sure it's worth keeping.
Recently my midlife role models are all around me and they don't just look like Gram. No, they look like Maggie Crane of Amazing Grays who urges us to shift our mindset to "pro-aging and sweep out the old views where we:
Likely find a lot of dust bunnies in the form of old stereotypes limiting beliefs, and fears about what it means to be a maturing woman in a youth obsessed society. Time to get out the dust mop! It's these unexamined fears and beliefs that hold us hostage and keep us on the treadmill of more, more, more! We end up with less, less, less time, money and energy. It's exhausting!
Madison Avenue and our buy-in to the messages they offer have created much of the current hype around anti-aging. While the population of those over age 50 now exceeds those under 50, we're still swayed by the plethora of information geared to a younger generation. It's as if being a mature woman has no merit!
Have you noticed it takes a lot of time, energy and money
