Resisting An Age Phobic Culture
Resisting An Age Phobic Culture
BLOGGER: JESSE MENDES
There are some people in this world that approach every birthday in their later years with a sense of dread; an unwelcome, God-forsaken, doomsday event.
One of those people is my mother. Every year I try to remind her of the level of self possession and appreciation for life that she has now, that continues to grow as she gets older, and that she never had when she was young. Every year I point to her the strength, the beauty and the wisdom with which she perceives life now, that defines her day to day experience, and that only came with age. Every year, she admits I am right. My mother is an extraordinary woman with extraordinary depth, and a capacity for love and sheer delight that most people can only dream about. And yet despite her treasures; despite her sanctuary of a home and her beloved cat creatures and her rich social life and her back yard of magical forest fauna, every year, she fights me. Every year, as I implore her to remember who she is and how she inspires me, she clings to her disgust about age, insisting that I won’t understand until I reach her age.
Perhaps she is right. Except that I believe we all have, to some extent, a hand in how we experience, or respond to, the inevitabilities of life – and our emotional responses are shaped, in part, by our attitudes. And I don’t want to dread growing older. Maybe I can’t control that. Maybe there is some genetically-pre-disposed, universal experience to getting older that I’m oblivious to. Or maybe we’ve all been sold a bill of goods; an ideology so utterly devoid of virtue or any morsel of humanity – that to age is to become undesirable, impotent, irrelevant and disposable.
There it is. The elephant in the room. Well, hardly. Common attitudes about aging in North America are nothing short of pathological, and yet somehow, they make up most of the propaganda we all willingly participate in every day. My mother is one of many victims of a mass media marketing machine, peddling warped ideals of an age phobic culture. How will I fare? Will I succumb to mainstream dictum?
Not if I can help it.
Jesse Mendes is a writer, editor and journalist who is deeply committed to helping to change how older women are perceived in North America, and to dispeling the stigma around aging. Her blog can be found on the Blogroll on this web site, and on the link on her Twitter page, where she goes by the name SeptemberMay.
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