Growing old

Last weekend my cousin, who’s the same age as me but not yet retired, came to stay and – inevitably – at one point we started talking about being 61. We agreed that it really is very odd being ‘elderly’. We’re old enough to be lumped in with those in their seventies but we still don’t feel like we belong there, or even with the other people in their sixties (quite possibly, they aren’t convinced that they are in the right age group, either). In a group of people of my age, I feel like I’m not a proper member of the group, but an imposter. Clearly this is an illusion – nobody has ever come up to me in an over-50s context and challenged my right to attend! – but it isn’t about some misplaced vanity over my appearance; it’s about how I feel inside. I had that imposter sensation strongly today, when at the Christmas lunch event for one of the exercise groups I attend – OK, so we were merged with the Even Older Group taken by the same teacher, but still the knowledge that I’m probably the second youngest in a room of 32 people is very strange. Are these my people? It’s even stranger than the fact that, when I’m in church contexts, I remain one year younger than the average Church of England member in this diocese (reasons to go to church: you’re going to be one of the young ones). Feeling younger than you are is apparently something that affects people after age 25 – before that, more people feel older than they are rather than younger than they are – and after the age of 40 it’s common to feel 20% younger. So do I feel 49? Yes, I probably do.

While there’s a recognised thing here about feeling younger than you actually are, and even a suggestion that it is a Good Thing indicating a healthy brain, I suspect that one aspect of my own dissonance is not having had children. It’s not just that a lot of conversation with casual acquaintances tends to drift towards the topic of children and – good grief – grandchildren. It seems to be a ‘safe’ subject; well, certainly safer than how many bits of one’s aged body have fallen off so far. But I really feel that having children is still considered a rite of passage to adulthood, meaning that I’m not even an adult yet. Like me, my cousin hasn’t had children. I can always cope with the ‘children’ topic by mentioning my late-acquired stepchildren, which keeps a conversation alive: she can’t, but she spends more time with tinies, as a result of being an aunt – which, as an only child, isn’t one of my roles. Maybe you need children around to make you feel more of an adult?

Unlike me, though, my cousin is still single. When I was in my twenties and thirties, on several occasions I encountered children who found it hard to make sense of someone who wasn’t married and wasn’t ‘a mummy’ but was the age of their parents. I was even asked by children whether I was a child or a grown-up; the first time this happened, it threw me. Trouble was, I didn’t know the answer. Getting married helps with that one (I didn’t do this until my late forties), but with the stepchildren being grown-ups my married life can often feel gloriously immature, with the freedom to stay up watching movies and stay in bed in the mornings. Plus looking after my mother reverses an old pattern, and means that sometimes I am in a ‘mother’ role – but to my own mother.

I suspect this dissonance, this feeling of not being in the right age group, isn’t going to go away in a hurry. Maybe I have to wait until more of my bits drop off…