A Lady of a Certain Age

The feeling that I am running out of time is lately all too real.I trip and fall my way through the week when suddenly I am at the weekend. I have taken to three-day weekends since starting this new job, which means theoretically I get Friday-Sunday off. 

Ultimately, the time is far from relaxing. I have to spend it cleaning, washing, cooking, writing (extracurricular writing,) singing practice that I haven’t managed to do all week, piano practice that I haven’t managed to do all week. The usual.

The point I’m trying to make is, I’m stressed.

When we are young we feel we have all the time in the world. But the older we get, the more of a deficit we accumulate.

In Strauss’ opera, Der Rosenkavalier, the Marshallin, realising her much younger lover Octavian is occupying himself with a more youthful woman, sings an aria in ode to stopping the clocks. The French have a charming term for it –  
Une femme d'un certain âge.

For those of us determined to keep pushing back the hands of time, it can be a tightrope act between surrender and self esteem.

There were many instances growing up which, looking back, I can now see eroded my confidence about my physical appearance. This has become amplified in advanced years. My dad never made me feel certain in this regard – merely pudgy. I was sent to the nutritionist (for my own good, but still.) I was a fat child. I had unusually large, expressive eyes, and for good measure, a nose best described as Roman.

A man once wrote to me on a Spanish language learning site that I should have plastic surgery for my “nariz enorme"– huge nose. I’ve never forgotten it. And a singing teacher once told me I “got in the wrong queue” when it came to looks. My nickname by passive-aggressive church women was “Barbra Streisand.” So no. I’ve never thought myself beautiful.

I’ve been listening to a lot of music from my childhood lately. One of the singers from my childhood mixtapes (via my dad) spoke insightfully in an article I read about how he wished women wouldn’t fight the passage of time. But you know, if they don’t fight fair, what choice do we have?

There are certain songs I can’t place on my Spotify. They elicit too much of a deep-seated response.
The tiniest of prompts can nudge you downwardly into a nostalgia spiral. As well as delving into my old cassette tapes, I loved the John Lewis ad that came out at the end of last year with the dragon and the little red-haired girl. But my friend and flatmate reminded me of a song this week from an earlier JL ad – the one with the hibernating bear.

Every year, the bear misses Christmas, until one year his friend, a hare, decides rather than halting the hands of time to wait for the bear to wake up, he will set an alarm clock for him so he doesn’t sleep through.

What if we could all capture a moment and remain in it eternally?

I asked my friend what his moment would be. A constant traveller like me, he wondered if it would be sitting on a rooftop in Greece as the sun rose. Travelling across Ireland in a car with one CD – The Divine Comedy? 

But the one that came to him immediately was lying on a trampoline with his childhood friend, wondering what he would become. The one moment with endless potential. Where everything seemed possible, and it all lay ahead.
These moments never really existed. They are nostalgic specks in our mind’s eye. God shows us to seek something much less temporal. God offered me a wonderful promise in the form of Isaiah this week. He doesn’t offer to stop grains of time slipping through our hands. Rather, that he will construct something out of our lives that is eternal, something far beyond time and space, if we’ll let him.

Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted,

no weapon forged against you will prevail,

    I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise,
    your foundations with lapis lazuli.
 I will make your battlements of rubies,
    your gates of sparkling jewels,
    and all your walls of precious stones.
 All your children will be taught by the Lord,
    and great will be their peace.
    and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord

Isaiah 54:11-17