Is Grey Really the New Blonde?

Whew! I feel so much better. Actor Antonio Banderas says it's okay for women to get old. And's it unfair older actresses are pushed aside by young beauties.

Combine that with the news that grey is the new blonde - or is it the new black? - and things are looking up. Even young women are dying their hair grey. (Gray for my American friends.) Because grey hair is now cool. Actresses like Jamie Lee Curtis, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren are becoming role models for beauty. Even Lady Gaga, never one to miss a trend, has played with grey.

"Gray hair becoming a hot look for 2015," claims The Province Journal. They open the article talking about Joan Didion's appearance with her "chalk-white hair" in a spring advertising campaign for Celine. I never thought I'd live to see the name, Joan Didion, and the phrase, hot look, in the same article. Of all the adjectives I can come up with to describe one of my favourite writers  - brilliant, haunting, meticulous, fragile - hot has never been one of them.

Then Joni Mitchell, with her long white hair, was chosen as the new face of Saint Laurent. She does look kind of hot. And she's always been cool.

It's not surprising two French companies are behind this. The French with their love of women "of a certain age," are far less restrictive when it comes to standards for female beauty.

On my pessimistic days, I see this whole "grey hair is cool thing," as a trend in the fleeting meaning of the word; on my good days, as as a trend in the developing, changing meaning of the word.

I do hope it's the latter. I remember seeing both my grandmother and my mother in the last days of their lives, their white roots spreading wider on top of their dyed hair. They were both highly intelligent women; accomplished for their eras. But neither could accept grey hair even after they were eighty. So I promised myself I'd never be that woman, worrying about her hair colour to the end.

But I have worried about my grey hair, which started in my 30s, and I've done my share of hair dyes and henna rinse.. Grey hair has always seemed just another sign that it's time to ignore a woman. I'd like to think my grey hair is a sign of achievement, not coolness, a sign that I am older and wiser and live with more equanimity. And I'd like to believe others are starting to see it that way too.

I guess in the words of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, I want to see it as a sign I'm "pro-aging,"and so is it the world. D

Addendum: A reader pointed out the Julia Louis-Dreyfus advertises for Clairol so maybe she's not the best person to go around taking about accepting her age. And by the way, I'm still ambivalent about going grey and understand why other women are too. Just hope one day any woman who wants to go grey can do so without all the baggage. Oh, and I was being sarcastic about Antonio - don't believe him for a moment. D

These Things Take Time

Every morning I make a list of things I need to do that day and most times I don't get everything on the list done. When I had a full time job the lists were longer and the number of things I didn't get done each day was longer as well. My good friend, Bernie, once told me the secret was to make the list manageable, 'do-able', and have it consist of a mix of the urgent and the long term. Without doubt, he is right, I just haven't got there yet.

I ran into a friend the other day who is on a self-financed sabbatical, and I asked her how it was going and she was ecstatic, enthused and over the moon excited with how her life was unfolding during the time she was away from the office. Someone asked her how she was going to manage the re-entry to the workplace and she paused and said, "I don't know how I am going to cram work in on top of all these other things I am doing," I think I understand exactly what she means

A few years ago, before I had given any thought to changing the focus of my life, a colleague was telling me about a mutual acquaintance who had some bad health problems."She tells me she spends a good part of her life, managing being well...exercise, diet, relaxation, meditation." At first blush it seems crazy, but the reality is that being sane, being healthy, simply being requires time, focus, energy and perspective.

Every day, my list includes some writing (both paid and unpaid), some planning, some exercise, some household maintenance, some effort towards personal growth, some thought to eating and being, some reading and just being with Debi. And at the end of that list, maybe just maybe there is room and time for the spontaneous and the unexpected. All of these things are essential to life, living and being and yet for so many years all of that was crammed around and into the niches and interstices of work.

Work is not unimportant but, for too many years in our lives, work is overwhelming and intolerant of everything else. There is a reason for the phrase`work-life`balance, a reason why work and life are separate entities in the accounts book.

Ironically, since shifting into the Third Phase I have been thinking about work more and more. I have been reading about and delving into how toxic work has become, how precarious and hard to find. Our children are finding the joys, opportunities and benefits of solid well-paying careers so much harder to obtain than most of us did and that both worries and perplexes me.

I know that work is important. I know that life outside of work is vital. I know that at different phases the issues around work change and morph. Trying to put all this together is yet another project I am adding to my list.

These Comfortable Shoes Are Made For Walking

I always liked Nancy Sinatra's song, These Boots Are Made for Walking. It was the "girl power" song of its day, a great break-up revenge song. But more than that it was about walking, about how movement and walking onward, away from something, toward something, around something was powerful on its own.

I have always liked to walk. I used to have to walk to school and I loved the transition period between the classroom where the teachers often found fault with me and my home where I believed I had to be a certain way.

On my walks home I could imagine myself as someone else, rid myself of what was bothering me and feel like my own self.

Flash forward to the third phase and walking is still important, perhaps more so. I haven't lost that ability to contemplate while walking, and I feel a greater freedom than my younger self did, particularly my twenty-something self trying to walk alone in European cities without being hassled. No one bothers me much anymore.

Walking has become over the years the best way I know to discover a place. Peter knows a lot more about the mechanics of walking. In fact, he wrote the book. I've been lucky. Except for blisters and some low back pain after overdoing it, I don't have to think about the physical side of walking which leaves me free to observe people, buildings, street art and more.

And it leaves my mind free to plan new projects, get ideas from everything that is around me, look for unusual camera shots. Whenever we travel, after Peter's had enough walking for the day, I continue on, sometimes for hours. Since the latest surgery on his leg two years ago I've explored the canyons of Death Valley, the parks of Valencia, Spain, the commercials streets of Buenos Aires and the back streets of Salta, Argentina solo.

So I want to keep walking as long as I can. My daughter gave me a Fitbit for Christmas, the small device that counts your steps. I've become obsessed with reaching the 10,000 step target each day - I do that about half of my days  - even adding exercise at the end of the evening until I reach the goal. Just yesterday, I thought I forgot my Fitbit when I went to the gym and joked that there was no point in taking steps if I didn't count them.

I'll get over that, but reaching my goal is really about something else - working hard to ensure my mobility lasts a long time.

I have never been a runner but I'm trying to build up my jogging. And for the first time in my life, I approached a personal trainer to reach a point where I could run for half an hour with ease. Jacyln did a long questionnaire with me on my fitness goals. I didn't care about weight loss or sculpted arms (although they would be nice) So she gave me not particularly glamourous exercises to strengthen my gluts, upper back and core to improve my walking efficiency and my posture. She was right; they probably are the best exercises for me. Jaclyn summed up my ultimate goal this way: "You want to live independently when you're ninety."

And I guess that is what it's all about now. I don't want to stop walking, stop seeing new places with my own two feet. I want to let my mind wander freely, not have to concentrate on each step. I'll move as much as it takes now to make sure I can keep on trucking, as they said in the day, until I stop completely. D

The Happiness Problem Paradox Perspective

The Happy Face was the appetizer served to us at a vegetarian restaurant in Salta, Argentina. We had gone there searching for a meal that wasn't rooted in, centred on or consisting solely of butchered animal. As cutesy as the appetizer was the whole experience made me happy in ways that wouldn't have been possible 20, 15 or even ten years ago.

A recent issue of Maclean's Magazine, a blog on the Zoomer website and more studies than I can count all suggest that the pursuit of happiness is perhaps the most enduring of puzzles, problems and paradoxes that human beings ever invented. The key may be in the use of the word "pursuit.' Happiness can seem so personal, so difficult to quantify, that even the founding fathers of America thought safeguarding the 'pursuit of happiness' was the most any one could actually wish for. Being happy was going to be up to the individual in question. Maybe, but, then again, maybe not.

I have a confession to make. I am happy. Not crazy, smiley happy in a creepy, bizarre way, but happy. Life's good, my health is ok, my finances are not a disaster and I have a family that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and I am in the third phase of my life. Strangely all of this makes me fit a statistical model in a way that both challenges and pleases me.

Having money, health and a decent relationship are all life long markers of happiness. Being poor, ill and alone are not a guarantee of misery and sadness but are often connected to unhappiness. It is the growing older and its link to happiness that most surprises. As with all scientific research, there are wrinkles and quirks but the bottom line seems to be: if you make it through the middle years intact, odds are that as you age you will be increasingly more happy. In fact, some of the research indicates that people in their 80s can often be nigh on ecstatic, or at least much happier than they were in their 30s and 40s.

But why?

Part of the answer seems to be that we grow up. Petty quarrels and arguments that enraged us in our twenties and thirties don't seem to matter as much. Arguments and scrambling over status, position and rewards lose their lustre and their weight. We seem to age into a sense of equanimity and acceptance that make life a marvel and source of wonder. We seem to become literally more mature.

I am challenged by this simply because I want to claim some responsibility for my emerging happiness, and the idea that it is simply the passage of time seems to deny the importance and need for growth and the cultivation of perspective. At the same time, I am pleased because it means that all things being equal over the years as society ages, we will become a happier country, a happier world.

I may be happy but I haven't become a pollyanna. I do understand and deeply appreciate that the qualifiers on health, finances and relationships are key and critical and that the absence of these vitally important elements of the 'good life' can render the most mature pleasant individual  a psychological basket-case. I am also cognizant of the fact that some researchers believe happiness is a con, a self-help delusion that distracts us from real social and personal problems.

But here is the key tricky part of this self awareness: I am comfortable with wrestling with these dilemmas largely because I am happy. The happiness I have discovered, developed, encountered or stumbled upon gives me the psychological and spiritual space to wrestle even deeper with the crazy-making answer to that most ubiquitous of questions...How are you doing?  I am happy even while wrestling with what that even means. P

The Art of Age

I was walking down a busy street in Buenos Aires and happened across some sort of open-door art studio/ art class. This older woman was so occupied with what she doing that she was the only one who didn't look up when I started taking pictures. She was in that wonderful space we lose ourselves in when we are being creative, when the work we are doing matters more than anything: the street noise, others in the room or intrusive cameras.

It's a space I've always loved to enter. But it seems to me that over the years of working and parenting I've lost some of that deep concentration I knew as a child creating new worlds. When I was about twelve I wrote story after story in small lined notebooks. They were largely adventure stories inspired by my love of Trixie Beldon, a fictional character I could relate much more to than the sophisticated Nancy Drew. The biggest compliment I got for one of my original stories was from a teacher who accused me of stealing it from a book.

I have tried my hand at fiction throughout the decades but, for the most part, I never put enough into it: most of the writing I did was work-related and non-fiction. Recently, I've entered that imaginary world again. Whole-heartedly. Creating lives for people who exist only in my head. I don't know if I can master something good enough to last but I know I am enjoying trying. And I know that I am able to enter imaginary worlds because I have the time to stay with them, to move undisturbed hours at a time with the next moves sloshing around in my brain. And that I have the experiences in life to create full characters.

It may be easy to see the creativity of the third phase as some sort of hobby to pass the time. Especially if we believe that creativity is the domain of the young. There are those that say our creativity begins to die the moment we enter school (We all know the changes in the wild drawings of children once they learn to draw inside the lines), and declines further as we try to conform or develop ossifying habits. 

But I just can't see it that way. I see it a a chance - for those open to it  - to grab the creativity that has been latent for too long. And I don't see it as a desperate act of accomplishing something before it's too late.( Of course, I am aware of time becoming a limiting factor. But then I always worked better with a deadline.) Creativity in the third phase comes without the pressure to perform; it is done more for the self than at any other time in adulthood.

The question remains; how good can the creative results of third phasers be? Creative energy is often equated with youth, especially in our social media/instant recognition era. But David Galeson in his book Old Masters, Young Geniuses, says creative types can be divided into innovators, the young geniuses who make brilliant breakthoughs and experimenters who build on their experience and improve with age. Think of masters like the artist Matisse and the poet Robert Frost who did some of their best work in their later years.

I once met the Canadian print maker David Blackwood and he told me he expects to continue to work as long as he's physically able to. He collects old French prints done by a master who got better and better until his death. Each an experimenter building on a life's work.

But what of those of us who haven't had the time to focus all our lives on particular creative skills?
I have a friend - Debbie Dryden - a woman I worked with in my early twenties when I started out as a teacher. She was the art teacher at the school, a graduate of a university art programme. But she had - as we all did - a complicated and busy life for much of her twenties to her fifties. She still managed to produce some innovative art during that time but could not give it her full attention. Now that she is retired she has returned to art in a serious way.

She turned part of her home into a studio, takes courses in her chosen art form - encaustic painting - joined an arts co-operative in Guelph, Ontario and regularly has shows with successful sales. No one can call this a hobby. She has the time, the commitment, the skills and the free imagination to accomplish great work. She is a prime example of rediscovering the full potential of a latent creativity in the third phase.

               

                                                       

                                                                        Photo Courtesy: Debbie Dryden



While I love the visual arts, I'm more interested in knowing how writers fare as they age. Star writers like Doris Lessing and Alice Munro both decided there was a time to stop, which is alarming. But then there is Frank McCourt who didn't write Angela's Ashes until he was 66 and Wallace Stevens who started writing poetry after a career in business. More promising but perhaps just exceptions.

There's a bell curve (which looks exactly like a bell) that's been around for decades showing how creativity builds up until about forty and then declines rapidly until it almost flat lines by age 70. It has supported the belief out there in workplaces that new, young blood is needed all the time to come up with fresh ideas and has made us doubt our own powers of creativity and renewal.

Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, did research that sustained that bell curve. But then he discovered that if people traveled, had new experience, changed careers their creativity flew off the peak of the curve and spun upward.  In other words, age does not have to mean ossification. And that is the most hopeful take I can find.

That means, of course, that there's great creative potential for a generation of career-changers, frequent flyer, experimenters. It all makes sense to me.  Experience + new challenges + latent abilities = late creativity. Inhibiting bell curve be damned. D

What Are the Rights of The Elderly and Are they Different from the Rights the Rest of Us Have?

 

In the 1990s, while working at CBC Radio`s Morningside, I produced a series of conversations about the then emerging field of elder law. Most of the work being done was in the area of living wills, obligations parents owe to children and vice versa and whether any or all the rules change when one party to any transaction or issue reaches the milestone of 65 years of age.

Nearly two decades later, I am visiting the Evita Museum, just around the corner from the zoo in Buenos Aries. Argentina is not an easy country or culture to crack but it is clear that Evita, the Show Girl turned National Hero is an important piece to understanding the last 60 years of the country`s history. It is during the playing of one of the several newsreel type movies about Evita and her time on the national scene that I am brought up short by one of the subtitles that declares that in 1948 Juan and Evita Peron introduced legislation enshrining the `Rights of the Elderly`. There are no further references to the content of these rights at the museum but it is the phrase itself that gets me remembering and thinking. I know that the third phase of our lives is filled with changes in attitudes and opportunities, but does it also change our legal status?

A couple of years ago, our daughter Jane came upstairs to our kitchen at breakfast time and, while she was waiting for the kettle to come to a boil, asked me what a living will was. I took her through the basics and she seemed slightly perplexed and asked what Power of Attorney was and I explained that and she then asked if I and her mom had made arrangements for a Power of Attorney. When I said no, she asked if we wanted to give her Power of Attorney. I laughed and said a first rule of life is never give Power of Attorney to someone who asks to have it. She laughed, made an instant coffee and headed back to her room

That's story makes me laugh because Jane is one of the most truly kind and generous individuals I have ever met, certainly kinder and more generous than me and so I don't actually worry about the idea that control over my life might fall to her. But the reality is that all kinds of people, good people with good children, worry about what life might be when they are no longer in 100% control or even 50% control. Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, is wrestling with a double edged sword when she says "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

In January, The New York Times ran a fascinating story about the increasing frequency of nursing homes seizing power of attorney over patients to collect debts, often without informing family members in advance. It is enough to cast a cold chill over any of us, regardless of how many years remain before a nursing home becomes a likely possibility. At the heart of any sense or idea of Elder Rights are questions or control, respect, attention and compassion. 

It has been nearly 70 years since the Peron Government experimented with the idea of Elder Rights and a quick or even exhaustive Google search leaves me still wrestling with what exactly would those rights are. Would subways have the power to insist that you give up your seat to a senior citizen, would Seniors Tuesdays at Shoppers Drug Mart become the norm and legally binding for all stores? Would seniors be entitled to a greater degree of respect and attention than anyone else in society? It doesn't require much imagination to realize that all of those ideas are more than slightly askew and unlikely public policy initiatives. 

After all there is nothing magical about turning 65, or 60, or 55...wherever that  'freedom at' figure falls for you and suddenly fearing a loss of control or needing some reassurance that you are still a valued if slightly less valuable member of society. A 30 year old contingent worker relying on a whimsical supervisor for the number of hours of work they might get that week probably feels a lot less powerful and in control than a 75 year old with a defined benefits pension and the ability to spend the entire winter relaxing far from bitter winds and deep snow. 

If there is one area where the 'Rights of Elders' might be made concrete it is probably with questions about whether the things being done for the person or to the person are in their best interest. And then to make it that much more complicated, how do we define 'their best interest'? When public services, including health services, are under strain how do we ensure that the provision of services is equitable? Does the 80 year old have less of a right to dialysis than the 30 year old, and, if so, what is the value system we are using to make that determination? 

I don't have easy answers to any of these questions. I know for some disabled activists and some elder advocates the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision on medically assisted death raises a host of complicated ethical questions, not the least of which is how do we ensure that the wishes of the person in question are adequately represented. 

After leaving the Evita Museum, Debi and I had lunch at a very nice coffee shop on a leafy square and we talked about Evita and the idea of the rights of the elderly. We talked about our parents and others we knew and the problems that can and do occur as families drift apart and the elderly are left at the mercy of individuals and institutions that have other priorities, other demands that might at times trump the needs and wishes of the person in question. During that conversation the idea of the Child Advocate in various legal systems arose. The concept is simple. Children have rights, needs, concerns that are separate from society, from their parents, from institutions charged with their care. The Child Advocate steps in as a check on the power and privilege of others, a check to insure that the needs and perspective of the most vulnerable party to the process are respected and acknowledged. Do the elderly need an Elder Advocate? 

A couple of days after the visit to the Evita Museum that prompted these thoughts, we are in a gorgeous park just around the corner from our apartment. At the heart of the park is a huge rubber tree that spreads shade everywhere. Dozens of  teenagers, adults, young children were present and simply enjoying another gorgeous day. I was reading a new biography of Pope Francis and was in the section where his birth and circumstances in Argentina were being discussed. The author, Austen Ivereigh, takes us through some of the reasoning behind Francis' attention to the migrant and notes that of course Francis is the child of migrants, his grandmother Rosa had emigrated from Italy. Ivereigh writes "Francis was born to an American nation forged from millions of similar deracinations. Nostalgia- from the Greek words nostos and alga, a yearning to return to the place- ran in his veins. When we lose it, he said in 2010, we abandon our elderly: caring for our old people means honouring our past, the place we come from."

I close my book and watch small boys led by a very determined young girl race around the park on scooters, bikes with training wheels, bikes and an odd little means of locomotion that scares me a lot more than the young boy using it. I watch a couple in their late seventies or early eighties return from lunch and I enjoy observing the adults talk and eye their children while simply letting them play. The rights of the elderly are not something pressing but in this our third phase something we attend to from time to time. Life might actually be a circle. All the issues that bedevil us as infants and children return to bedevil us at the last moments of life: the need for respect, attention, decency and an understanding and commitment to the proposition that all human beings have human rights.

P                                        

The Power of Grandmothers

I started to write a blog last week about the unfair way older women are treated. The idea came out of the obit for Colleen McCullough, the author of the Thorn Birds, in which she was described as "plain of features and certainly overweight." It seems where sexism meets ageism the joint is particularly sharp.

The anger and derision that shot through Facebook and blogs over that obit resonated with me. It's easy for any women over fifty to come up with her own examples in careers and personal life, and I certainly have stories of being treated unfairly or dismissively because of my age and gender.

Here's just a small, fresh example: the week before the obit went viral we had a sexist/ageist tradesman in our house. Now you have to understand that I am the one in our household who does minor repairs, all the painting, the designing etc. And I am the one who knows what needs to be done when a tradesman arrives. Well, the tradesman who came that week didn't get it, even though I showed him the materials I'd picked and talked to him about the possible ways the job could be done. Throughout his visits, he kept calling Peter "sir" and me "dear,"(over and over before he switched to "honey.") And when he needed to find the electrical panel he walked right past me to Peter's office to ask him where it was.

But my heart's not in writing that blog anymore, I'm just not feeling particularly outraged at the moment. I still believe we have to fight sexism and ageism in the workplace and politics and when it comes up in our daily lives. But the huge outcry over that obit comforted me. And, as the old saying goes, living well is the best revenge. Strong, old women may have the last word yet.

Then I remembered a quote that I'd filed away in my brain although it had no relevance to me when I first heard it. I was a producer involved in an interview with Germaine Greer who had just written a book about women, menopause and aging. In the interview she said that, after menopause, women become invisible and then she laughed. What she said next stuck with me for decades and finally became useful. She said it was wonderful to be invisible; you could do whatever you wanted. At the time I couldn't believe that Germaine Greer, of all people, would enjoy not being seen (and I still don't buy it completely) but it seemed such a liberating statement.

Certainly, there's some pleasure in walking for hours down streets at home and in foreign cities without being eyed or harassed. But there's more to it. Old women can get away with so much. And it is in realizing this power that they can make changes others can not.

That brings me to this week when I watched the remaining Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo march around the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada, the Argentinian seat of government, as they have for almost forty years. There are far fewer than the fifty or so women who started the movement and they circle the square three times instead of marching all afternoon. They have their own bus now and sell pins and cards of their iconic white scarves.

But they can not be dismissed as a tourist show. They began marching in the dirty war when generals "disappeared" their children; they demanded to know what had become of their grandchildren, who were often born in prisons and put up for adoption, sometimes to the very military men who had destroyed their families.

Today, there are plaques on the streets of Buenos Aires to commemorate those who disappeared but back then most citizens turned a blind eye out of fear, out of impotency. The military had banned public gatherings but didn't quite know what to do when a group of women in skirts and white scarves started marching with pictures of their loved ones below their windows.





And the women got results. Of the suspected 500 missing children, they have identified more than 100, enlisted an American geneticist, and are credited with creating the Argentine Forensics Anthropology Team. Just last summer the leader of the group, Estella Barnes de Carlotta, then 83, was reconnected with the grandson she had been looking for all those years. A pianist in Buenos Aries, he volunteered to give his DNA to find the truth. The two then met Pope Francis, who had been archbishop of the cathedral next to Plaza de.Mayo during the time the women were marching.

Watching the frail, elderly women march in the 30 degree heat, I was in awe. They are a fierce reminder that old women should not allow themselves to be dismissed, that they are capable of becoming a society's conscience and fighting for what is right. If they choose to, if they don't allow others to define them. Then, those who describe them only through their appearance will be the real dinosaurs. D