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My 5 Favorite Things About Being 50
I Thought It Would Be A Craptastic Year. I Was Wrong.
I turned 50 last January. Smack-dab in the middle of COVID.
I got my AARP card in the mail, and I had a small slice of carrot cake (my favorite) with my kids at home. My amazing daughter had planned to get takeout from a restaurant I’d been eager to try, but they were closed on my birthday, and we really didn’t have a backup plan.
Dinner at home with my three grown children and a solitary candle on my favorite kind of cake was a splendid kind of simple. It led me to what is turning out to be an enlightening year, this thing of fifty. It’s now even autumn, and though I am planning a getaway for January, when I turn the corner from fifty to fifty-one, I have discovered a few things that are really great about this half-century age thing.
- Accepting the imperfect
Fifty seems like a great time to accept the less-than perfect. I’m not sure why this happened this year, but it has. When I was a teenage girl, I spent literal hours curling my hair to get it in the exact shape and dimension I sought (hey, it was the 80s). I dedicated boundless energy to layering clothes, to whitening my leather tennis shoes, to fitting into jeans designed not for me, but for supermodels. At fifty, I wear a modified pixie cut, don’t use hairspray, makeup is…
