Photography by Lori K. Tate
The other day in exercise class we were joking around about why we work out. None of us wants to be one of those super buff people covered in oil and wearing tiny swimsuits, and we’re not obsessed with being skinny either. We just want to be healthy and fit. I chimed in and said that I wanted to stay relevant.
Before anyone gets upset, I’m not saying that you aren’t relevant if you’re not in good shape or if you’re overweight. I’m saying that exercise gives you a better chance of sticking around, and being alive automatically makes you relevant.
Forty-seven is a strange age, especially when you have soon-to-be 10-year-old twins. Many of the moms in my world are younger. Some just hit 40, while others are a few years away from that milestone. That doesn’t stop us from being great friends, but I do find myself swimming between islands sometimes.
While I have a few millennial pink (light pink for those who don’t know) items in my wardrobe, I prefer flipping through the bright colors found in the Talbots catalog. (Niki Taylor models for them for God’s sake, and she’s an icon of my generation.) I adore listening to ’70s and ’80s music, but I discovered Lizzo last month, and I adore her, too. I’ve never Snapchatted, and to me, TikTok still means the sound a clock makes (we still have clocks in our house), but I’m starting to get the hang of Instagram. Sometimes I feel hip, and sometimes I don’t.
While I don’t want to be the middle-aged chick wearing inappropriate clothes (think way too short mini-skirts and stilettos — together) in a failed effort to be cool, I also know that I’m not ready to hit the Alfred Dunner racks at Belk (no offense to anyone reading this who wears AD — my mom and grandmother both did and they were cool ladies).
It hit me a couple of years ago that I am no longer young. Yes, I’m younger than a lot of people and I’m not old by any means, but my skin isn’t as smooth as it used to be, and as much as I try to pass them off as blonde, those are indeed white hairs that you see sprouting from my scalp. When I go to a meeting, I’m no longer the youngest one in the room. I’m somewhere in the middle, so the youngest person is probably trying to guess my age because that’s what I used to do when I sat in their seat.
I’m mostly fine with all of that, except these annoying wrinkles that have taken up residence on my chin. What I’m not fine with is being written off because I don’t use the latest technological wonders in my life. Even though I don’t wear VR goggles while peddling a Peloton (my husband listens to CDs while riding our “Boboton”), and I don’t have ear buds for my iPhone, I still have a lot to offer, although it might be delivered in an archaic e-mail.
I think about this when I talk with older folks. If I feel this way sometimes, how do they feel flipping a Jitterbug open while waiting in line for a clerk to check out their groceries? (I’m just now warming up to self-checkout, and I still don’t like it. We need to talk to each other.)
My dad turns 83 in February, but he isn’t 83 on the inside. Up until last month he owned a black Camaro convertible with racing stripes. He carries a flip phone (not a Jitterbug). He doesn’t text (or take selfies), and he doesn’t use a computer. I often think he’s better off because he doesn’t have the distraction of technology in his life. Sometimes it turns out that not being hip is the hippest thing you can be.
Today marks five months since mom left us, and during that time my father and I have grown closer than we’ve ever been — despite not being able to text each other. As painful as it was to lose mom, the silver lining is that I discovered my father’s relevancy. Though he is dealing with the incredible adjustment of living without my mother, he still manages to give good advice and tell colorful stories about the way things used to be.
As dad and I learn about each other’s worlds, we’re building a new world for our family. This is some of the most relevant work that there is because relationships are the foundation of everything, and they’re also the pathways that connect us to loved ones when they’re long gone.
No, my mom isn’t here anymore, but she’s more present than ever because I think about the things she taught me every single day. One of those things happens to be the importance of exercise, as my mother wore out at least three stationary bicycles in her lifetime. Now when I hop on the Assault AirBike in my exercise class, I can’t help but think about that and her quest to stay relevant. All any of us wants is to matter, and my mother was certainly successful in achieving that.