Day 70: Middle Ground

Weird start to the day. I’m on the board of Ubuntu Africa, a not-for-profit in South Africa that provides support services to children who are HIV-positive. The center is in Khayelitsha, a township of a million plus people outside of Cape Town that’s riddled with poverty and disease and crime. The residents are among the world’s poorest.

So, I had a 7:15 Ubuntu board conference call this morning. I went into the kitchen to make a strong cup of coffee and found garbage strewn all over the floor. Seems someone left the garbage bin open last night and the dogs had a feast – probably a better meal than most of the children in Khayelitsha could even dream of. As soon as the meeting was over I took L and H to their annual physicals, where they were found to be in excellent health. H got a booster of the chicken pox vaccine. She hates getting shots, and I feel for her, I do, but how lucky is she to have that vaccine available? We’re so fortunate that we’re able to take things like food and medicine for granted.

We then headed into town to do a few errands. A book in a store window stopped me cold: Hot Granny. Okay, that’s just too disturbing to pass by, so I went in to check it out. The flap copy says it’s a toast to any woman over the big Five-Oh. Excuse me, but once I hit the big 5-0 (much better spelling if you ask me) I’m considered a granny? That makes me hot under the collar! And, once I do get to the point where I embrace my granny-ishness, I really hope I’ll be confident enough and wise enough to have moved beyond any attempt at being hot. And by the way, isn’t trying to be hot just about the un-hottest thing a woman can do? Don’t all the self-help books and columns tell us that being comfortable in our own skin is actually the “hottest” thing of all? Are they all full of hot air? I never want to be mentioned in the same breath as Miley Cyrus or Jessica Simpson or Megan Fox (well, maybe Megan Fox), especially when I’m a granny. I want my grandchildren to lump me in with someone soft and cuddly and adorable, someone like Winnie the Pooh.

In hot pursuit of more coffee, we entered another store and displayed there, to my great consternation, were lollipops that say 50 Sucks. In all fairness, 30 Sucks and 40 Sucks were available as well, but still and all, that’s just the wrong message, especially when the book next door is telling me that I can be a hot 50-year-old granny. Isn’t there any time in between me being hot and my life sucking? I don’t know, maybe not. I used to think there’d be a time when I didn’t have zits or wrinkles, when I could be the Noxzema girl, but clearly I was mistaken. And don’t think I missed the humor here -- that the message is funny because it’s on a lollipop, a “sucker” so to speak. I still think it’s the wrong message. Why not 50 – Hot Damn instead?

On the drive home I got thinking about another titillating tome, hot off the press, which I saw in the first store: Where Will You Be in Five Years? Now that’s always an interesting question, and with this big hot, sucky birthday looming and my professed search for direction, it’s one I should be trying to answer. But doing the math left me all hot and bothered, because I realized that in five years my youngest child will be starting college and D and I will be all alone, just us and the garbage eating dogs. A serious rite of passage. One that I should be so lucky to see. But right now it doesn’t seem so hot.