Greeting 60 with anticipation and dread

I was three weeks past the due date, weighing a hefty 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) and my mother was keen to disprove the doctor’s theory that she may have been carrying twins (my sister’s birth weight was roughly half of mine). 

I'm not too thrilled about this big zero birthday. I gag slightly to say the new number. “Sixty” just does not roll easily off the tongue and I feel a bit like Sylvester the cat, suddenly developing a lisp and a stutter over this “despicable” number.

How can it be that I have lived this long? Put me beside my mother and I am still that child that took bites out of my bedhead (my mother would not let me near Grandma’s Queen Victoria beds) and the waxed fruit on the dining room table. Put me with my grand-children and I am firmly about to enter that place where waxed fruit melts for all eternity. They think spring chickens should be able to spring more easily off the floor. If that’s the gauge, I am perhaps destined for the age of a 60-year-old, having never been all that springy when it comes to hefting myself from the floor.

It’s not only the floor that I cannot spring up from. The skin is not springing back into place any more and there are a few saggy bits that really do not belong on my body at all. Even my hands belong to someone else. They have veiny bits and little strange dots on them that could belong only to someone aged (oh no) about 60.

The eyes see best through a set of lenses and the hair has only kept to its original colour with the help of a sympathetic hairdresser and a lot of hair dye.

I greet this decade with anticipation and dread. Because while I might bemoan my physical state, I do not bemoan a life well lived.

The wrinkles and the saggy bits pale beside the friendships I have made, the family I share, the holidays, the aching belly laughter and the music that has filled my life. I am happy to enter a new decade and share all of this anew, albeit with friends with wrinkles and saggy bits.

- Linda Muller