Panty Panic

On to a mundane topic that causes more angst than the existential ones: underwear. Specifically, underwear for us middle aged gals. I didn't have to even think about this issue until recently, when it came time to replace my current crop of panties, haggard with stains, loose threads and spent elastic.

Off to JC Penny I went, where I've been buying the same brand of undies for two decades. They're called Adonnas, nice cotton panties with just the right amount of coverage (a design called hipsters) and a pleasing look. To my great dismay, I found that Adonnas have been discontinued. The sales clerk said many customers were similarly crushed. Indeed, a woman behind me was looking for them too, and we whined in unison at the bad news.

Our choices now are these: big waist-to-thigh bloomers suitable for the 19th century, or band aids with strings. These latter disappear into the folds of your (whatever) if you are carrying the least bit of extra poundage, making your hips and legs look like a stack of sausage links. The former scream "grandma." Neither does justice to the vibrant, vital, sexy women we still are.

A lot has been said about the dearth of appropriate clothing for women over 40. We have that polarized spectrum of choice again: baby doll outfits for teens and young 20s, or the kind of leisure wear often seen in retirement communities. The other option, one that could solve these clothing quandaries, is out of reach for the majority: the upmarket departments in stores like Nordstrom's or Macy's. If I had $2000 and style consultations from the What Not to Wear team, I'd look damn good all the time.

I will say I'm happy to see the tunic tops in stores these last few years. Tunics usually have stitching under the breasts and a deep neckline to accentuate the waist and shoulders. My blue, brown, and white Liz Claiborne tunic is the most flattering piece of clothing I own. Because the front hangs loose over the stomach and hips, there's lots of room for all body types underneath. Now all I have to do is get the corresponding image of maternity wear out of my mind.

(Art by Eric Gill, early 20th century.)

The Middle Way at Midlife

I started to write an essay on body image in middle-aged women. About mine in particular – the ups and downs, the acceptance one day and despair the next about the gains and losses of aging. I wanted to write about cultural transgressions against our humanity, the inundation of mixed messages and outright lies we must sort through daily about health, youth and beauty. Downhearted about my 49 year old frumpiness, the sex goddess inside of me wanted to rage about her invisibility. It's painful and it's real, no matter how much I "know better" and can slough off the negativity on the good days. I planned to wrap up with considered, articulate arguments for self-acceptance and a balanced attitude toward mental and physical health.

Then a few things happened over the weekend.

A friend took me to a play about Alzheimer's disease, in which the main character changed from a bright, energetic woman to a slobbering, incoherent mess. My husband and I watched an episode of The Sopranos, the one with Tony at death's door and a plate-sized hole in his stomach, life support clicking away while his family watches helplessly. This led to Googling "coma, memories" and reading about people's experiences with that. To top it off, I hopped into the tub with my Sun magazine and came across a moving essay about a girl in upside-down traction about to have spinal surgery.

I went to sleep with an appreciation of my moving legs, my overweight but healthy body, and my (so far) sound mind. My ability to see, hear, and walk without pain. My freedom. Whenever I'm in that state I promise to appreciate those blessings always, and on one level I do. But it's never too long before the dissatisfactions creep back, demanding equal time. This is the see saw, the yin and yang, dark and light. It's always in flux, and by now I know that the wheel will turn. It doesn't make the hard parts painless, just a little less intense.

Buddhism says our suffering in this life is about attachment. Put another way, we can't deal with loss of control. If we are observant we know the impossibility of controlling others and the world around us. The closest and easiest thing we have any direct power over is ourselves. When we learn from birth that the problem is us – how we look, act and think – we buy into it to gain acceptance and the illusion of safety and security.

It is with this mind-set that we approach our unsocialized impulses and our uncooperative bodies. But how do we usually choose to do it? Certainly not through gentleness or love. We tend to go at ourselves like a drill sergeant in boot camp. We go at it with something akin to hatred and fear of our humanness, a terror of our limitations, of decay and death. This may well be a curse of consciousness, for as Ernest Becker asserts in The Denial of Death,

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Additionally, our culture holds little to look forward to for the aged and the marginal. You can see why so many of us don't want to go down without a fight.

The problem is, we are trained to fight ourselves instead of the system that dismisses, judges or minimizes us. Ideally the "system" would care for the humanity of its members by creating a container of rituals, myths, stories and vehicles from which we took comfort and meaning in the face of our eventual annihilation. That it doesn't adds yet another layer of terror we must push away in order to get on with life.

Becker, whose work expands on that of Kirkegaard, Freud and Otto Rank, says mankind's invention of civilization – a symbolic system - helps us transcend the dilemma of our mortality. He calls this our "heroism project" – engaging in something that we feel will outlast us. This gives us the feeling that life has purpose, meaning and significance.

Enter one of the great blessings of the second half of life. About this phase, Jung pointed out that

“At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning…. we can not live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

This means that the values and goals of our first thirty or forty years begin to chafe. They no longer feel meaningful or appropriate. Instead of focusing our efforts to live forever by accumulating - wealth, children, toys (all tasks of youth) - it eventually becomes our impulse and our task to give, in the form of wisdom, knowledge, and the little time we have left.

A friend who is facing a real possibility of future illness is struggling with a body and will that won't oblige her vision of health and fitness. This is doubly painful in light of other losses she has recently faced. She is angry for not having the control she hopes will minimize future suffering. I would never presume to tell her how to feel; her frustration is understandable. But I encourage her to minimize her current suffering with kindness and compassion for her mortal dilemma. By her own admission, she has not fully grieved her many losses. She would like to get herself and her life back on a track that feels and looks better to her - now. But spirit and psyche may be dragging their feet, implying that she needs to finish the work of this passage.

When the timing is right - timing that mocks our laughable human "schedules" – she might find comfort and progress in the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way – the antidote to the polarities our minds torture us with. As one psychotherapist put it, "I have found a middle way approach most useful when people swing between two unsatisfactory or unsustainable extremes . . . trust vs. distrust; optimism vs. pessimism; positivity vs. negativity; idealized happy self vs. depression; over-indulgence vs. self hatred; perfection vs. imperfection; total control vs. no control . . . "

I must constantly remind myself to walk this middle path. It's true, my "meno-pot" and double chin may belie the sex goddess inside, but she is there nonetheless, expressing her lust for the world in every encounter and intention. The life force may be shapeless, but she is eternal.

A Wish Unfiltered

My work of late is taking me to some interesting places. Specifically, to garbage dumpsters, full of intriguing refuse from businesses in the SODO district of Seattle. This is where manufacturing plants, the trucking and shipping industries, wholesalers of every stripe, seafood brokers, commercial bakeries, foundries and so much more form the backbone of the city. It's a bit overwhelming at times, with trucks and NOISE and odors and dust . . . but it gets quiet too, in the most unlikely places. The Georgetown area in particular is dotted with pockets of green and houses that date back to Seattle's earliest days. In the triangles formed by adjacent industrial office parks, you may find a sweet little espresso and sandwich café, or a soup stand, or a falafel wagon. In between towers of crushed automobiles and concrete blocks are buildings with no visible names or addresses. These are warehouses full of workers handling imported stone, artisans creating with metal and clay, or perhaps seamstresses assembling sportswear with customized logos.

Needless to say, the trash bins outside these places are filled with trade remnants. I've come across hundreds of malformed zippers, pieces of exquisitely polished marble, dozens of long purple eggplants unfit for sale, slightly wilted but still beautiful flowers. I get to meet the people who work in these blue collar environments too, and I could be projecting, but mostly they seem more engaged than office workers – maybe because they are more active, using both body and mind.

At a commercial bakery the owner packed me a free box of warm donuts, glaze still dripping, right from the assembly line, which I passed along to a road crew down the street after being tempted to eat more than one. I made the rounds on Perimeter Road, along the eastern edge of Boeing Field, where airplane hangars for the wealthy and the little King County Airport provided yet another show I had never seen before.

It was here that a new, clean thought occurred to me while I was talking to the owner of a flight school about his recycling. Suddenly came the idea that I could learn to fly a small plane. It seemed interesting, and doable. Slightly stunned, I realized it had never before crossed my mind - or if it did, it was shot down in milliseconds by visions of malfunctioning controls. Just like thoughts of sailing on the open ocean invoked my reflexive terror of being lost at sea.

It was the first time in long memory that my psyche delivered a wish unfiltered. There was no split second debate, no voice in my head steering me away from doing something as unfamiliar and potentially risky as flying a plane. No aversion whatsoever to a new and wild idea.

It seems that my work among the dumpsters is serving as an education I never got – one in which certain professions were off the radar because white collar work promised a more suitable life, or held more cache for my status conscious middle-class peers. I may never end up employed in the freight yards or airplane hangars of South Seattle, but my eyes are open now to more possibilities than I knew existed. Flying – or trusting that I can learn how – is suddenly a symbolic and appealing option.