75 Hotter: An Update

Or, I changed my life and changed nothing at all

A couple of months ago I started my version of 75 Hotter. I did this the way most people do these things, ie. in an ineffectual frenzy driven by some sort of innate dissatisfaction with the world and cowed by the fear there is nothing I can do to fix it.

Anyway, I don’t know if it has been 75 days since then, but it feels like it has? I’ve been fairly consistent, though when we were in France I ate far more croissants than chickpeas. I also drank a lot of wine in France because, you know, France. Have you ever had a glass of cold white wine in France while also eating French olives and French potato chips in France?

and the cheese!

I’m not sure exactly what I expected when I started 75 Hotter. I mean, sure I do. I expected nothing. I expected maybe I would be a bit more tuned in to my life, maybe a bit more intentional about certain things. And that is true, I have done that, and painted my nails a few times to boot. I will keep wearing my little pedometer because I like having something to check that isn’t my phone and I like the reminder to move a bit more than I might otherwise, even if it is just pacing around my room before bed. I’ll keep drinking water and eating greens and beans though I was doing those things anyway. We want radical change, but the truth is pretty much no one ever radically changes. A dear friend of mine once met a guy in a hotel and he asked her to move to France with him and SHE DID, and that is pretty much the only person I know who radically changed their life (it didn’t work out with that guy, but my friend does still live in France, because again: France).

As for me, my body has changed not at all. I feel no stronger, look no slimmer. What I have realized about being 41 is that things will either happen violently or not at all. In other words, no new cream will make me look younger; surgery or injectables might, but I’d lose something along the way (money, time, a sense of self and also of superiority) and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Walking around the block a few more times won’t vanquish the evidence of the two babies I made and carried and nursed and held; I could starve myself and start lifting very heavy things but I don’t want to abdicate my pleasure. And besides, I don’t really want my body to forget the babies it made, though I suppose I wouldn’t mind if it briefly looked as though it had forgotten them. A short bout of aesthetic amnesia! I just don’t want this enough to actually do anything about it, it would seem.

Mostly I just want to feel better. Or—let’s be specific. Better is elusive, unclear, unreachable. Better could always be better! What I really want to feel different. I want to surprise myself. I want to become unrecognizable.

One thing that has shocked me about having children is how they learn: by degrees, and then all at once. I think about how Mira figured out how to swim, clinging to the edge of the pool one day then throwing herself into its depths the next. Suddenly she was a kid who could swim! One day she picked up a book and was a kid who could read! There is work happening below the surface, yes, but it looks effortless, most of the time. It looks simply like life. My daughters are all potential. They will wake tomorrow in bodies that look nothing like the ones I nuzzled and cradled and bandaged six months ago. Whereas I will wake exactly the same, over and over until I get weaker and older and then my hair falls out and I die. (If I’m lucky!)

My kids will surprise me a thousand times over. I have lost that power. I suppose that’s one of the reasons people have affairs in midlife; the desire to surprise someone new. To be surprised by how much you can still surprise someone. To surprise yourself! And that is, of course, the false promise of self-improvement. Not that you might become better but that you might become. The decadent potential in the gap between the you you are and the you you might be. The heady, teeming, delicious moment before you kiss someone new. Before you jump.

The terrifying thing about midlife, for me, is the crystallization. Men don’t buy tiny red sports cars because they want tiny red sports cars. They buy them because they want to believe something can change. That they can still change, despite all evidence to the contrary. But I can’t afford a tiny red sports car, nor can I afford the emotional tangle of an affair (so messy!). I don’t even have time to have a midlife crisis! I have two young kids and unruly hydrangea bushes. (There must be far fewer midlife crises these days, what with all of us having kids in our 40s while also managing aging parents and trying to navigate the fall of democracy? Think of how many people would just flat out die simply because we wanted to get really into tae bo??)

So what is left for me, then?

Maybe I’ll learn how to watercolour. Maybe I’ll buy a new sweater? All the big decisions have been made, and here I am. I am very grateful, and also very bewildered. What is left to do? Or rather—what might I do, yet?

Self Soothing

Highly recommend a slutty anklet for summer; The Wedding People; maybe what I’m really talking about is the portal, so read AHP on the portal; new HAIM album; The Gilded Age, which two years ago I thought was boring and now all I want is to be soothed and pet by a show that can wring an entire season’s worth of drama out of the question, “At which opera house shall we take a box?”