I have a question pursuant to how I’m going to spend the next decade: how the hell old are people in their forties?
Last night, my boyfriend and I hunkered down and watched a bunch of newish TV1. We started with two episodes of The Chair Company2, where Tim Robinson plays Ron Trosper, the graying father of two full adults, basically. His son is is being scouted by colleges for basketball (fine), but his daughter is engaged and everyone’s excited about it, not unsettled at the idea of a child bride. The character might well be older than Robinson is! But I googled “Tim Robinson age,” “Lake Bell age,” “actress chair company daughter age” and read the information (44, 46, 23) aloud as we watched, and the plausibility of it was a new experience3.
Afterwards, we tried Down Cemetery Road, where IRL 43-year-old Ruth Wilson plays Sarah Trafford, a plot-relevantly childless woman whose husband casually thinks babies are part of a future they’re planning on eventually, a conversation she appears to have been ably avoiding for years. The character might very well be younger than Wilson is. Still, the show seems to have a child’s view of the world. The worst of this is how juvenile it is in its worldbuilding and characterization4, but this perspective is text, too. Trafford explains that she cares about the 5-year-old girl at the center of the mystery not because she wishes she had a child like her (the way that the rude, unhelpful cops and you, probably, think), but because she relates to the kid.
Is that what your forties are? One minute you’re a 43-year-old girlchild who is, to those who know and love you, plausibly likely to become naturally pregnant at some indeterminate time in the unconsidered future, and the next you’re a 44-year-old father of the bride? It seems like it, actually.
Right now, I feel like a crone but also a teen again, like I’m going through an adolescence for being elderly. My body is constantly changing — in the last 3 months, my close up vision has started to go, my chin hairs went helpfully gray, my back asserted itself as a constant negotiation — and I think I’m only just starting to understand that I’m really, really never going to be any taller. Work has been definitional for a decade; now I’m unemployed, trying to start a new career and, for fun in the meantime, find my own voice again. I never really worried a ton about being cool in my demographically desirable years, but now I fear being uncool like the kid who made her mom drive twice around the high school so I wouldn’t be too late or too early to first period. Some of these concerns must be peri-menopause, but are all of them?
In the weeks leading up to my birthday, I started to have a strong, clear feeling: turning 40 wasn’t just a matter of linear time, but a tangible failure on my part. If I had been diligent and aware, I wouldn’t be turning 40 at all. More than that, if not for my violent inattention, a lot of things that happened in the last ten years or so wouldn’t have happened. Writing that thought out now and seeing how untrue it is doesn’t dull it’s power for me, like, at all.
I never really planned for this. In my 20s, I used to joke that I knew exactly what kind of woman I wanted to be in my 30s and in my 60s, and I never thought about those middle decades. I vaguely hoped to turn into Catherine Keener, somehow, but fundamentally had no interest in the years when I might have to be a somewhat serious person, not primarily an adorable one. Today that’s still true and really not so funny. I need all the models of life after 39 I can get.
Obviously Ron Trosper, being played by Tim Robinson, is driven by a core of deep immaturity and self-doubt. His characters are always childish, whether they’re using swears at the haunted house or exploring tunnels with their wife. But they also live in a world where the presumption is that they’ve grown up, even if everyone is a true weirdo. There’s no sense that life is unfair because it doesn’t cater to their less-developed instincts. Sometimes, I’m not totally sure I live in a world like that.
Being baby the way Sarah Trafford is, where maybe it’s actually okay and even sympathetic or noble to ignore that your shitty husband wants kids and you don’t, feels truly humiliating, though. Not that being an adult means having children (I notably do not), but it must mean recognizing you aren’t one.
Maybe the really mature thing to do would be to stop watching a show I don’t enjoy. Doesn’t seem likely!
Important update to yesterday’s newsletter: I actually wore the Croptuck out this morning, on my little walk.
This morning I put on my closest jeans and the same Uniqlo-shirt-as-jacket I wore two days ago (I’m gross! This is part of it!!). I paired them with this too-long T-shirt I bought off Razzle, or something. This is what the Croptuck was for, I realized, so I put it on.
This T-shirt says “Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers // A film by Les Blank,” and I saw it when a bunch of crew members wore it in Burden of Dreams, his documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. The rest of the sentence is “for keeping the girls away.”
The Croptuck TikTok hawkers say, “you can’t even feel it!” It’s not like it’s digging into my skin or anything, but as I walked around my neighborhood, I felt it with every step. “Crop. Tuck. Crop. Tuck,” I thought, as I tried to look like I was going somewhere, “I am wearing a dumb little band around my waist just to get my little steps in. Crop. Tuck. Crop. Tuck.”
When I got home I took it off and went to the coffee shop sloppy-shirted but carefree.
1 This is a fashion blog so: I wore sweatpants, they were orange, and, in a homage to the versatility we have inside of us, kept on the T-shirt I’d been wearing all day.
2 Hilarious — also, I saw the linked headline referenced on Seth Meyers, laughed, watched the episode, laughed really hard at one part, thought of the headline, read the article to see if it was the same moment, it was, laughed even more.
3 My boyfriend said it was impossible, and I pointed out that if we’d hooked up way back when we first met, freshman year of college, and I’d gotten pregnant, that kid would be 20 now. Neither of us really liked that.
4 The swashbuckling older woman PI (Emma Thompson) wears a leather jacket and has spiky gray hair while cheating on the simp husband (Adam Godfrey) who worships her; the secretive government agency responsible for all the bad stuff knows anything that happens immediately, but its hierarchical structure is simply “a tall man is mean to a short man”; there’s a businessman is so flat, evil, and oddly shoe-horned into scenes that he could have been played by a misplaced Snidely Whiplash standee. It’s kid stuff for old people.