The Critical Mom's Guide to Aging

"I'm getting younger every day."  This is my preferred answer to friends who ask me how I deal with birthdays.  And don't I get depressed?  I say "consider the alternative," or I answer the question of how to deal with a particular round number, one of the decades, by saying  that I use the following methods:

(1) Denial

(2) Denial

(3) Denial

Also I go to ballet class twice a week, plus tap dance, plus I walk my daughter home from school, plus I run up and down the stairs, and I am in better shape than most of the mothers I see, especially the one who lost an amazing amount of weight and, when I admiringly asked her how, told me that she had eaten nothing but one roll a day for months on end.  For German readers, that's one "normale Brötchen" per day.  It's not hard to be in better shape than someone like that, until one day your back hurts and your foot feels sore and there's this strange ganglion on your ankle, which did finally go back down again.  And so you go to the doctor, who warms your back with some electric gadget that looks like the sort of cure you'd find in the typical European spa, the kind where you'd also find water therapy (standing naked while being hosed down by a fat lady in a uniform, first with hot salty water and then with freezing salty water.)  The warming gadget--I was told it would be good for my kidneys and do me good--absolutely worked.  There's still a kink or two in my back but I did make it through ballet class, and had enough energy to come home and make dinner for my husband and oldest son, and to continue discussing the unpleasant all-day school situation into which my youngest has been thrust.   She came home crying that she had to do six pages of math homework.  I remember never doing my math homework, finally being put into a room to drill multiplication tables, and eventually being rewarded with Mary Poppins, the movie, when I finally achieved a passing grade in Math.  I still count on my fingers, I don't balance my checkbook, but I do read my bank statement, and I think my daughter will get more out of the Betsy-Tacy books than she will ever get out of Math.

Because I'm getting younger every day.