Last year, I joined my stepmother, her sisters, friends, nieces, my younger sister, and a beautiful circle of women for a spa weekend celebrating my stepmother’s 60th birthday.
There we were, Black women spanning several decades, laughing in robes, soaking up the sun by the pool, telling stories and celebrating a woman who had earned every one of her sixty years.
At some point, my younger sister, who is in her twenties, was talking about some of her friends and the choices they had made. Smoking. Hard living. The details escape me now.
But one thing stayed with me.
“They look 45,” she said.
I was 47.
I remember looking up and asking, “What does 45 look like?”
A few women nearby laughed and playfully scoffed. My sister quickly backpedaled.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
And I believed her.
Because that is the thing about ageism.
It rarely announces itself.
It shows up in casual
comments.
In jokes.
In compliments.
In the assumptions we make about what certain ages are supposed to look like.
And somewhere along the way, we have all absorbed the idea that looking older is evidence of decline rather than evidence of living.
As a gerontologist, I have spent years studying aging. Yet I remain fascinated by how effortlessly age slips into our vocabulary as a warning, an insult, or a punchline.
Not because people are cruel.
But because culture has trained us to think in those terms.
Which brings me back to the question I asked that day.
What does 45 look like?
Does it look like me?
Does it look like the women celebrating 60 beside me?
Does it look like a grandmother? A CEO? A woman rebuilding after divorce? A marathon runner? Someone with laugh lines? Someone with no wrinkles at all?
Maybe the better question is this:
Who decided there was a face attached to 45 in the first place?
Because age is not a costume.
And birthdays do not come with a standard issue appearance.
Forty-five does not have one face.
Sixty does not have one face.
Old does not have one face.
And perhaps the danger in saying someone “looks 45” isn’t that 45 is old.
It’s the assumption that there is something undesirable about looking exactly the age you are fortunate enough to become.
Ironically, the women gathered around that pool represented what I hope aging looks like.
Laughter.
Friendship.
Stories.
Wisdom.
Softness.
And the privilege of still being here.
Not one of us looked alike.
But every one of us looked alive.