A couple of weeks ago, I took my eldest son and my daughter who is my youngest child to lunch (I call them my Alpha and my Omega). We went to a restaurant I had never been to before that is known for its nightly shows and bands. When I asked our waiter what show he would recommend, he looked at me and without a stutter he said, “Oh, definitely Throwback Thursday. My mom loves that show.” Ouch.
Now, he was right. I am definitely old enough to be his mom. And I love 80s/90s music, because that’s the music I was brought up on, but ugh, I didn’t want him to notice that fact. I didn’t want him to look at me and think “Throwback.”
I think that I’m at that awkward stage of my Second Half of Adulting. It’s similar to the one I went through in my First Half of Adulting, when I was just a preteen. That first awkward stage involved being stuck between being a kid and being a young adult. The big dilemma at that stage was, “Do I still want to play with my toys or do I want to kiss boys?” The second awkward stage is coming to the acceptance that the stuff that I like is starting to be considered a little “outdated”, but not old enough to be considered “retro and cool.” The second awkward stage is the awakening to the fact that I’m not necessarily part of the mover/shaker crowd anymore. The marketers and the trend watchers are more interested in what my kids are buying and doing than in me anymore. And there’s a conflict because I’m not sure I want to move out of the First Half of Adulting. I still have two kids at home and unfortunately, retirement seems quite far away, but I’m starting to not fit in with the First Halfers anymore either.
It’s subtle changes you notice when you are moving out of your First Half of Adulting. It’s like when you see the Barbie you played with as a kid, now in the window of an antiques store, or you start realizing that you don’t really know who 85% of the people on the cover of the gossip magazines are anymore. The frequency of being called “Ma’am” goes up a notch. Last year I had a part-time job where I shared a cubicle area with a couple of millennial women. We were talking about weekend plans and I said that my husband and I were going to Hall and Oates. My coworker said, “Oh cool, is that an island?”
The Second Half of Adulting is still new to me. So, it’s hard to “own it” with confidence. I know that my husband and I could not pull off Hipster with any kind of grace. Tattoos, nose piercings, pink streaked hair, woolly beards and beanies aren’t part of our middle aged comfort zone. But at the same token, I’m not ready to shop for retirement communities yet, either. It’s funny how life cycles around. I never dreamed I’d have to go through another “awkward stage” but I guess these are the stages in life that you must go through to figure out what you really want next. You get so uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, that you finally accept your new role, your new place in society with confidence. You’re the “record player” now because you’re cool again. And you never stopped being a record player, it’s just that you’ve stopped apologizing for being a record player and you’ve stopped trying to turn into Spotify. With your new self confidence and self worth, people remember that you’ve always been pretty amazing and that that you still have an important role to play, it’s just shifted a little. And maybe that’s not so bad.