A former friend refused to reveal her age. We’d often talk about intimate subjects—affairs to salaries—but AGE was strictly off limits. A fashion and beauty writer and editor, I think she was concerned that potential employers wouldn’t hire her if they thought she was “too old.”
Perhaps they wouldn’t have. But that was then. This is now. Fab Over Fifty women are finally coming out of the closet! Who cares what the calendar says? 48? 52? 57? 63? 85? It’s never been cooler to turn fifty.
I’m not sure how Heidi (above, right, with mom Liv) from Anchorage feels about her state’s former Governor, but I do know how she feels as she’s about to turn FOF. “I turn fifty next August, the same summer my youngest son graduates from high school and my oldest from college. When they were two and five, I became a single mom and started law school. Three years later, I passed the bar exam and finished a master’s degree in theology I had started in my twenties.
“When my sons were in elementary school, I tried to be a nurturing, hands-on, cookie-baking, field-trip attending mom, a primary provider and a law firm associate. But the relational costs were too high, so I left the firm to help start a program that provided legal services to those who couldn’t afford them.
“As my oldest son entered his teenage years, I balanced my desires as a mom, professional, and provider by becoming a career law clerk in federal court. Now that my sons are graduating and I am facing fifty full on, I wonder how I will reinvent myself. I am grateful for all that has been and am excited about all that is yet to come.”
Heidi in the mountains...no fairy tale
Heidi also manages to look beautiful, hike and have a great relationship with her 72-year old FOF mom, Liv, who just finished her second mini-triathlon.
I wonder if my former friend feels as good about herself as Heidi and Liv. Good enough to say:
What’s age got to do with it?
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I didn’t know much about playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died in 2006, at 55, except that she was single; funny; won a Pulitzer Prize for her play, “The Sisters Rosensweig;” had a great many creative and well-known friends; gave birth to a baby daughter, but never revealed the father, and was the sister of Bruce Wasserstein, a genius (if not pompous) billionaire investment banker, who died a few years after Wendy.
Now a new biography, “Wendy and The Lost Boys. The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein,” by Julie Salamon, gives us a (sometimes) painful look into her background. Her mother, Lola, was a piece of work. When she was walking down the street once with a young Wendy, she pointed to the crowd and said, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’” After her husband died, at 29, Lola married his brother, but neglected to tell her second set of kids, Wendy included. Wendy learned the facts from a sister.
The antithesis of her professional life, Wendy’s personal life was unsatisfying, a conflict Wendy apparently never resolved.
Wendy’s daughter, now 12, lost her mother when she was seven and her uncle, Bruce, when she was around 10, the two people she loved most in the world. I trust the young girl is showered with love by her mother’s close friends, who must miss her every single day.