Between 18 and 50

A text message informing me that a former colleague had passed on reminded me of how old I was. A friend and I had mused about the number of wakes we had gone to in the past few years and we concluded that it was a sign of middle age. We know more old people now and we have accepted that not everyone gets to live to be over a hundred years old.

Just a few days before I got the text message, I was wondering about the proper thing to do with the names and numbers of people who had passed on that were still in my cellphone directory. I thought about erasing them but could not. It must be a form of sentimentality.

What rites do modern Filipinos have to mark the coming of middle age? For some boys, getting circumcised during the summer marks the passage from childhood to adolescence. For some families, the occasion of a girl turning eighteen means a formal debut or a big party to celebrate her official adulthood.

There is no celebration for what comes between eighteen and fifty. Some are torn between celebrating it and denying that the time has arrived. In fact, I know a few people who'd rather forget about it. That there are a lot of magazine articles that say that "forty is the new thirty" makes it worse. What does that mean? That it is not okay to act one's age?

I still have a few years to go before my fortieth birthday. The sensible part of me is excited and hopeful that it would mean that I would be wiser by then. The vain part, the part that ran to the salon to get my hair dyed the first time a strand of gray hair appeared on my head, is uneasy. I have realized that maintaining colored hair requires rituals worthy of an ancient priestess and is not suitable for people who liked combing their hair only once a day. I've been dealing with occasional gray hairs by getting rid of them but I'm not sure if this strategy will work at forty. I'm afraid that I will need a major lifestyle change involving more fussing with my hair and more salon expenses in order to look presentable at forty, assuming that I'd still care how I would look by then.

 More than the appearance of gray hair, I think that what marks middle age is a change in outlook and the way one deals with other people. In my early thirties, I learned to be more vocal about what I wanted and spoke out more forcefully when I felt I had to.

Unfortunately, that meant snapping at people I normally would not talk to that way (saying "Don't tell me how to do my job!" to an older relative). Fortunately, it also meant learning not to put up with situations I would have endured in my twenties (abusive cab drivers, needy clients, and the like). Except for the slow metabolism that results in dessert translating into tighter clothes the next day, I like myself better now.

"I didn't like myself in my thirties. Things started getting better in my forties," a friend recounted. She's in her fifties now, a glamorous and sophisticated grandmother. I would probably need an in-house stylist and make-up artist to look like her.

 Her statement just proves that there is no specific age to learn to like one's self. Maybe at any age, there will be days when we like ourselves and days when we do not. Maybe the point is to live in the now and to find something to like about ourselves every day. For today, I'm just happy that I'm able to notice the butterflies that flit from the flowering trees growing on the sidewalk to the vehicles stuck in Monday rush hour traffic in Manila.

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