Here's The One About (Not) Aging

Thanks, in no particular order, to Halle Berry in the buff, Pedro Pascal being Pedro Pascal and me turning another year older

A few days ago while I was enjoying the first chills of the incoming Cape winter via a giant glass of red wine and a blustery sea view, wrapped up in my Romaria cardie (yes, spot the namedrop), Halle Berry was doing the same. She was enjoying the first rays of the incoming summer via a giant glass of white wine and a palmy fronded tropical view, wrapped up in, well, nothing. Naked, she was. Bless her. We’re basically twins, except for the naked balcony debut. And the Oscar.

So, you can imagine my forking great big ball of burning ire when someone commented on The Goddess That Is Miss Berry’s post: “Imagine being in your 50s, still posting nudes for attention in menopause when you should be chilling with your grandkids.” Urgh. Go ahead and roll your eyes before you continue reading. I know I did.

Here’s the thing, people – and I speak from some experience - never tell a woman in menopause what to do. Women In Menopause are reading this, smiling and nodding sagely, the rest of you are looking around nervously. Do not tell us what to do. Also: it’s coming. Also also: in our collective dreams we are all this smoking hot at 56.

When my thoroughly divine mom hit menopause – a mark in time that my family and I never let her forget – we all knew it. She was never a woman known to take anyone’s crap, but, good golly Miss Molly, did she amp that up to Grand Master level after 50. She retired, based on bad mood. She moved cities, based on bad mood. She took up gardening, based on bad mood. We all thought it was hilarious and endearing – I honestly don’t know how she didn’t want to murder the lot of us! For an entire decade, we blamed everything, as a family, collectively on menopause. Whenever any of us did something, the rest of us would shriek: “menopause” and laugh hysterically. We were absolutely painful. That’s what you get from having teens and twenty-something-year-olds around when you’re hitting your 50s.

And where do I find myself? In the exact same position. Do I know anything more about menopause know that I did back then? Yeahhhh, very little. Will my own punks be as brutal as we were with my mother? Knowing, my genetic pool, definitely! So, here I am with Halle Berry and all I know is that you can definitely still want to post nudes in menopause and drink wine and not necessarily have grandkids yet. Nor give a flying continental F about anyone else.

Something that you won’t know until you are Actually Aging is that aging itself falls into two categories. These are: “I am not going to age and don’t want to talk about it” or “I am happy to age but ALSO don’t want to talk about it”. Which dovetails ever so nicely with menopause, which is code for “I am going to do whatever the hell I feel like.”

In the one camp you have Madonna forcing back the hands of time and in the other, you have Jamie Lee Curtis refusing any Hollywood malarkey. Most of us sit somewhere in the middle – not quite as glazed and porcelain-like as Madonna, nor as riotously outspoken as Jamie Lee. We are, I am hoping, with Halle Berry - soaking up the sun and the wine, quite possibly in the nick.

There should be no hard and fast rules. And yet, here we are! Definitely keeping a checklist of rules in our own back pockets about how we should look and who we should be by now - spiritually, emotionally, financially. Those of you who follow my Insta, know that my (very) current obsessions involve Daisy Jones & The Six (just watch it - Amazon Prime) and Pedro Pascal. So, Pedro - the daddy of the Internet - is Esquire’s latest cover star.

He had this to say: “I had a moment of thinking, ‘you’re in your forties and you don’t own a home? Grow up’. But I’m relinquishing expectations around what it is to be middle-aged and what it means to be fully grown up.”

Maybe I just want to be Pedro? He’s 48. Turns out his birthday is just 22 days before mine. He also said, when asked about being a daddy - the Internet version, not an actual daddy - that ‘daddy is a state of mind’. Which offers both the best answer on The Internet to anything and also the answer to Halle Berry’s critics, anti-aging trolls, your mother-in-law and probably menopause too: aging is a state of mind. All credit to us then!

PS My birthday is April 24. Don’t forget now.

PPS More Pedro - for reference purposes IYKYK