4 - Sunday, February 7, 1988 - North Shore News

I HAVE a wife who is about
to Turn Forty.

She'll kill me, of course, when
she finds out I have written a
bloody column about it!

It's not that she’s asnamed of
Turning Forty, or that she
begrudges me a good chuckle at
her expense.

It's just that she’s a bit touchy
about being humored lately.

“Don't patronize me,”' she
growled.

The idea is — she told me
repeatedly, months ago -— to act as
though everything is very normal.

Nothing major is happening to
her. She’s not going into meno-
pause or anything. She’s still viable
as a reproduction unit for proba-
bly another decade.

So, it’s not that. Her career, as
it happens, goes weli, Golden op-
portunities lie pulsating at her feet.

So it’s not that cither.

On the home front, the kids’
teeth are under control, school is
fine, some of the furniture mat-
ches, for the moment the relatives
are all | Dehaving, even the old man.
So.

"Honey-Buns, it would seem, has
no real ordeal happening in her
life; compared. with what the rest
of the world has to deal with. She

is loved and feared. What more
/ can a woman ask for?

She every still gets whistles.

But this 40 business has got her
rattled.

Is it because the last decade
slipped by so quickly? Faster than
the one: before, which seemed to
take forever..; —

Is it because, until now, she Has
been screaming along life’s high-
way.in full gear, across a vast,
seemingly endless plane and sud-.
denly, over the distant horizon the
dim outline of the Mountain of

® strictly personal ¢

Personal Doom looms?

Mortality! Aha. Yes, | can tell
by that look in her eyes that she’s
been thinking all those profound
things that you find yourself think-
ing around 46.

She insisted, as I say, that ever-
thing be normal — but it ain't! She
knows a Rubicon when she sees
one. She knows she is about to be
dragged by time across the bound-
ary separating youth from non-
youth, yes, into post-youthfulness
itself.

I remember vividly when |
Turned Forty, seven years
ago. I was utterly convinced
I was having a major, major,
major mide wife c crisis.’

At 40, it's s true, Flower- “Lips,
you aren't a kid any more.

On the bright side, the urge to
be a cheerleader should have
worked its way through your
system by now, although I trust
the urge to rock n’roll will never
wane.

I remember vividly when ]
Turned Forty, seven years ago. |
was utterly convinced I was having
a major, major, major mid-life
crisis. You know how these things

go. The more you imagine you are, -

the more you are.

Sweetness-Light was very patient
and supporiive during this dismally
neurotic stage of my life, which.
endéd with me accepting the fact
that I was going to have to go
through a phase of being mature.
There was no. way around it any
longer.

So I put my shoulder to the
Great Plow of Domestic Respon-
sibility and toiled mightily up the
mortgaged slopes under the lash of
taxation and inflation and interest

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And at my side (this is the part
where J get choked up) there she
was, trudging stoically along in
harness too, my blue-eyed
Baboshka-Pic!

As we reach the end of this
heroic struggling phase of our
lives, we brush the sweat and
blood from our brows. We look up
and see the cagles. Stirring music!

I turn to her. She turns to me.

And wham, (nasty plot twist!)
she ... Turns Forty!

Life, ch! It’s not fair, Angel-
Earlobes. I know.

What can I tell her to get her
through?

Well, | can say not to worry. the
peak age for an astronaut is 4%.
That helped me get through. Fut
that's not really her cuppa.

I’d say you're an ageless biolog-
ical wonder, but she’d squash me
like a bug for intellectual
fraudulence.

So I'll have to resort to appear-
ing to be bleakly truthful.

Vil tell her that life is cruel and
about to become crucller. [il tell
her that the first 40 were the
easiest. It’s all downhill from here.
She thinks she's winded and weary
and covered with stigmata now?
Ho ho! Her suffering has just
begun. Poor ex-young thing.

That way, she won’t have any
exaggerated expectations. And
when it turns out that life has in
fact just begun, and the best has
just started to come, and she’s ac-
tually metamorphosing into near-

_ goddesshood, and that nubility is

forever, it will all come as a sur-
prise!

Have a good cry, Happiness-
Bundle. Youth was fun wasn’t it?
Ah well, we'll love you, anyway,
and we’ll try to be more respectful.

Patronizing? Me? I wouldn’t
dare, ©

Dr. Mark Cousins

Naturopathic Physician

#405-1124 Lonsdale Ave.
Specializing #1, Backs

984-0040 » 984-8863

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