Hello, my name is Bonnie and I’m old.

Age always has been a relative thing. Ten is young to twelve, fifteen is ridiculous to twenty, the thirty-somethings are just babies to forty-somethings and my fifty-ISH is a cakewalk to the octogenarian set. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it. And some days, I just feel kind of like a T-Rex: my skin is scaly, I can’t reach all my itches and I’m gonna be extinct – soon.

Well, not really. But, sort of. The tagline of my blog is The Journey of a Century because of my declaration at age fifty that I was only “halfway there”. But like Bon Jovi’s subsequent lyric, some days more than others I am acutely aware that I am “livin’ on a prayer.”

Let’s talk about my dinosaur skin to start. I seem to be itchy all the time now. I remember In My Youth being puzzled about television commercials featuring senior citizens finding great relief by using a certain anti-itching cream. I understand what that’s all about now. And while many trips to the dermatologist seems to be paying off some for my rosacea (an over-fifty affliction with no rhyme or reason), I have come to the realization that no amount of miracle serum is going to get my face back to its previous Photoshop evenness of coloring. And conversely, no amount of aging seems to be able to put any distance between me and “adult acne”. Let’s not forget to mention undereye circles and (gasp!) WRINKLES. My first trip to the bathroom of the day can be quite unnerving.

Well, that’s not true. The FIRST visit to the bathroom of each day is usually done under cover of night because my over-fifty bladder rarely allows me an unbroken night of slumber. Some nights, I need to stumble there more than once and it doesn’t seem to matter how little liquid I consumed the night before. The really weird thing about going to the bathroom when you are over the proverbial hill: if you sit on the toilet long enough, you can pee twice. And by long enough, I mean a minute.

There are other indications that I’m not the spry bunny I once was: my knees refuse to help me up off the floor – I need the help of a nearby counter to pull me up. Or I just go into a reverse down dog to get back on my feet. Either way, I am thankful for strong arms. And my neck – I am resigned to it never working the way it used to, back when I could shoulder check and not give myself a headache and/or a neck cramp.

But I’m not Complaining. I’m just…Noticing. Out loud.

Maybe what I really want is for someone to tell me that this is all normal(ish), that I’m hitting all the benchmarks at the appropriate times, that I’m above the fiftieth percentile. Because it’s alarming to still feel young in my heart and have the rest of my body mutiny in such a way that tells me otherwise. Or to look at old(ish) photos of myself and then be confused when I look in the mirror and think: umm, that’s not what I remember.

In the spirit of camaraderie, or maybe commiseration, I recently took to the Interwebs to find out how other fifty-somethings were dealing with This Whole Thing. Plug in the hashtags OverFifty or FiftyPlus or SexyAndSilver and you get all the same thing: a bunch of unreasonably good-looking people for their age telling you that It’s All Good, the getting older thing.

Well, I mean really, who’s gonna get anywhere on Instagram advertising bad knees and double chins?

The thing is though…I actually like getting older. Except for the whole imminent death thing, accruing miles (or kilometers) on the human odometer does have its perks. I’m more mellow now, even when I look in the mirror or step on the scale, than I was in my thirties and forties, because like an (actually dying) friend of Anne Lamott once quipped when Anne was worried that a certain dress made her look fat: Honey, you just don’t have that kind of time. I can answer more questions on Jeopardy now- maybe because I’ve lived through more categories. I have more time to go for long walks and write stories and cook healthy-ish meals. I break a lot more rules in writing than I did in English class and I just don’t care anymore. Ish.

I can’t change the marching on of time, so I might as well learn to like the getting older part. The itches – well, maybe I need to get some of that special lotion reserved for the SexySilverSet. Or a backscratcher. I’ll probably get a discount. I’ll let you know how it goes.