This photo essay is the first of what we hope will be a regular posting on MidLifeBloggers: contributions from MidLifeBloggers who are visual artists.

The eye shadow was the first to go. Instead of making me look youthful and wide-eyed, it began to make me look tired and slightly clownish, like I’d lost a run-in with a tropical fish.

Yes, I am. Because I’m speaking…Yes, I am. At the session…
LifeBlogging Outside the Lines: When You’re not a Geek, a Political Wonk or a MommyBlogger.

The envelope came this week. To be honest, it came as a bit of a surprise. I really thought the mailman made a mistake…..till I saw my name on it. Wait a minute here, I’m not 50 yet. I haven’t wrapped my head around the fact yet…. that I’ll be 50 in September. WOW! It’s not that I don’t KNOW I’ll be 50 this year and in some ways I’ve been preparing for what I want to do for my birthday. But there is a difference between planning a getaway to a spa and a boozy filled weekend with the girls and shoving a “Hey yo, yeah you, you’re old” card in my face.

A friend of mine (who knows I am blogging about this) announced a couple of days ago that she had recently caught her husband having an affair with a work colleague.
He claimed it was just a ‘one night stand’.
She asked me what I thought.
Well, to be honest, I was sitting there thinking how much easier it would have been if President Obama had asked for my opinion on the world economic crisis.
I could have answered that question.

“My vagina is dying,” my friend told me on the phone yesterday.
“Come on!” I replied as I put down my tea and instantly started doing kegels.
“No, really. My vagina is literally wasting away. My doctor says I have vaginal atrophy.”
“No, shit!” I said as I pictured gravity having it’s way with my friend’s once taut pelvic muscles. “What’s it from?”
“No estrogen. Fucking menopause…sucks.”

In lieu of a new post today, I’m sending you all over to BlogHer to read Nordette’s post on Joni Mitchell as her midlife muse. I want you to read it, because I can’t readily …

There are occasions when I make my husband absolutely insane. Take Saturday night, for instance. He had spent the entire day playing with his latest gift to me, yet another new universal remote control, and he was almost giddy over it. He was convinced that this was the holy grail of remotes, the one that would finally do what all the others had only claimed they could – allow you to use a single gizmo to control oodles of equipment….So, now, remind me again. Why is it such a terrible crime that I won’t sit down and read up on every new gizmo that he drags home – especially knowing that in a few short months he is bound to tell me that it is now “obsolete” and needs to be replaced?

Dear Family…I am not adopting because it’s trendy. Did you decide to get pregnant and give birth to your children because it was trendy? No? Then maybe you can understand that level of trendiness, or lack thereof, was not part of the equation when I was deciding to adopt. I want to be a parent, and this is the way that is open and available to me at this time in my life. Let’s agree that I won’t accuse you of trying to imitate your favorite pregnant celebrity and you won’t accuse me of wanting to adopt because I’m following in the footsteps of Madonna or Angelina Jolie or anyone else. Okay?

My days are filled from morning to night, but never with just one thing. I am, in fact, constitutionally incapable of any kind of singular focus. My life has been lived, and what successes I’ve had, follow a shotgun methodology: I spray the woods and where the buckshot lands, I go gather the goods. I resist the sneers of those who call me dilettante and I insist my way is The Way. But secretly, as I said, I feel guilty. Now, here comes Ingrid E. Cummings telling me that not only do I have a place in the world, more people should be like me! In The Vigorous Mind, Cummings argues for “a return to a Renaissance perspective, when the ideal was to be well-rounded.” Her thesis is contained within the subtitle: “Cross-Train Your Brain to Break Through Mental, Emotional, and Professional Boundaries.”

In conclusion, this post doesn’t have any big point to it (do they ever?) except to use my small public forum to officially announce that as A Woman Of A Certain Age, I feel I have earned the right to say that though yes, God looks at the inside and though yes, I am eternally grateful to be healthy and happy and living in a democracy, the bald-faced truth of it all is that certain aspects of the aging process just… suck.

That is all. **bows deeply**