Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Generational Gap part 2

Unlike my sister, I don’t have kids, so I don’t have any experiences about people thinking I’m a grandmother. Though the other day I stopped by where one of our cousins works, but she wasn’t there. When one of her co-workers asked if she could help me I informed her I was still thinking then I asked after my cousin.

She informed me said cousin had gotten off early that day, then asked me if I was my cousin’s mother. I mean, dang, I am older than her. I am in fact older than all but one of my cousins, however, I’m not that much older than the one in question.

Considering I have cousins who were in grade school when I finally got married at the age of twenty-four, I can see where I could be mistaken for their mother, but the cousin in question isn’t that much younger than me.

But I figure the woman needed her eyes examined, since more often people don’t believe me when I tell them my age.

Like an incidence, admittedly a few years ago where I had arrived at church for a dinner just for the women, which hadn’t started yet, and a bunch of the women not on the committee to set it up were just sitting around visiting.

Most of these women were older, and somehow the topic turned to the joys of menopause. Then the daughter of another cousin of mine entered. At the time she was a newlywed, and one of the ladies looked from my cousin’s daughter to me then said, “This isn’t something you have to worry about, this is something your mothers are going through right now.”

I was dumbfounded. I mean I’ve never been able to spout off any witty comebacks on the spot, but this time I didn’t know what should I tell the lady. Should I say that my cousin whose daughter had just entered was younger than me? Or that said cousin’s daughter was not quite seven months old on my wedding day? Let alone that my doctor had informed me I had officially entered para-menopause earlier that very day.

And yes, the lady who made that comment knew the young lady was related to me. I just couldn’t figure out how she thought the granddaughter of my aunt, who was also present that day, was of the same generation as me.

Of course, not looking our age is something my twin and I have always dealt with, much to the annoyance of our older sister.

Once, when we were teenagers, our sister and our mother had been downtown shopping when they ran into someone our mother knew from work, and that someone asked our mother if our sister was her sister. Way back then our sister thought it was funny while our mother fumed.

The tables got turned a few decades later when said sister was helping me run some errands and we ran into an old acquaintance of hers. I stood there waiting as these two caught up on old times. When the woman finally took note of my presence, she asked my sister if I was her daughter!

Man was my sister mad. But I couldn’t stop laughing. She’s only sixteen months older than Konnie and I.

And since my husband died I’ve received tons of comments on how sad it is to be such a young widow, and few of those have even said something along the lines of how it wouldn’t be so bad if I were over fifty. Such a statement would make better sense if they’d said over sixty or over seventy, because I am a young widow, just not that young. :)

And I can certainly come up with a whole lot more stories where people thought I was younger, sometimes way younger, than I really am. So far, just my cousin’s co-worker has considered me older than I am, so I’m guessing she isn’t a good judge of age. What do you think?

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