Cheesy Chicken Parmigiana Meatball Soup

What does it mean to be beautiful as a middle-aged woman today? Maybe a total redefining of beauty is the thing we need. We're all aging, and it's no secret that some of us handle it better than others, but the majority of attitudes are shifting.

“I Feel Bad About My Neck” is a brief and funny essay in the book of the same title by Nora Ephron. All of Ephron’s essays, scripts, some interviews, and some New Yorker pieces are also gathered in a collection called The Most of Nora Ephron, which is one of my treasured bedside table books that I turn to frequently. In this piece, Ephron notices herself and her friends trying every type of shirt collar and turtleneck sweater in order to hide their aging necks. She notices this and then concludes in her sharp, observant way that it’s a shared fate, part of life, and there’s nothing really to be done about it.

It just bothers me that this incredible woman—who was a reporter, a novelist, the screenwriter of 'When Harry Met Sally' among other classics, a director, and a producer—had anything to worry about regarding her neck. She wasn’t going to be filmed and judged and picked apart and criticized over it, because she wasn’t an actor and Twitter hadn’t been invented yet. But still, she worried enough to turn it into comedy, which is what brilliant comedic writers do, I guess, especially if they’re women.

Incidentally, everything I’ve read about aging, whether fiction or nonfiction, has been written by a woman. Perhaps I have missed the many essays written by men worried about their necks aging because I’m a woman looking to see what women I admire have to say on the subject, or maybe I’m correct that male writers don’t spend as much time thinking about their necks as female writers do. I just googled “men, writing, necks,” and the first thing that came up was, “Why are men so attracted to women’s necks?” This concluded my research.

Maybe—like my mother did, like Ephron did—turning fears about aging and mortality into contemplation and comedy is just one of those things women are better at. And perhaps this is not a burden but should be a point of pride. We get to bond with each other with gallows humor and honesty, a more constructive—even joyous—response to fears about middle life and its injustices than, say, buying a flashy sports car (unless that gives you joy). All the Restylane in the world won’t make 60 the new 30, so why not laugh about it? Maybe the through line here is, “Let’s all give up!”—a resigned but cheery call to inaction.

Do you know what the hardest job for a woman is? The list is longer than any given line at Starbucks, so I know it's not that easy to pick just one. But I do want to talk about getting older and the absurdity of all that it is.  If we embrace our grey hair and wrinkles, we are called haggard old ladies who have given up on life. But throw some color on our hair and embrace our youthful spirit, and we are told that we are trying too hard and to act our age! I'm not even sure what that means anymore.

Don't dress too conservatively because you'll be labeled frumpy and boring. But on the other hand, you can't be trendy or show too much skin or you may hear you are attention-seeking, and no one wants to see someone your age in THAT!

You can't be too thin or without being told to eat a cheeseburger, but heaven forbid you should rock your curves or you'll be told to go on a diet. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

But we Gen Xers are not your grandmothers from the 1950s. We have been redefining what it means to be a woman our entire lives. We are modern women with hair every color of the rainbow, tattoos, and attitudes that rival any teenager (we just smell better). We are aging with grace, and confidence while living our best lives. In my opinion, attitudes toward aging aren't just being redefined, they are being recreated. And it starts by giving society a whole lot of our middle fingers.