THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE by Betty Friedan

“There was an increasing obsession with the problem of age and how to avoid it personally, through diet, exercise, chemical formulas, plastic surgery, moisturizing creams, psychological defences, and outright denial– as early and as long as possible”.

Nobody prepared me to become a mother. Therefore nobody prepared me to become OLD!!! OK, just my husband’s friend, since high school, is allowed to call me “the old one”!!!

My examples of old age were both of my grandmothers having white, wrinkled skin (they were protecting themselves from the sun, while working the field, with scarves and thick tights) but in my mind, they were lovely. My aunts, some of them sophisticated enough to smoke and drink (my mother was vehemently against it), and others were mindful with the food they were eating and how much they moved.

My mother, charming in her youth, she called herself old when she was forty years old. So, as a good daughter, I started calling myself old, even younger than forty years old!!!

That is why I choose to read Betty Friedan so I can understand a valid point of view about getting old.
“The fountain of age” is a very thick book that contains lots of studies’results, conclusions from specialized Institutes and interviews with specialists in aging..

“The more we deny our own age in order to pass as young, the more we give credence to that dread aura of age.”

Betty Friedan’s conclusion is one that I find a perfect one for me.

“It is time to look at age on its own terms, …breaking through the definition of age solely as deterioration or decline from youth.
The problem is, first of all, how to break through the cocoon of our illusory youth and risk a new stage in life, where there are no prescribed role models to follow, no guide posts, no rigid rules or visible rewards, to step out into the true existential unknown of these new years of life now open to us, and to find our own terms for living it.”

But, at the end of the day, we are different.
So, listening to my wise husband, it is better each of us to choose his/her own path to aging.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1994