Does This Mind Make Me Look Old?

Rambling reflections from an invisible ageing woman

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My daughter, her teenage son, and his girlfriend are having lunch. They laugh, joke, and chat as they eat, sitting casually around the dining table. There is easily room for a fifth chair, but something in me just broke.

It is Saturday morning and we have come together for this impromptu lunch. A middle-eastern feast of flatbread and felafels, hummus, and fatoush salad.

I help myself to a delicious wrap, and survey the scene, but in a strange moment of instant and uncontrollable anxiety, I bypass the dining table and sit on a couch across the room to eat alone. I feel strangely at ease sitting there, knowing I do not have to understand the non-conversational conversing that drifts across the room from the table.

My Gen X daughter, having lived among the Ys and Zs for a few years now, has mastered the language, rhythm patterns, and content of these odd communications. To me, it’s unintelligible, which the younger ones enjoy pointing out could be because of hearing loss, or early onset dementia.

The jibes are meant to be funny but I am well aware of the first, and the second is not impossible. And it grates. I admit I’ve done some weird crap lately, like going out to get one thing I needed and coming…