Getting Older

Getting older does not happen over night, there are steps in our lives, levels of living, we have as we get older. We do not notice, but even the quality of living changes as our ages do. There is the time of being young and never worrying about your complexion or your hair because you're a child and life make s you beautiful no matter what the mirror says. Children are full of life and energy and it shows in their eyes.

The next phase, is when you are an teenager. You are young and beautiful but only just beginning to discover who you are. You worry about your hair and complexion but you still are beautiful because of the wonder of it all which is in the eyes.

There comes the time after college, when you are an adult. You work and live, still beautiful but in a more 'grown up' way. You have experience and have developed some wisdom. The mirror may show a few lines from time to time but, your eyes are still clear and your inner beauty shows with your confidence you share.

But it is later, as you reach the middle years, you begin to see the most difference of your life. And one morning, it is harder to get out of bed. It is harder to sit down. All things in general are not moving as they did only yesterday, but what is time anyway? The doctor says you have a chronic disease. It will progress and worsen. First, it is the aches and pains, then the arthritis carries, eventually into the organs. The liver, kidneys and heart. They hope to slow it down but there is no cure. The injections and chemo are always best. You realizes after two years of chemo, it is just too hard so she sticks herself every week with an injection. This injection will lower her immune system enabling the slower growth of the arthritis. There are side effects there also, but she tries to ignore that, this is her only other outlet.

So, you get up in the morning, in pain as usual though you try to forget it. You look in the same mirror you have had all your life. There is a gray haired woman, who is too young for the lines on her face. And her eyes have not the color they once had. Though she is not elderly, she has the feeling of it now. She thinks of this sometimes when she sees the mirror.

Then her husband comes in and tells her how she looks like the same beautiful girl with the long hair and hippie clothes he has loved all his life. She forgets the mirror and goes back to her life she has with her family. Her mood changes, only because someone remembered who she really was inside. It is important to her. That someone besides her remembers her for everything she has been and is now.

None of us know what tomorrow brings, but I can always count on my husband to help me through.

Learn more about this author, maddie rose.
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