I’m struggling to help my daughter, who has asked to borrow some clothes so she can dress up “like a 45-year old” for a play she’s doing.  Unfortunately for her I have no idea what “45-year olds” look like .  Personally  I live my non-working life in jeans.  Rebecca is still only 12 but is already as tall as me and has the same size feet.  She borrows my clothes pretty regularly – not the formal stuff, but certainly the  black V-necks and  the ankle boots;  I’ll have to wrestle my trenchcoat off her back if I ever want to wear it again.  So I should just have  drawled “honey – this is what 45 looks like” and told her to go dressed as she was, just adding a  harassed expression and perhaps some crow’s feet.

But that’s obviously not what they want.  I suspect they’re after the look that middle-aged women had when I was little.  In my memory* women then had hair that was styled and set once a week and wore headscarves to protect it in high winds.  They had sensible clothes in muted colours; perhaps a jaunty scarf at the neck.  They wore flat shoes and 40 denier American Tan tights.  Slacks were acceptable but not jeans.   They did NOT have tattoos.  When they got a bit older they wore fur-lined bootees in winter and hats like mushrooms with stalks coming out of the top, and generally looked like the three Great Aunts from Glossop in I Didn’t Know You Cared.

There are no women like that around any more, and I for one miss them.  I envy their domestic competence and their unshakeable self-confidence.  Which is not to say that I want to be like them.  Possibly it’s  the dread of damart that makes women of my generation fear getting old so much (and may explain their sales slogan – Think you know damart? Think again!)  When you pass 40, you are super-sensitive to how very OLD it sounds.   I shuddered when I read a newspaper article the other day about a “sprightly 50-year old”  Sprightly?  Isn’t that how you describe octagenarian ballroom dancers who like the occasional Scotch?

Ageing is unavoidable of course, but I’m still waiting for the level of  grown-upness  in my head to match the number on my birth certificate. And, on a more serious level, I am reminded every day in dozens of little ways – this is only one example – that in the eyes of many people I’m very nearly past it.

*It was surprisingly hard to find images to illustrate this.  There are some very odd things lurking under a search for images of older women, but nothing much that gives you pictures of “ordinary” middle-aged women from the past.  Perhaps they were invisible?