On Tour With the Kid | Perspective From The Hill

Turning 50 was spectacular, partly because I have decided to start telling people I’m 65, so they think I look outstanding for my age.

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When you add all the messages, phone calls, and flowers with very expressive language on the card delivered to my door, what more could you ask for?

It’s also lovely to realise people really know you. Despite my advancing years, I still eat like a teenager, so I arrived at work to a beautifully wrapped box labelled “Dinner for two” containing enough junk food to clog all my arteries, which I loved. My childhood friend made my life motto into a giant neon sign that lights up my whole house. I finished the night watching the original Footloose at the cinema with two of my best friends and the kid. When you keep in mind that I still have my bowel screening kit’s arrival in the mail to look forward to, half a century doesn’t seem so bad.

I made a deal with my friends. They wouldn’t buy me cards that talked about me being over the hill, and I would never say, “50 is the new 30,” mostly because ….ewwww. And it’s not. The new age bracket does, however, come with something invaluable that only comes with time and experience: perspective.

Years ago, when my grandmother was in her mid-sixties, I asked her how it felt to have a middle-aged daughter, and she said very defiantly, “Your mother is not middle-aged. I’m middle-aged”. I asked her to name all the 130-year-olds she knew. Intellectually, you know that tomorrow is promised to no one, and you could go any time, but if you are lucky enough to get to 50, you know for sure you are in the third act, and your attention does turn to how you are going to round out your story.

I come from a family of incredibly strong women. My maternal bloodline is full of women who did things on their own terms, no matter what the world expected of them. Even by modern standards, they are incredible, but when they came of age, their lives were a radical departure from the norm.

The unspoken family motto has always been, “Normal gets you nowhere.” Not in any obnoxious way, but just living your life in a way that feels authentic to you. Anyone who whispers about you or disapproves is welcome

to their opinion, but they don’t pay any of your bills, and when you lay your head down for the last time, it’s not their faces that you’ll see. You will think of all the things you missed. All the experiences you didn’t have because you lost your nerve.

No matter what bloodline you come from, your teen years are still full of your instincts being overshadowed by trepidation. My theory is that if I do crazy things with her when the opportunity arises, my newly minted teenager will be embarrassment-proof when the time comes when she needs to stand up and be counted.

For those who have seen the movie “Anyone but You”, the last scene was shot dancing on the steps of the opera house with Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten playing in the background. On a recent trip to Sydney, I decided we should do that. Not for TikTok because that’s not for us, but because it would be a memory. While I was still getting eye-rolls and loud noooo’s from the kid and her friend, I just decided to stroll behind them, singing loudly, and these two 20-something tourists joined in. I started a real-life scene from fame. I know I dated myself with that reference, but bite me, I’m 50.

I eventually got the kid and her friend to join me. We even got it on video—not the polished stuff you see online, but the delightfully awkward kind that will absolutely be shown at her 21st.