by Kim Solga
(This is part one of a two-part post about Kim’s turning 50. CW: talk about eldercare and subsequent death)
Sam and Tracy started this blog two years ahead of their 50th birthdays. Their goal: to be their fittest selves at 50, and to show the world how it’s done, the feminist way. I started following them early, and Sam invited me to join the blogging team in 2013. I’m younger than many of the bloggers here: when I started writing for FIFI I was 38, a long distance cyclist, and cocky as hell. One of my first posts was report on what remains one of my proudest cycling achievements: in July 2013, for the disability arts charity SCOPE, my then-husband and I rode the 450+km from London (UK) to Paris, France in 24 hours and 14 minutes.
Last September, the day before my 50th birthday, I climbed Jordan’s highest mountain, Jamal Umm ad Dami, on the border with Saudi Arabia. (I was hiking the country along with eight other adventurers and a hilarious and kind guide called Mahmoud. For the mountain climb, we were also joined by an insanely fit young Bedouin guide called Mohammed.) On my birthday morning, I woke up at 5am to ride a camel into the desert sunrise; it was magical. It was also still late evening in Montreal, where I was born, so *technically* I was still 49 at the time. And don’t think I didn’t tell people.
As that day progressed and we traveled the highway to the Dead Sea, I felt the ache of the previous several days’ hiking in all of my bones, and especially in the ones connecting my left leg and hip to my spine. I’d crashed my road bike in early July, requiring surgery (and a lot of metal props) to repair my shattered left radius. My left hip, already a liability of sorts because of my joint-munching autoimmune disorder (Ankylosing Spondylitis), had been giving me extra trouble ever since. What’s worse, that crash was avoidable. It happened close to home, in my local park, because I was over-tired from attempting to ride 157km solo across June 30 and July 1, to mark not Canada’s birthday (of course not!) but rather 157 years of… settler colonialism.
Cate and Susan teased me a lot about that one; dumb idea all around, Kim.
I had to admit they were right, and not just because my made-up justification sounds, well, REALLY BAD when you say it out loud. The truth was that 38-year-old Kim would not have minded at all 157km in one go. Kim at 43 would have groaned but done it anyway. Forty-seven-year-old Kim would have been daunted, but she would have made.
And nearly 50-year-old Kim? She was nervous. And so decided she had to do it anyway.
To prove nothing had changed. To prove she was the same woman, same athlete, as ever.
To prove her body was still hers to boss around and control.
Except it wasn’t. It isn’t.
***
I was away two months last fall; that’s one of the benefits of my incredibly good, very lucky job as a university professor. I was on sabbatical, and because I have tenure I didn’t need to hunker down and write a new book. I’d long decided that this was the sabbatical I was going to gift myself self-care; in fact, I’d made that a promise to my rheumatologist when I saw her in the spring.
You see, the thing a lot of folks don’t tell you about reaching this age has to do, intimately, with care. If you are a woman reaching this age, you probably won’t have been thinking much about care in the years leading up to and through perimenopause, because, well, you’ll have been too busy doing it. If you’re a woman my age with kids, those kids are finally launching (if you are lucky). However, at the same damn time, your parents are aging, and fast.
I’ve got no kids, but in April 2023 I was a parent to an extremely old doggo called Emma that I loved more than anything, and two elderly parents who refused to look their endgame in the face. I helped Emma pass on 1 May 2023, and I’m proud I gave her such a good death, because at the time I was fighting my dad on literally every care decision we were trying to make as we navigated his rapidly plunging heart and lung health and my mother’s wheelchair-bound semi-mobility. He wouldn’t accept care for her; he insisted on doing it all himself. He wouldn’t accept care for him, either. He refused to say anything was truly wrong.
I was swimming in the ocean off the coast of Cornwall in June 2023 when my mother emailed me to say that dad was in the hospital. Less than a week later I was flying back to Toronto; he had been admitted to palliative care. The next few months are a blur. I took over my mother’s life management, realizing with horror how little she knew of bank accounts, bill payments, and What Happens Now. By hook, crook, and the help of an amazing Senior Move Specialists called Janice, by Christmas we had her safely moved into a wonderful new care facility. She had her own apartment (for the first time in her adult life!), and, briefly, I felt easy. Then, in April 2024, she had a bad fall; she was not wearing her alert button. She lay half-dressed in her bathroom for what we guess was about 16 hours; she went from the tile floor to the ICU, and she never came home again.
***
In Buddhist traditions, practitioners learn to value the present – to be here now, as they say. The present moment is the one we occupy this very minute, and it is all around us, in all oof our senses. It’s not in our phones and it’s not in our other distractions. It’s also not the moment that was the present of our past selves, past bodies, or past expectations. Those moments are gone; we may have learned from them (if we are lucky) but whether or not we did, they are the past now.
I’m trying hard to be more Buddhist these days; I’ve been practicing in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh for a couple of years now. In Plum Village, we often say: present moment, wonderful moment.
But who am I now, in this new present moment?
***
What happened after mom died? I’d been a wreck so long, managing eldercare and trying to do my job alongside, that initially, briefly, I felt free. But then I started to notice things. For the first time in a long time I was paying closer attention to my self: my body, my heart, my injured soul. I began to realize that I wasn’t just getting older – I was there. I could see clearly that I was in perimenopause, and that I probably had been for some time.
I began to realize that I was more tired than ever. I reasoned, of course: you’ve been to the wars, Kim. It’s only natural you need to rest! But resting had never before been in my vocab; like so many people my age (so many women my age!), rest is defeat. Keep going, keep hustling, keep riding and lifting and burpee-ing until you drop. That, to me, was my superpower.
I did not drop – I could not drop.
Until now.
