Being a 49 year-old high school teacher has its pluses and minuses.  The kids do keep me young– they are funny and energetic and curious– most of them.  But as I age and go through the hard knocks of life, they never get more than four years older.  My students are always between the ages of 14 and 18– I’m always swimming in the same adolescent stage– the crucible of conformity, identity formation, and burgeoning sexuality.  The older I get, the further away I get from their hormonal, anxious lives.

When I first started teaching, I felt young.  I was 32 and I had a 3 year-old son, a 6 year-old daughter, and a teenage step-daughter.  I remember supervising detention and listening to the high school kids talk about their plans and dreams and complaints about life.  One young man was talking about his dream to open up a clothing store that would sell only “cool” clothes.  “Like what?”  I asked.  And he said “Nothing these people are wearing.”  I looked around and saw a room full of denim and sweatshirts, and said “What do you mean?  You’re all dressed in jeans.”  He rolled his eyes, pointed to the person next to him, and said “You don’t get it.  My pants are NOTHING like his.  Look at the hem on his pants!”  Then he mumbled to himself, “Old people, jeez…”  I realized at that point that aging is not a choice; no one wakes up one day and says, “I’m going to be a fuddy-duddy from now on!”  The young people come up underneath you and push you into that status.  They think they’ve invented the world, and your insistence that you will never get old means nothing to them. Our music, the rebellious rock-and-roll that made Tipper Gore’s hair stand on end?  They’ve never heard of it, or they think it’s “boring.”  The dancing that made parents in the fifties keep their daughters home at night?  Child’s play.

That first year of teaching, a student wrote an article for the newspaper in which she used the term “clueless adults.”  I had to chuckle in a stupefied way– clueless?  Really?  Had this high school junior ever applied for a mortgage?  Bought a car?  Paid her taxes?  Now, at the age of 49, the idea that I’m “clueless” seems even more sadly comical.  I’ve been through a 21-year marriage with a man who struggled with many demons.  I’ve raised two children and watched them learn to crawl and walk and face the world, fail, get back up, cry, and move on.  I’ve seen a man broken by love for his daughter and I’ve seen people being horribly mean to the ones who love them the most.  Nasty politicians, hypocrisy, senseless wars.

I chaperoned the prom last weekend, and I couldn’t stay in the room with the dancers because their dance moves were so sexually suggestive.  My colleague told me “You’re getting old!” and I agree that I am.  But why is that statement tinged with a warning?  I don’t want to get old and obsolete.  I want to stay in tune with the world and its changes.  But getting older is not simply a series of losses.  I have gained such insight from what I have been through.

I see subtlety and nuance in the world that I would never have seen in my twenties.  As I search for “true love” since my husband’s death,  I am surprised by the way my concept of love has changed.  I love my husband in spite of his demons and in spite of the pain we went through together.  I love his parents and sister and brother.  I love the men who dance with me, who are willing to share an embrace with me on the dance floor even though I am not young, not their spouse, not the best dancer in the world.  I love the women I tutor who endure hardships that Americans do not understand.  I love my father with all his eccentricities, and I forgive him for his human frailties.

The smallest gestures of kindness can have such deep meaning– a thank you, the holding of a door.  The smallest details can be masterpieces of beauty– the fog on the river in the morning as I drive to work and the perfect V of ducks parting the water.

And then there’s sex.  After 21 years of marriage, sex took on many different meanings.  It was passionate, athletic, fun, and sweaty, but it was also tender, deeply loving, and vulnerable.  As a non-religious person, I found that my sexual relationship with my husband was the closest to a spiritual experience I had ever had– a feeling of unity with something greater than myself and the most profound sharing of love I had witnessed. To make love to someone who is attractive and loving, who makes you laugh and who shares in life’s joys– that is easy.  To continue to make love to a person with whom you fight, argue, cry over, who frustrates you, who knows how to push your buttons– to continue to LOVE that person–that takes great strength and maturity.  Our sex life was a reflection of all that.

One year, when I taught the novel Catcher in the Rye, we discussed the scene in which Holden sees a couple in another building spitting water on each other.  Holden says “I really don’t understand sex,” and a young man in my class said “How can he not understand sex?  What is there to understand?”  I just shook my head.  These are the things I want so badly to explain to my students but just can’t.  I said to him “Come see me in 15 years and tell me what you think.”   Watching my students “grinding” on the dance floor makes me feel the same way.   They lack subtlety; there’s so much they have to learn about intimacy and tenderness, about fog on the river, about love.

These are the appreciations of life that only experience and age can impart.  This richness is the prize for aging.  It is not flashy, it is not loud.  It would not make a good music video for Beyonce.  But I would never trade it for youth.