Taking a Bittersweet Look at Life After 50

NEW YORK —  After nearly 30 years of marriage, author Judith Viorst says she has learned one of the secrets to a long and happy relationship: Shut up.

“It used to be that every time we’d come home from a dinner party, I’d give my husband a complete review of his conduct for the evening,” says Viorst. “I’d analyze everything. The jokes that were getting stale, the things he said, the things he didn’t say. Everything.

“Now that I’m in my 50s, I say to myself, ‘I’m not raising this man. I’m not his mother. I’m not his teacher.’ At this point in my life, I’ve learned to accept things a lot more. So shut up, you know?”

Viorst, an attractive, dark-haired woman of 58, curls up on a couch in a friend’s apartment and chuckles at the story. Asked when she learned this lesson, she flashes an impish smile.

“Oh, about a year ago. Who said you stopped learning after 50?”

Viorst should know. She has just written “Forever Fifty and Other Negotiations,” a collection of short, bittersweet poems about the sixth decade of life that touches on everything from middle-aged sex and sagging kneecaps to fully grown children who won’t leave home.

As she did in her earlier books on life in the 20s, 30s and 40s, the Washington author uses a gentle, self-deprecating voice to convey what are often serious messages. Like “Necessary Losses,” her previous nonfiction best seller, Viorst’s latest work suggests that people should accept life’s setbacks with grace and good humor.

So what if you’ve disappointed your parents and failed your children, or that nobody’s tried to seduce you since 1976? You might as well laugh, says Viorst.

In “Exercising Options,” for example, she confesses:

I respect those brave ladies who’re burning their flab off with Fonda.

They still wear bikinis. I long ago switched to a sack.

But my horror of thickening thighs

Is surpassed by my horror of exercise, so

I float on my back.

In the poem, “To a Middle-Aged Friend Considering Adultery With a Younger Man,” Viorst minces no words:

It’s hard to be devil-may-care

When there are pleats in your derriere ...

It’s hard to surrender to sin

When you’re trying to hold your stomach in.

Viorst, who is on a national tour to promote her book, says her poems seem to connect most naturally with women, but that men also are affected by these life changes. There is nothing more alarming, she says, than the look of a 50-year-old man who has just been called “sir” by a younger woman.

A Troubling Time

The 50s are a troubling time, after all. Memory begins to play tricks with you and elderly parents can suddenly become a pressing concern. Still, Viorst insists that life after 50 seems blissful compared to other periods of life.

“When you add it all up, I think the 50s are the best,” she says. “Only then do you really start to feel a sense of peace inside your own skin, because all of the battles from the previous decades are over. It’s like the calm after the storm.

“By this time, hopefully, you’ve become a real grown-up. When you were younger, you thought that life should be nothing but blue skies and sunny days. Now, you’ve learned that life is sunny days and rainy days, it’s butterflies and cancer all rolled into one.”

Viorst, who has reared three sons with her husband, Milton, a political writer, says many couples experience a second honeymoon when their children finally leave home. The 50s also can be a time for exploring new possibilities, especially for women who have begun careers later in life.

‘But Who Cares?’

“The woman I’m staying with here in New York is in her 50s and she just decided to enter the New York Marathon,” says Viorst. “She’s never run a race this long before, but who cares? It’s as if we have this new opportunity to grow now, to fall on our face, maybe, but to take a chance.”

Yet there is a darker side to middle age. Viorst, who has studied at the Freudian-based Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, says “mortality really strikes loud and clear in the 50s. People you love die. We all have a battery of doctors, and it seems that we all look into the abyss every time we go for a physical checkup. We walk in knowing that anything is possible.”

Despite these drawbacks, Viorst says the 50s are an occasion to celebrate the ordinary pleasures of life. Things slow down. People who have been running on a professional treadmill for 30 years can suddenly catch their breath.

As the author sees it, there are times when simply cuddling up with a spouse in front of the VCR is enough. In her 1965 poem “Happiness,” Viorst wrote that “happiness is my mother calling at 4 in the morning and I’m still not home.” Now, in “Happiness Reconsidered,” she writes: “Happiness is a clean bill of health from the doctor, and the kids shouldn’t move back home for more than a year.”

Asked the inevitable question, Viorst says she won’t write her next book of poems until she is well into her 70s. As she contemplates the last chapter of life, her smile dissolves into a look of concern.

“You know, when our mothers always told us about the importance of having your health, that was really the truth, even though we may have thought it was a very low standard at the time.

“I look forward to old age with curiosity and a lot of anxiety. But I only hope that I can still laugh about things then. And I hope that I’ll be lucky.”