About Mona – The Thing About Aging By Mona Sides-Smith

About Mona We’re excited to bring a little prickly wit to our readers with the musings of a new contributor. With sardonic humor, our friend and writer Mona Sides Smith will take an irreverent look at the joys and woes of aging in her regular column, About Mona. Tune in as she shares her tongue-in-cheek views on everyday life as an eighty year old workaholic, with caustic wit and sarcastic hilarity. March 13, 2014 The thing about aging is that it is here to stay. Don’t worry about it. It will get worse. Aging is very common. The older a body gets, the more time-consuming it is. There are the doctor appointments. In the doctor’s office, most of the help assumes that you are hard of hearing and they shout at you. They shout things like “Hello Sweetie,” as they pat you on the shoulder and bend over toward you, I guess to see if you have your eyes open or if you have drifted off again. There is Walking Slower as the years go by. I walk so slowly that I annoy myself. I am amazed by how fast people can pick up their feet and put them down. I can’t do that. When I practice fast walking, I increase my speed up to Very Slow. Then there is the sleeping problem. I hate getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I could sleep well, except for my bladder. It holds about half a cup of liquid and then begins to leak. I could go into how I deal with it but I’m not ready to do that yet. I am, however, open to suggestions from others who have bladders that seem to have shrunk to the size of a kumquat. And there are the store-bought body parts. There are these store-bought teeth that make it possible for me to eat, provided I do not bite on anything firm – like peanuts, my dentist says. You see, I have some of my front teeth. A few are mine, ground down and crowned. A few are bridges. But, they don’t come out for dunking in some caustic liquid for cleaning them so I don’t breathe denture breath on people. At least, I hope I do not. Please tell me if I do. Once I lost one of the partials in an airplane. I thought I dropped it in my purse, but I must have dropped it on the floor. I talked my late husband, Smitty, into calling the airline and describing it to the Lost-and-Found folks. God bless him. I doubt that I would have done the same for him. It was never found. I can only imagine whatever happened to it. There are other store-bought parts and by-passes and repairs and additions and removals. Dear God, I feel like a hypochondriac when I present my list to yet another physician. I’m eighty now and some things are no longer a problem. How about that decision about whether or not to get a PhD? Moot point. It would take me half a day to walk across campus to get to a class that would be over by the time I shuffled in. Sex? Forget about it. All of my husbands but one died, and the only one still standing moved to Australia forty-five years ago. It doesn’t look like he is coming back. Not that I believe you have to be married to have sex. I watch TV and I don’t mean X-rated movies. There is more sex information on one morning news program than I got the first twenty years of my life. Aging is here to stay. Aging problems are here to stay. Don’t worry about them; they get worse. I just deal with it and occasionally complain to a captive audience like this one.