I don’t like dating Monica. She’s a stuffy person. She knows everything better than anyone else; she looks better than anyone else; her husband is better than anyone else. Since high school, she’s liked to tutor everyone because she was once considered the prettiest girl in her class. Her love of all sorts of beauty products, weird gymnastics, and advice has stretched ever since. The last one she adores the most.
For all my reluctance to communicate with Monica, we have to correspond even in the same network, because she is constantly sending me online workouts or techniques from couch experts to remove the hump on my back. And I do not have a hump!
My husband says she purposely lowers the self-esteem of others, because otherwise she can not raise his, and I do not even know what to think. Okay, even correspondence, but for the birthday of our mutual friend, she gave her a printed out book of tips on self-care. My own authorship. Similar “publications” had already been given to our other friend, and to me Monica hinted that I was next in line, because my birthday was coming up.
I looked at these tips … And it’s all there to hint at what her friends are fat and ugly. The first tip, for example, says that you have to watch your weight and not even think about sweets. You need to sleep “enough,” but not all day. Exercise minimally (attached are links to videos that she apparently does). Don’t eat meat, because it’s dead meat! Get mentally healthy by avoiding stress. Buy some stylish clothes. Trim your hair (long hair makes you look old). And the main tip – get the grandchildren in public places to call you “Mom.
Monica thinks she has discovered the great philosophy of fifty-somethings and her advice is common sense, and I think my husband and my family love me for who I am. That eating sweets when I really want to, even to the detriment of the figure, is okay. Eating meat, by the way, too. Stresses can not always be avoided, alas, because we are all human and subject to it. Clothing should be not so much stylish as comfortable. And hair, of course. And about grandkids… I’ve been waiting so long for my daughter to have someone and I can babysit her kids that it makes me happy to hear the long-awaited “grandma” instead of teaching the little ones to lie since they were babies.
The advice I would give myself and other women in their fifties is not to listen when you are told to. You’ve lived in this world long enough to decide for yourself how you look and how you don’t look.
