Naughty Aunties!

Ever since my teenage years I have wanted to turn into the naughty old aunties who with a twinkle in their eyes pinched bottoms, made flirty remarks to the old and young alike, wore low necks with panache and generally had an infectious joie de vivre.

I figured the age to turn into one of these rather loud and border line obnoxious creatures was around 50, plus minus a couple of years. I am still decade and a half away from the ideal age but I find myself getting quite happily into the groove. And I tell you it is extremely liberating!

I have a theory about naughty aunties. One is supposed to live out one’s rebel side when in the young adulthood years but when one is an anal young person with very propah parents/upbringing or to quote my astrological hocus pocus, a kill joy placement of Saturn in Pisces, one does not go through all of that at the appropriate age.

As a young girl I was frought with what is proper and what is not proper issues, along with the usual self esteem, identity, peer pressure and place in society, friends, family, extended family, extended friends – the list is endless. I ended up being a cautious, sensitive, overly idealistic person.

And of course then life happened. Got kicked around in the teeth, picked myself up, got kicked again, picked myself up and kicked back, HARD. And this continues to this date.

All this kicking and kicking back has kick-started the rebel in me. It was after my first break-up about a decade and a half ago that I decided that I would not let one jerk colour my view of what love and life would be .….. that subsequently caused me to be kicked some more :) ..….. but since I had not lived out my rebel-cycle in teenage years like most normal kids do, I turned rebel at this point. I rebelliously stuck to my almost naïve beliefs because somewhere along the way I decided that I would not let others decide how cynical I would be – I would decide how cynical i would or would not be.

This causes me to be an optimist – an optimist who gets kicked around a lot – but a twinkle in the eye optimist, who really believes that things do turn out for the best and that the good truimph's over evil and that if you do good things and good things will do you... and quoting from the immortal line from Seinfeld 'Yada yada yada'.....

Alongside this rebellious sticking to impossible ideals I gathered years (not to mention pounds). The years liberated me from trying to conform to someone else’s stereotype. The pounds liberated me from having to travel economy :)

So the deal is that I am turning into a naughty aunty and loving it. This bit of age has given me a freedom which was not there when I was 22. Take the humour part of it - I had issues on how to react when guys told jokes about how to cheat on women, dumb blonde jokes and sex jokes. Now I just throw back my head and laugh – sometimes at the guys and sometimes at the jokes. I could not tell dirty jokes to my male colleagues. I can now and i laugh heartily at them even though it seems that my poor colleagues are embarrassed. In my younger years I did not use swear words. I *(&#^@ do that quite *#^(&@ easily. And my views – Oh dear! I had mild political, social, religious views in my younger years and now it seems they are getting stronger and stronger and I do not stand on ceremony if I get into a discussion regarding these. And discussion, thankfully I don’t get into too many of those anymore – specially with people who make controversial statements just to get noticed or to get a rize out of you. Also i seem to suffer fools much less gladly now. Seems I had a particular quota of fools and now it full and there is no room to listen to anybodies idiosyncrasies any more. Things that incensed me in my twenties, don’t turn me nuts now. Most importantly priorities have crystallized. Have somewhat figured out that life is going happen and all depends how I deal with it.

Je suis digressez from ze issue…..

Coming back to my theory – Naughty aunties and wanna-be naughty aunties like me are living out their teenage in their middle age. This gives them an unique advantage of having all the benefits of middle age as well as teen-age years without the disadvantages of either. It gives them a youthful outlook, with the ability to look at the brighter side of life andlaugh more easily. It gives them a sharp tongue along the wisdom of when to hold it and when to let it go. It gives them the ability to look and accept the grey along with the earlier black and white vision of idealistic youth. It give them wrinkles which add to the twinkle in their older wiser eyes.

Ah yes naughty aunties, I am going to join your ranks!