We, too, are tweens

by Patti

Have you ever noticed that a person's life seems to be broken out in titled stages? Infant, toddler, kindergartener, school-aged, tween, teenager, young adult, child-bearing age, middle-aged, senior citizen.... We are a series of labels.

But there is one "label" that I have recently discovered manages to repeat itself quite sneakily in one's life: tween.  A tween is a kid who is too old to be a child and too young to be a teenager. But what about when you are too old to be young, and too young to be old?

The other day I was at ballet with Cathy, and while our girls leapt through the air on the other side of the viewing window, Cathy asked me if I had ever had the chicken pox. Used to random questions from Cathy such as this, I didn’t think twice when I told her I had. “Oh my GOD, did you know you can get shingles now?”
The mom sitting on the other side of me jerked her head up from her iPhone . “Have you guys seen that commercial?”
YES!” replied Cathy, knowing “that commercial” before the woman even had a chance to get into any detail.
"That firefighter… remember him?” continued the other mom. She lowered her voice in an attempt to sound like that fireman. “I’ve been fighting fires all my life; I’ve entered burning buildings.. but I’ve never felt pain like this!"
"I KNOW!” yelled Cathy. “I’m so scared to get shingles now!"
"My mom had shingles,” I offered, probably not very helpfully. “But she’s… older….”
"She did? What was it like?” asked Cathy, her eyes wide.
"Oh, she had these horrible blisters all over her chest and down her arm. She was in pain for, like, 3 months, or something. And the blisters were uh-gah-ly. She still has scars.”
Cathy and the other mom winced.
I continued. “They actually have shingles shots at Walgreens.”
The other mom leaned in. “But aren’t those for senior citizens? I mean… aren’t we too young to worry about shingles?”
The three of us sat there, pondering.
"I’m gonna ask my doctor about it,” decided Cathy.
"Let me know what he says!” we cried in unison.

And then we laughed. Because this conversation we were having? About shingles? Was most definitely not the conversations we normally have; the ones about the cute shoes we bought on sale, or the cool restaurant we had just discovered, or the movie the other simply had to see. Yet, much like our daughters talk about American Girl dolls and then the cute boy who sits 2 desks over in the same breath, we were having total tween talk. It’s just that ours see-sawed between lip gloss and shingles.

The startling truth? Many of my friends and I are at the stage in our lives where we walk the line between youth and aging; between hip and hip replacement; between cool and cooling gels for our joints. Cosmopolitan magazine is too young; AARP digest is too old. Some might call it middle-aged, but as I pop my calcium pill for the day and chase it down with a Skinny Vanilla Latte, I feel I can safely say that, indeed, we, too, are tweens.