A Tale of Two Biddies E-Book

Vicki Kuyper

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 166

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Aging is a gift—a privilege best enjoyed with open arms and a grateful heart. Meet Kitty and Mardel, also affectionately known as St. Katherine and the Dragon Lady. Through a good dose of humor and some hard-earned insight, A Tale of Two Biddies tells the entertaining story of the two women who inspired this book. One was kind, tender-hearted, and humble; the other was critical, pessimistic, self-centered, and sharp-tongued. As these women aged and their inhibitions fell away, the true character of their hearts became increasingly evident to those around them. For better and for worse. In this book Vicki Kuyper explores the issues women face as they age and encourages them to make the most of the latter seasons of their lives. We can't control the aging process, but we can choose how we'll face each day, ultimately shaping our hearts and who we become. We grow old in the blink of an eye. Growing up takes considerably longer. That means there's no better time than right now to reevaluate our habits, our faith, and our future. We can choose what draws us closer to God and closer to being the amazing women God created us to be. That's life at its finest. FEATURES: - Beautifully designed full color interior layout - Special cover features include textured debossing and spot UV - A beautiful satin ribbon marker conveniently keeps your place so you can quickly pick up where you left off.

Leseprobe

Published by BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC

Racine, Wisconsin, USA

www.broadstreetpublishing.com

A TALE of TWO BIDDIES

© 2015 by Vicki Kuyper

ISBN: 978-1-4245-5024-1 (hard cover)

ISBN: 978-1-4245-5053-1 (e-book)

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Scripture marked TPT is from The Passion Translation®, copyright © 2015 by BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC, Racine, Wisconsin, USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. www.thepassiontranslation.com. Scripture marked NIV is from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. All Scripture marked NLT is from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Chris Garborg at www.garborgdesign.com

Interior design and typesetting by Katherine Lloyd at www.theDESKonline.com

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Printed in China

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Dedicated to my grandmothers,

Kitty and Mardel,

as well as written in memory

of so many wonderful women

I’ve known and loved who never

had the opportunity

to open the gift of growing old:

Vereda Williams

Allysa Geske

Kristen Balsis

Doreen Buller

Pam Galliano

Julie Sawyer

Sandy Hopkins

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Meet the Biddies

CHAPTER TWO

The Wizard of Uhs

CHAPTER THREE

The Long and Whiney Road

CHAPTER FOUR

She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Mother

CHAPTER FIVE

Seniorella: When Beauty and the Beast Share the Same Mirror

CHAPTER SIX

One Hot Mama—Or One Haute Mess?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paging Dr. Pepper

CHAPTER EIGHT

All the Wrong Stuff

CHAPTER NINE

Out of the Mouths of Babes…Who Happen to be Wearing Depends

CHAPTER TEN

His Eye Is on the Sparrow, While Mine’s on the Empty Nest

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Living La Diva Loca

CHAPTER TWELVE

Where’s My Happily Ever After?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

You Can Teach an Old Broad New Tricks

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

God Is Expanding Along with my Waistline

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Trojan Hearse

CHAPTER ONE

Meet the Biddies

Once upon a time there lived two biddies. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. Just moments before, they’d been young mothers, new brides, giggling teens, teetering toddlers, and fragile infants opening their eyes to the wonders of this world for the very first time. Or at least that’s how it seemed. But time passes. And so does every one of those marvelous stages of life.

Then comes stage “biddy.” At first glance, maturity (that’s the politically correct term for “going to pot,” “over the hill,” “past your prime,” “long in the tooth,” and other equally flattering euphemisms) looks like the ugly stepsister of life’s phases. It brings to mind words like menopause, colonoscopy, bone density, and Depends.

Lucky us. No, really! In the early 1900s, most women didn’t go through menopause. Why? Because they didn’t live that long. Now, our average life span extends into the mid-80s. That’s nearly forty additional years—almost an entire lifetime just one century ago. It’s like winning those gold coins that give you an extra life in Super Mario Bros.® (Okay, so I played video games with my kids when they were young. I can still hear that annoying theme song in my head. So why can’t I remember where I put my reading glasses? I digress…)

So our most pressing question as we enter these Mario Bros. golden bonus years is: How are we going to spend our extra life?

To help us answer that question in a personal, practical way, let’s take a few lessons from two real-life biddies, Kitty and Mardel.

ST. KATHERINE AND THE DRAGON LADY

Grandmothers are like a church potluck. You never know what you’re going to get. God blessed me with two women at opposite ends of the Biddy Spectrum. Kitty was the grandmother everyone wanted to call their own. She was kind, tenderhearted, humble, and followed Jesus so closely that she died at noon on Good Friday.

In contrast, Mardel was a loose cannon—critical, pessimistic, self-centered, and sharp tongued. All of which earned her the family moniker of “Dragon Lady.” Blind in one eye, she’d barrel her sky-blue Cadillac out of her driveway, in reverse, honking her way into oncoming traffic. She simply assumed everyone would stop for her. I think that’s kind of how she felt about life in general.

She lived to be ninety-six. But apparently that wasn’t long enough for her to learn my children’s names. All two of them. She simply referred to her only grandchildren as “Vicki’s boy-child” and “Vicki’s girl-child,” as if they were characters right out of the pages of The Jungle Book. It’s not as though my husband and I named them Mowgli and Rumpelstiltskin. “Ryan” and “Katrina” didn’t seem all that tricky to master.

Then again, maybe it was Mardel’s way of getting back at us for naming Katrina after Grandma Kitty. Not that we ever told her. We figured that if we used Katrina instead of Katherine, we could let Grandma Kitty know we were honoring her while Mardel would be none the wiser. Perhaps I underestimated the homing device of Mardel’s intuition.

Not that it was always on target. One time she misplaced a Christmas tin filled with old hair curlers. She was convinced the neighbor who’d dropped by for a visit earlier that day had absconded with them when using the bathroom. What a ruse! Did I mention her neighbor was an elderly bald man?

Of course, Mardel didn’t become Dragon Lady overnight. Like all of us, there’s more to her story than just her biddy years. Mardel grew up on a small ranch in California. Horses, guns, and lots of hard work were the “toys” of her childhood. In her early teenage years, her brother’s rifle misfired out in the front yard. The bullet came through a window into the house, hitting Mardel in the eye. She spent months in a dark room, recuperating from her injury.

Despite her accident, Mardel remained an avid sharpshooter and hunter. As a kid, I listened to her and my grandfather regale countless tales about deer hunting in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains. My favorite was how she shot and dressed a deer (for those of you who do not have a deer-hunting grandmother, that means she cut out its internal organs, not that she decked it out in a cocktail frock and pumps). Then Mardel made my mother (who had never camped or hunted before, let alone seen an animal butchered right before her eyes) carry the warm liver back to camp in her hat.

This memorable little episode took place on my parents’ honeymoon. So much for romance.

Long story short, Grandma Mardel was a rough-and-tumble sort of gal. She liked to smoke (back in the day when smoking was cool), gamble, hang out with the guys, and wear ostentatious, fake jewels and anything-but-fake furs. Her favorite place to be was squarely in the center of attention.

In contrast, Grandma Kitty was a self-proclaimed wallflower. Painfully shy, she fretted over her lack of schooling, social graces, and red hair. (The latter of which Kitty passed on to me, for which I’m grateful.)

Raised in a very strict home, Kitty followed suit by marrying a jealous, controlling man. But back in high school another young man was “sweet” on her. Kitty often retold the story of how he surprised her one day with a beautiful bouquet. But when Kitty returned home from school the next day, her flowers were nowhere to be seen. Her stepmother told her she’d visited the cemetery that morning and took them to place on a relative’s grave.

Seventy years later, I still don’t think my grandmother ever got over the fate of those flowers. That’s as far as the story of her would-be beau ever went. But Kitty and I wrote lots of new stories together, particularly after I entered adulthood.

When I got engaged, I asked her to be a bridesmaid in my wedding—enticing her with the promise of walking down the aisle on the arm of a handsome young groomsman. True to form, she blushed, giggled, and politely declined, but said she’d always treasure the fact that she’d been asked.

Other than lamenting that waylaid bouquet, and the fact that her “real” mother died when she was young, I rarely heard a word of complaint from Kitty—until dementia took hold in her late eighties. (Even then, when she was thinking clearly she’d apologize for anything she’d said or done that might have been unseemly, all of it uncharacteristic and unremembered.) As for Mardel, “woe is me” could have been her middle name.

Kitty was widowed in her early sixties. Mardel, a few years later. Kitty lived in a one-bedroom apartment on a meager income. Mardel lived in a nice home in the hills and had money to burn. Kitty and Mardel were both women of faith, though their Catholic faith looked different on each of them. Kitty attended mass every morning and worked as a church secretary well into her seventies. Mardel went to mass on Christmas and Easter and fused her faith in God with mysticism and superstition.

As these two women aged and their inhibitions fell away, the true character of their hearts became increasingly apparent to those around them. For better or for worse. Was it nature, nurture, or their very own choices that shaped the legacy of St. Katherine and the Dragon Lady?

The answer is “all of the above.” That means we each have some control over who we’ll be when we grow up—and grow old. So, while we still have all (or at least some!) of our mental faculties about us, we’d better make a decision as to which direction we want to go.

BIDDY IN TRAINING

Not all biddies are created equal. A “biddy” can be a chicken or a cleaning woman. It can be a nickname for Bridget. In Australia, it’s a two-for-one fast-food voucher. But the biddies we’re focusing on right now are you and me. We’re both biddies in training. One of us may be ahead of the other in terms of age, but if God has bestowed on us the privilege of laugh lines, a glacially paced metabolism, and chin hairs that have started sprouting like tulips after a winter thaw, we’re well on our way toward biddydom.

So we’d better start planning now.

We grow old in the blink of an eye. However, growing up takes considerably longer. Some of us never really do, even though we live into our eighties and beyond. That’s because growing up involves maturing, and maturing involves change. And change is hard.

We like our ruts. We eat the same thing for breakfast. Hang out with the same friends. Wear the same mom jeans we wore when our children were young—if we’re lucky enough to not have bumped up the waist size a time or two. Our favorite songs are the same ones we played on our car radio back when those bands were actually on top of the charts instead of touting their fourth Farewell Reunion Tour.

Ruts can be our friends. Chances are if we’ve always been active, we still are. If we’ve always eaten healthy, we still do. If we’ve maintained a strong faith, loving relationships, and a healthy self-image, we’re probably still following these same positive ruts forward into the future.

But what if the ruts we’ve worn into our lives are leading us somewhere we never intended to go? What if we’re selfish, mean spirited, and cynical? Not that we see ourselves that way. What we see when we look in the mirror may be an independent, truth-telling realist. Of course, if we need reading glasses to decipher a price tag, perhaps the way we see ourselves has also grown a bit fuzzy over time. We may be way past due for an “I” check.

Who are we … really?

The older we get, the more stuck in our ruts we become. That means there’s no better time to reevaluate our habits, our worth, our faith, and our future than right now. If we’ve got a whole new bonus life ahead of us, let’s choose to spend it well! Trade in that Bucket List for a Becoming List.

What kind of biddy do we want to become?

CHOOSE LIFE

Getting older is a privilege. It’s a gift not everyone receives. So how do we accept it with open arms and enjoy it with a hopeful heart in spite of the challenges it brings our way?

Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life” (NIV). We can’t control the aging process. But we do have a choice as to how we’re going to face each day that comes our way. Each choice we make helps shape our heart as well as our life—and our bonus life. We can choose what draws us closer to God and closer to becoming the women God created us to be. That’s life at its finest.

But the choice is up to us. Just ask my mom.

My mother, following in the footsteps of her mother, Kitty, excels at choosing life. More than a decade ago, she had a series of life-threatening strokes. After awaking from a coma, she had to relearn to swallow, eat, walk, read, and so much more. Every day was a challenge. She spent months in a rehabilitation hospital, many more months recovering at home, and years continuing to slowly regain most of the abilities she’d lost.

Now in her eighties, my mom takes line-dancing classes, goes to the gym, and loves to travel. Just a few months ago, we flew to London to take a transatlantic cruise, just the two of us. Mom said when she told her friends at The Village (her retirement community) about her upcoming trip, not one of them wanted to go. As a matter of fact, she said they really weren’t interested in going any farther than The Village’s front door.

“They’re alive,” she said, “but they’re already dead.”

She was so right. We choose life, or death, every day. So, fellow biddy, which will you choose today?

CHAPTER TWO

The Wizard of Uhs…

Someone keeps trying to hack into my online accounts. Unfortunately, that person is me. Passwords, pin codes, and occasionally the names of my very own children are just a few of the informational black holes created by my aging brain. But it’s more than just names and numbers that disappear. Tangible objects have been known to go missing.

One Christmas not so long ago, my sweet daughter gave my hubby and me tickets to see Les Mis. As the performance date drew near, I wanted to check the time the curtain went up. I rifled through my Important Stuff file folder. The tickets were nowhere to be found. I checked my desk drawer. My purse. Assorted piles of paper on counter-tops and nightstands. My underwear drawer. The vegetable crisper. Nothing. I concluded we must have thrown them away in the flurry of gift wrap after Christmas. Sheepishly, we paid the replacement fee and went on to enjoy the show.

Months passed. Easter was now just around the corner. Time to make deviled eggs. I took out the cake decorator I use to pipe the yolk into fluffy yellow peaks. (Don’t be too impressed. It’s one of the few family recipes I make that doesn’t wind up looking like Pinterest “fail” photos.) What should I find in the box? You guessed it. Two tickets to Les Mis. Okay, so I did make deviled eggs over the Christmas/New Years holiday. But exactly how those tickets traveled from our living room to the kitchen and then into the decorator box remains a menopausal mystery. All I can say is I must have gotten distracted on the way to my Important Stuff folder.

Not as though that’s a big surprise. These days I can’t take a shower and mentally organize my day at the same time. Just last week, I caught myself washing my face with my hair conditioner instead of facial scrub. At least now the hair on my upper lip seems shinier and more full bodied.

Honestly, I used to be a whiz at multitasking, absolutely undistractible. I could carry on a phone conversation while writing on my computer with music blaring in the background as I also sipped tea and snacked on cookies. These days, if the heater happens to click on while I’m working, I get so distracted I need a cookie break and head to the kitchen, where I notice I haven’t cleaned out the dishwasher, which then gets halfway emptied before I see a birthday card I forgot to mail on the counter, but before I can head out to the mailbox my phone alerts me to a text from someone asking if we’re still meeting for lunch—where I was supposed to be fifteen minutes ago. Of course to read the text I try to put on a pair of reading glasses only to discover I’m already wearing one.

Yes, times have changed and so has my brain. Why? Aging has ushered me into a second adolescence. My face is breaking out. My monthly cycle’s out of whack. My hormones are as jumpy as an over-caffeinated assassin. I have work that needs to be done, an ever-growing to-do list hovering over me, making me sweat (or is that a hot flash?). But all I can muster any interest in is losing myself between the pages of a novel or reposting Facebook videos of kittens singing with the dubbed voices of celebrity pop stars. What’s a biddy to do?

The first time I hit adolescence, I couldn’t wait to be older. Now, I dream of what it was like to be younger. Thinner. Prettier. Quicker on my feet. Quicker in my recall. If I can’t have a younger body, I’ll settle for a younger brain. My brain. The one that actually worked. The one that was fun to go out with because it remembered the punch line to the joke I’m in the middle of telling. The one that could locate car keys, theater tickets, and the parking space I pulled my car into less than ten minutes ago. The one that attracted minutia like my black dress pants collect lint. The one that made me feel smart.

If my brain weren’t such an indistinguishably unattractive blob of gray matter, I’d post its picture on a milk carton. LOST: My mind. Reward offered if returned in condition I last saw it, sometime in my mid-40s. Unfortunately, countless other women of a certain age would be convinced it was their very own misplaced marbles. There’d be custody battles. Catfights—and those cats would probably be crooning “Let It Go.” Hold on a minute while I check Facebook…

ADOLESCENCE IS BETTER THE SECOND TIME AROUND

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah…adolescence. It’s not just for kids anymore. As we head through perimenopause (the ten years or so that precede menopause) our brains are enacting a geriatric version of Hormones Gone Wild. In direct opposition to our first adolescence, now our estrogen and testosterone (it’s not just for men!) levels are plummeting, along with our thyroid levels. This plays havoc with things like our memory, our ability to multitask, and the speed with which we process new information. Not to mention the speed with which our body processes the calories of the cookies we just ate!

Believe it or not, just as our metabolism slows to a glacial pace, our brain’s response to glucose also goes haywire. This causes our energy levels to yo-yo up and down, which triggers cravings for more sweets and carbs.1