Admittedly I misread this first time around, and also with full disclosure (albeit I kept my comments private) my angle had been rather significantly affected by another writer whose very painful article about being called an "old hag" really hurt my heart.

I think what's important isn't just our choice of words but what I put into them, as the reader and consumer, as I can't escape whatever filter shades my understanding. That said. I really love the notion, and fully believe in it, that there are people are put on earth already old in the most positive sense of the word, but not old in the sense that popular culture means it. I told Yael I'd reread this in that sense in that is how I respond to it now. That said, perhaps what's complicated, and I share this, is that at this middle-muddle point it's hard to acknowledge for those of us who haven't partnered for life or even partnered for long not to feel at some level that a piece of life has passed us by. Certainly as it pertains to kids. My folks were in their forties when they had theirs, but that assumes a relationship, and when one isn't on the horizon, that sense of passing opportunity is aching indeed. What is truly old is the deep current of connectedness to the world, to our collective Mother, to what is wild. That is ancient. Feeling that in our bones, perhaps, connects us with what is old and deep and sacred. That's a truth for me, albeit I am also watching my face wrinkle like the bark on the fir right outside my window. I read somewhere that the years 45 to 52 can be particularly difficult as it's a time of deep reckoning with what is, not what we might have wanted it to be. This is my public apology to Yael for misreading her story, and thanks for writing what likely touches most of us at the turning of another year: what we lost, what we learned, what is left, and what we will yet make of the time we have.