I am turning forty-nine this year, my last year before fifty and I am going through a big change. These last few nights I have awoken in the middle of the night, cooking from the inside out. 

Scientists call it perimenopause, which is the second big change for women. I remembered my first change during middle and that one seemed less physically brutal, and more rewarding. “You’re becoming woman, you will be able to have babies.” I wonder what my next super power will be. Maybe, I will be like Spider-Man after a radioactive/genetically modified spider bit him. In the Tobey Maguire version, Peter Parker had a big fever dream and woke up able climb walls, catch falling cafeteria food and shoot webs from his hands. Instead, I think I am turning into Aunt May— the white haired version, and that’s not a bad thing.

Rosemary Harris played Aunt May in the  Spider-Man movies from early aughts and is still alive and aged 97.  She has had success in acting on stage and in movies since 1948 and has an HBO acting credit as recently as 2022. She has played hundreds of different characters on a thousand different stages. Somewhere in there she managed to have a kid too. Harris is the mother of Jennifer Ehle, the actress who played Elizabeth Bennet with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Now we have all learned something new today. Maybe my life isn’t wrapping up, perhaps it is just starting its next phase.

We silver-haired ladies need to go forward with less trepidation and more anticipation. What new adventure will tomorrow bring? Silver is the new black.