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 likemenopause, colonoscopy, bone density, andDepends.
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 ofThe 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
