2006No regrets Well

2006...No regrets! Well kinda!
Can’t believe it really is 2K6, can you. I am 45 on 20th January and feel like my life should be over by now eh? When I was 22 I imagined that when I was 45 I would be menopausal (Please let me womb stop bleeding…bring it on) but I aint! I imagined I would be wrinkly and wearing brightly appliquéd jumpers with busy butterflies and shiny sequins on them (like all the 45 year old women I knew when I was 22 years old) but I am not.

Well there are some wrinkles but certainly not as much as my mum had when she was 45, I remember her face clearly. She died an old woman at 47, I am sure some of you know my mum was murdered by her violent boyfriend in 1982, she was found in the River Clyde four days after he took her a late night ‘walk’.

I don’t mean she was an old woman, but she looked like an old woman and behaved like an old woman and that’s what most women her age looked like in those days.
My mum adored Judy Garland, she danced like her and almost lived like in the addiction department as well and strangely both of them died aged 47.

Getting back to the point, I think my mum’s generation didn’t foresee a working life after 40, certainly nothing more than working as a dinner lady or cleaner anyway.
They weren’t brought up in the 1940’s and 50’ to assume they could raise their kids then apply technological moisturisers and start shagging 20 years olds…like we are constantly fed by US sitcoms! (trust me you don’t need to be wrinkle free to let a 20 year old fuck you, you just have to have a good enough memory to remember to forget them afterwards… so I am told).

They never knew women who had ‘plastic surgery’ unless it was of course some poor woman whose husband tried to burn her in a fire and they grafted a new pinkie on her hand but left her face like a melted carpet….they just never foresaw regular people to have boob jobs or stretch marks being erased by lasers so the 45 year old could hit the beach in a tiny bikini!

I am of the generation of women who will work forever and try to look after themselves, manage their own lives and love and work to their own rules.

My own marriage has went through several regenerations…I was the original 80’s bride who wore shoulder pads, big hair, make up, high heels and sexy stockings and was into aerobics, to keep me trim, I survived on 300 calories a day (if it was good enough for Princess Diana, it was good enough for me), I ran a business, had a baby and was always ready to look good and provide hot foods and sex on demand …then I was the 90’s woman, turning my back on the job my husband had allocated for me (running the bar he owned) and became a stand up comic and started to travel alone for the first time in my married life…I even carried my own passport and cash! I had opinions that I shouted loudly from a stage and ran my own business managing myself.

I dressed to suit me, I let my hair grow longer, I got into my own music, I rebelled against everything I held dear as an 80’s woman and practically left home leaving him holding the baby (by then a school girl) and I demanded sex when I got home from a trip and revelled at reading my own name Janey Godley (not my married name…that’s Storrie, but I changed it legally to Godley) in the comedy magazines and listings.
Now I am 2K woman and we are still together, I work he cooks, I earn, he accounts it, I spend, he smiles and hides a grimace, I laugh, he laughs and we rub along fine.
I do have enormous amounts of regrets and stuff I have done and I wish I hadn’t.

I wish I had learned to shut up and listen more, I regret talking over people, I regret undermining other peoples emotions and above all I regret the red dress and pill box hat I wore at a wedding in 1989. I looked mental, I don’t regret the stretch marks ( have you seen my beautiful child? Because she worth it!), I don’t regret the scars on my knee (football as a youngster -I was GOOD!).

I don’t regret standing up to people who undermined others, I don’t regret telling a dirty joke loudly in the Vatican City last July beneath the Popes window over a mobile phone to a fervent Catholic! (I should have had more respect…really),
I regret missing some performances at my daughter school theatre, but I was on stage working to pay a mortgage and that’s life…still I do regret that.

I am eternally sorry for all the people who were my Uncle David Percy’s best friends and were really hurt and shocked when I got him imprisoned in 1996 for sexually abusing me as a child, that was rotten for them and not their fault…still that’s what happens when you touch kids and hope they grow up have a good enough memory to remember to forget them afterwards!

Happy 2K6 all…je ne regretene!