Nobody prepared me for this. Certainly not my Nordic family. To start with, I am married to an American – Italian man, which means that nothing is held back and he needs to be heard.

We’ve reached the age where ears play a major role in our lives. We just came home from dinner with friends at a local restaurant. Here’s what happened.

I'm all ears, honey

We checked in with the 23 year-old hostess and informed her that we would like to be seated where the noise level was manageable because of bad ears. She had no clue about Old Man Ears.

“Matching ears ” is an essential part of restaurant life in our world. That, and the location of the air conditioner, which I will get into later.

The men tell us which ear is the good one and which one bad. The wife should sit next to the bad ear because she really doesn’t have anything new to say to the husband anyway. When we are all matched up, ears aligned to the right listeners, the wives sit down in assigned places. (With the ear issue organized, we turn our focus on whether there’s an air conditioner blowing on anybody’s eyeballs or giving anybody a stiff neck. These things don’t happen to anybody under 40.)

My husband’s right ear is bad, which makes it hard on me when he drives and I am saying something brilliant. Hearing “What?” three times (getting louder each time) takes away some of my spontaneous brilliance and after awhile I just ask myself “Do I really want to say this three times?” The answer is usually “No.” I give up.

Another common ear thing that happens is when you are three rooms away from your husband and you hear “Have you seen my keys?”

You answer, truthfully, “No. I have no idea where they are.”

Then you hear a cranky voice, “How do you expect me to hear you from three rooms away?!?!”

Of course, if you are five rooms away and whisper, “Do you want to have wild, uninhibited sex, anything goes?” The ear thing clears up in a second.

“Do your car’s lights have a kind of strobe-y thing that they do at night?”

She assured me they didn’t. The flashing became persistent, about every ten seconds or so. Being a concerned friend, she suggested that I call the ophthalmologist right away. I caught him just as he was leaving his office.

“Come in at nine tomorrow morning,” he said. “If your vision gets bad, go straight to the emergency room.”

We promptly added martinis to our plans for the evening.

The next morning, the doctor declared that nothing was dangerously wrong with my eyesight.

“It’s just part of aging,” the forty-ish year-old doctor assured me with a kindly smile, after examining my retinas and explaining the medical provenance of the flashes.

“It’s just part of aging” is a phrase that I’ve heard for the past twenty years. I think I first heard it at about the same time that my face stopped breaking out.

I don’t have an AARP card and don’t yet qualify for Medicare. It’s bad enough that I can easily see (and choose to deny) the gradual changes in my body and mind that have crept in over the past decade or so.

But this is worse: hearing that phrase, always delivered by someone at least ten years younger, always delivered as a soothing attempt to settle my nerves when I’ve mixed up (and missed) an appointment, my grey roots won’t stay covered, my normal clothing size seems strangely snug or medical exams — especially with eye doctors — is flat-out discouraging.

My face has always been hopelessly expressive. The doctor, hair colorist, gym trainer, or whoever is dealing with me must be moved to say those words so I’ll lose the look of horror that advertises my feelings.

Friends, you are either “with me” on this, or you’ll soon be heading down this path, too. I promise you I’m not kidding.

A great fan of demographics, I admit to being a classic “Boomer.” For us, the mere idea of aging — let alone the dreaded word spoken aloud — causes a foul, toxic reaction. I believe that humor is the best antidote to just about any kind of poison, so here goes.

FIVE CLUES THAT YOU’RE GROWING UP, In roughly chronological order:

1. Perimenopause. Medical researchers continually lower the age-of-onset to just after you’ve achieved the right to vote. It’s a seamless transition from PMS to PMP. And it’s a great way to rationalize antisocial behavior as well as eating lots of chocolate. Somewhere along the line, it morphs into menopause, a condition whose symptoms can drag on for the entire second half of a woman’s life.

2. Hair coloring is an increasingly frequent necessity. This rapidly develops into an obsession, as you move from an innocuous grey-masking single process, to highlighting/lowlighting, to the infamous double process. Do we need a science lesson to explain why horses nose hungrily towards our hair? It looks like hay, drying out, like everything else in/on our bodies.

3. You can’t read anything smaller than 10-point font. This, too, sneaks up on you. My inner-codger whines unattractively about the ridiculously fine print on package labels. Those under-30 art directors sure like to trip up their parents!