It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty...and Other Tragedies of Married Life

The honeymoon is over
And he has left for work
Whistling something obvious from La Boheme
And carrying a brown calfskin attache case
I never dreamed he was capable of owning,
Having started the day
With ten pushups and a cold shower
Followed by a hearty breakfast.

(What do we actually have in common?)

The honeymoon is over
And I am dry-mopping the floor
In a green Dacron dry-mopping outfit from Saks,
Wondering why I'm not dancing in the dark,
Or rejecting princes,
Or hearing people gasp at my one-man show,
My god, so beautiful and so gifted!

(The trouble is I never knew a prince.)

Judith Viorst is an American poet, novelist and psychoanalyst. As well as It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life (1968), and its companion in our volume, People & Other Aggravations (1971), she has written other poetry collections, including Suddenly Sixty and Other Shocks of Later Life. Her inspiration is marriage and motherhood and the conflicts they cause: romance versus reality, love for a child versus passionate longing for sleep, love for a husband versus – it is the 'versus' that Judith Viorst writes about: with tenderness, realism, insight and wit.