Aging: coming to terms with the Cuffin Season

Credit: MadameNoire.com


The Urban Dictionary defines 'Cuffin Season' as the season in which everyone is getting coupled up usually happens when the weather is changing and it is getting cold outside.

I was strolling/scrolling through the web recently when I came across a story about 'cuffin season'. The article was very informative and made me feel my age in an instant. Born in the sixties in Barbados, people from my time and culture have a different term for so-called 'cuffin'. There, the word 'cuffin' is connected to a violent action. In our bajan dialect it meant you were giving somebody a good whooping, which is not far from what is going on during 'cuffin season'. However, in this new context of the word, people are having a good ole time: they both are choosing to be cuffed.

Reading the article, and the rules that had to be adhered to in order for 'cuffin' to be successful, made me realize how turning fifty in a year and half will really be a point of no return for me. Things are moving so fast that it is very hard to keep abreast with every new gadget or hip new term. People like Joe Frazier, Peter Falk (Columbo)and Michael Jackson are no longer with us. Every time a famous or even an infamous person, who played a part in my life experience, dies it focuses my attention on my own aging process even further. Nowadays, not only do I have to deal with Twitter and Stumbleupon, I have to embrace new words which look like old words but mean new hip things.

Fortunately, for me, I will be forced to stay up to date because of my 12 year-old. This makes me even more grateful that I dropped my no-child-for-me-ever rule to become a mother at thirty-six. Whenever my daughter asks me about something that is way out of my league at least I know I have 'the Google' on ‘the internets’.

Google gives folks like me hope and without it I would have never known that 'cuffin' now brings one selected comfort instead of unwanted pain. I just subscribed to Urban Dictionary for the daily word and meaning. A woman needs all the help she can get in these strange new times.

The more things change...