A friend from college just died from cancer. She was in her twenties. She was three years younger than me. Too young.
My mom doesn’t color her hair.
I have at least fifteen white hairs now on my scalp. I pluck them when I find them. I also have at least one white eyebrow hair.
My co-worker gets weekly facials, bi-monthly hair color, is stunning for a woman of any age, and talks constantly about needing a face lift.
Female movie stars in their forties look twenty-five.
Female movie stars in their sixties and seventies look cut-and-pasted and have plastic wrinkles.
I didn’t always think thirty was young.
When I was eight I thought I was old and all grown up.
When I turned twenty five, I got depressed because it was all “downhill from here.”
I used to starve myself because I thought I wasn’t pretty enough and that’s why guys didn’t ask me out.
There’s never a week at work where I’m not the brunt of a joke about being young or thin (I am both, according to my associates).
My baby sister has brought it to my attention several times that I have wrinkles on my face.
My parents raised five daughters in a home without a scale. Or a television.
Nearly every woman I have videotaped or photographed has me remove from the photo gallery multiple images where she doesn’t like how she looks.
Some of them don’t even let me take their picture in the first place.
My mom always says, “Take my picture now. This is as good as it’s going to get!”
My grandmother told me the best years of her life have been since she turned seventy. She feels the most confident, comfortable, and happy now, that she’s ever felt in life. (She does not have Alzheimer’s).
EVERY magazine cover is “photoshopped.” So much that familiar, stunning, naturally arresting faces are often nearly unrecognizable. NONE OF THEM really look like that. The ones who look close - being fit and beautiful is their full-time profession. Meaning, they do things to be fit and beautiful Full Time.
Most women around the world worry about whether they will have enough water to give their children today. They don’t have enough water to drink, let alone bathe, brush their teeth, or wash their face and hair twice daily.
In America, unless you are physically blind, you cannot drive home from work, pick up groceries, or read the news without being bombarded with pressure.
Beauty pressure.
Youth pressure.
You Are Inadequate pressure.
“She let herself go.”
“You can eat that; you don’t have to worry about what you eat.”
“You’re too young to know who that is.”
“Just wait, you’ll have aches and pains too one day, you’ll understand.”
“Beauty is from within.”
“The best years of my life began when I turned seventy.”
“The Lord looks at the heart.”
“The things that really matter can’t be purchased.”
“The best friends love you for who you are.”
How do I teach my heart that IT is what matters? How do I live an example so that my younger sisters accept and love their bodies, their faces? How to I teach my daughters, my sons, to shut out the faces and bodies and jokes and snide comments and innocent comments and You Are Inadequate pressure and listen in to Truth?
So that I don’t have to hear my five year old niece say, “I can’t have that,” to ice cream, because she heard someone else say it. (She’s thin. She wasn’t talking about healthy eating. In context, it was clearly a conversation about weight and body image that someone else had parroted. It could easily have been me.)
We are here. We live in this world. We live in this culture. I don’t plan to live on a farm, isolating my family from every influence except the crops and animals. I live in a world where our home will have a mirror, a computer. Where we will stand in line to buy groceries. Where we will drive with un-tinted windows down the billboard-crazed highways. Where people around us will say unfortunate things about faces, bodies, youth, aging. Where I will say the wrong thing too.
It always makes me sad when a friend in her eighth month of pregnancy talks about how she feels fat. So help me God, I will never say that. With His grace, may I never think that. The minute it comes out of her mouth, I have JUST been thinking how breathtaking she is. How incomparably gorgeous she is with her glowing skin, her expectant countenance, her beautiful round womb cradling her child.
And the day she brings that child into the world, disheveled, makeup-less, sweaty, breathless, exhausted, she has NEVER been more beautiful. I have seen these faces, and I am convinced.
And decades later, with her hair sprinkled with the crown of age, and her face lined with the stories she has lived, perhaps then, she is yet more beautiful.
My grandmother; my mom's mom
Today on the bus a woman entered and I first saw her hair. Gorgeous, silky, neatly tied up, shiny, lush, white hair. Her face when she turned was full of stories. Somehow, she looked young. She looked young and alive and vibrant. It startled me really, and I wondered, what was inside her that was giving her countenance so much life?
I have heard men talk about the pressure they also face, different, but the same. But I have only been a woman, and can only speak from my heart about the common experience of womanhood that I share.
It is a quest in which I have many questions and few answers. And with the best job a parent can do, we have not, will not, remove our children, ourselves, from the bombarding lies that surround. All it took for my sister was a single comment from a ballet teacher. All it took for me was wanting a man to ask me out. All it took for my sister was a lack of support in a stressful life. All it took for my sister was a fight with mono. All it took for my sister was our parent’s appropriate minor weight loss. All it took for my sister was her wide feet. None of us has been fully exempt, although we are still alive and fighting.
How to live free. How to live confident. How to live fully. How to live unashamed. How to live the Truth that says who we are, what matters, the Truth that sets us free.
“Charm can mislead and beauty soon fades. The woman to be admired and praised is the woman who lives in the Fear-of-God.”
Proverbs 31:30 The Message
tags: beauty, women, woman, aging, old age, youth, self image, am i beautiful, at i too thin, am i too fat, obsession, eating disorder, anorexia, help for,
