Living leaves a mark
Plus the Prime Day sale for my latest book!
Hi friends,
Recently, one of my daughters kindly informed me that “the lines on your face stay all the time now, even if you’re not smiling.” I laughed at the time - kids are so honest1 - and thanked her for noticing them, I’d earned those lines, I told her. But as I thought about it later, I realized what I heard in her voice was not critique but admiration. She was honouring my lines, not judging them, let alone saying, “Yikes, you should get that sorted out.” It was plain that she liked this about my face and it was her way of telling me so.
After that, I posted a picture of my face on Instagram with this caption, “I’m 45 now and I am gathering the loveliest collection of lines on my face. This is my favourite set: the pronounced lines to the left of my mouth, created by a lifetime of lopsided grins and quirked smiles, now present always. I’ve smiled a bit crookedly my whole life long and now I have the-rest-of-my-life proof. 😍 I like these lines quite a lot, I think they’re beautiful.
What a cool thing it is to get older, eh? It isn’t always easy to witness yourself changing and sure, I have occasional wobbly moments about witnessing my own face or body aging, who doesn’t? but that’s not going to stop me from loving the privilege of it.
When our four kids were tinies, one of our oft-repeated mantras was “we use our words to love each other.” And turns out that mantra translates nicely to this stage for me: I want to use my words to love, too, including loving this body and this face and this vessel for my life.
Practicing it, anyway. There are a million voices telling us something different; it would be nice for our inner voice to be one of love.”
Judging by the content of the comments and all of the tags/DMs/emails I received afterwards, those couple of paragraphs connected with a lot of us. I’m not alone in figuring this out on my feet. So for this week’s newsletter, I thought we could explore it a bit more.
Listen, God bless J.Lo and Jennifer Aniston and any number of “YOU WON’T BELIEVE SHE’S SIXTY!” cover models, but that is not my life story nor is it my priority.2 I don’t really want it, mainly because it looks like a lot more effort than I want to make.3 If someone does, more power to them. I will never crap on anyone’s right to choose what to do with their own body.4
But for me, when I think about how I want aging to look in these coming years, I know that I’m not best served by placing rich women with access to the excellent surgeons in Hollywood and six-hour workout regimens on my Vision Board.5 I’m thinking of the women around me in my real life who are growing in beauty as they grow in years.6 Mostly I think of my mother and my grandmothers, of the many women I admire for living fully within their own stories - famous or not, whose faces are wise and lovely to me.
Many of us don’t have the luxury of not looking like what we’ve been through. Like many of us, I’ve also been deeply shaped by my own journey with chronic illness, the seasons when my body was beyond my control or cooperation, and the ways I’ve had to make peace with or accept the limitations of capacity and capability that I have now (and how this may change in the coming years).
We control a lot less than the manifestation girlies or prosperity gospel-ers will admit. They’ll learn that in their own time, just as we did. It’s the kind of grief that bears gifts.
There has to be another way to talk about changing or aging bodies without angst and shame and comparison. I want to model something different for my four kids.7 (Maybe I just want them to keep that tone of admiration for wrinkles.) And yet I want to be alongside others who are candid about the realities of this season, too because it isn’t easy either. It’s a whole deal.
I am not really waiting for our culture to change here: the powers and principalities of our age make too much money off women hating themselves for there to be meaningful change. I suppose we’ll just have to go off-script ourselves, turn to trusted experts or sages, make it up as we go along, and share the things we learn the hard way.
It’s like anything worth doing, I guess.