Something to Chew On...

Maybe it's because it's almost swim suit season or because I'm still learning how to embrace the "new me" after 2 kids. Or perhaps it's because I have a lot of friends who are looking at themselves in the mirror, discovering gray hairs, inspecting whispers of wrinkles caressing their faces, lamenting the size of their thighs, their waist, their butts or their boobs.

I read the following and found it refreshing because it reminded me that while change is hard to embrace we often spend a whole lot of effort trying to fit ourselves into what we once were instead of using that same energy to learn how to accept where we are and who we are now. I hope I can be one of those women who embrace each new stage with grace...I'm still chewing on this one.

Excerpt from Plan B further thoughts on faith by Anne Lamott

“I was at a wedding the other day with a lot of women in their twenties and thirties. Many wore sexy dresses, their youthful skin aglow. And even though I was twenty to thirty years older than they, a littler worse for wear, a little tired, and overwhelmed by the loud music, I was smiling.

     I smiled with a secret smile of pleasure in being older, fifty plus change, which can no longer be considered extremely late youth, or even early middle age. But I would not give back a year of life I’ve lived.

    Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imaged for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don’t love—until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach—but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.

    Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it’s such a blessing that I’m not left to my own devices. I have amazing friends. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I’ve learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I’d give up all this for a flatter belly? Only about a third of the time.

    I still have terrible moments when I despair about my body—time and gravity have not made various parts of it higher and firmer. But those are just moments now—I used to have years when I believed I was more beautiful if I jiggled less, if all parts of my body stopped moving when I did. But I know two things now that I didn’t at thirty: That when we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was 127^th on the list of what mattered on this earth. And that I am not going to live forever. Knowing these things has set me free.

    I am thrilled—ish—for every gray hair and sore muscle, because of all the friends who didn’t make it, who died too young of AIDS and breast cancer. I’m decades past my salad days, and even past the main course: maybe I’m in my cheese days—sitting atop the lettuce leaves on the table for a while now with all the other cheese balls, but with much nutrition to offer, and still delicious. Or maybe I’m in my dessert days, the most delicious course. Whatever you call it, much of the stuff I used to worry about has subsided—what other people think of me, and of how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least eventually. It’s a huge relief….

    I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had swum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert. So this informs how I live now.

    Younger women worry that their memories will begin to go. And you know what? They will. Menopause has not increased my focus and retention as much as I’d been hoping. But a lot is better-off missed. A lot is better not gotten around to.

     I know many of the women who were at the wedding fear getting older, and I wish I could gather them together, and give them my word of honor that every one of my friends loves being older, loves being in her forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. My aunt Gertrude is eighty-five and leaves us behind in the dust when we hike. Look, my feet hurt some mornings, and my body is less forgiving when I exercise more than I am used to. But I love my life more, and me more. I’m so much juicier. And as that old saying goes, it’s not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often. And that feels like heaven to me."