Last night I was coloring my hair to prepare myself for the “fall look”. As I was coloring it I was thinking to myself how much money I have spent over the years doing maintenance to myself or attempting some self-preservation of my aging body. I have probably spent so much on facial creams, moisturizers and oils that I should in all fairness own stock in Proctor & Gamble. I have colored my hair so many times that to be honest I can’t remember without looking at old pictures what my natural hair color even was. To be perfectly truthful I’m actually surprised that I haven’t woken up one morning with all my hair on my pillow where it has fallen out from all the colorings, treatments and products I have used over the span of the last 30 years. I wish I had nickel for every ounce of Cajun Shrimp nail polish that I have applied over the past few years in an attempt to make my hands look youthful and attractive.
Those ladies Miss Clairol and Cover Girl have become my best friends over the years and honestly I probably don’t appreciate them as much as I should, because without them I’m fairly certain I could make a freight train take a dirt road with how I would probably look without all their years of their support and therapy.
I don’t know why it is so hard to just age gracefully in a dignified manner without all the hoopla of chemicals, foundations and lotions. I think that surely the Lord intended for us women to strive to look good or else all these products wouldn’t be out there. But sometimes I think that we tend to go overboard. I can look in the mirror and see a gray hair that stands out like a Baptist in a liquor store. I go into panic mode and the next thing you know there’s an emergency trip to Wal-Mart or Walgreen’s at 10:00 at night to make a made dash for a box of color before anyone sees that pesky little varmint that has taken up residency on my head!
I have been blessed fortunately through good genetics on my mother and my father’s side when it comes to being almost wrinkle free. I shudder to think though how I will react when I wake up one morning and have a well defined example of “crow’s feet” around my eyes. I will probably just go back to bed and mourn for a day or two. It’s probably a good thing that I will never be able to afford to live in the world of Botox and liposuction because I’m fairly certain I would probably feel the need to require it more often than not.
In actuality, I don’t know if we (as women) do it to ourselves because we want to look good so that we will feel better about ourselves or if we do it because we feel like society has mandated it for us to do it in order to look better for them. Either way – I think that it’s important that we worry to a certain degree how we look not just to the public but in the mirror as well. I see some women (mainly in Wal-Mart) and I think to myself “bless her – didn’t she ask someone how she looked?” Then there are others that just plainly don’t care as they come to shop wearing SpongeBob pajama pants and a Dale Earnhardt t-shirt from her significant other’s closet. Heck I felt so bad the time I went in with my skirt tucked in my pantyhose with all my glory showing that I didn’t go back for a month and trolled the “People of Wal-Mart” website 3 times a week nervously anticipating that my hind end would be on there (literally).
So as I sit here thinking about how much time, energy and money I have invested in trying to age gracefully and I wonder if I have aged with grace; because that is what’s important. I think it was best said by Robert Brault when he said “Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.”
