When I was in college I imagined 47 as a really advanced age. Like, social security lay just around the corner, and centenarian status would arrive a year or two after that. My mom was only in her early 40s when I was in college, and she was plenty old by my 19-year-old lights.
I thought that I was in a narrow window of attractiveness, and I worried constantly that I wasn't pretty enough. I worried about my hair and my skin and my teeth. And oooohhhh, did I worry about my conversational skills. Was social anxiety a formal diagnosis in 1989? Because if it was in the late-80s DSM, they should have put my picture next to the entry.
And I thought I was supposed to be at my peak.
I didn't know that I would eventually figure out how to de-fuzz my hair. I didn't think my skin would ever clear up. I scowled in most pictures, because I thought that smiling made my face look fat.
It's true that gravity and sun have changed the look of my limbs, but I appreciate the muscles they have developed and the miles they have carried me. I no longer have a 19-year-old's hands, but these 47-year-old hands can knock together a pie crust and settle crying babies and play guitar comfortably and toss off thousand-word angst-free essays. I don't wear bikinis here in 2017, but this is an acknowledgment of something that was also true in 1989: I don't like wearing bikinis. I have never felt as comfortable in my own skin as I do here in my late 40s.
It helps that I am married to a man who finds me beautiful and tells me so regularly. It helps that I am mostly out of the phase of life in which men looked me over appraisingly. (It happened to me recently -- at church, for crying out loud -- and I shuddered. Blech!) Today I was scanning pictures for some college friends and remembering viscerally the anxiety that I felt when they were taken.
I'm glad I'll never be 19 again. Fear not your forties, my younger friends.
Recent Comments