There’s no doubt about it. Beauty is fleeting. I don’t mind, really. I welcome aging. It’s interesting to me to see both God’s sense of humor and the strange new beauty that is born of the midlife merry-go-round. Our looks change, but so do our attitudes about our looks. Those of us that can agree with God that He is in charge and we are not can fare well through the inevitable, whether or not we receive the assistance of lasers and knives.
But then you have The Friends descended from Job’s friends. The ones that should never go to school to become paramedics. They would stand over you as your half dead body is in a ditch full of water where you are 10 seconds away from drowning and say things like, “Man, this is bad. I don’t see how you’re gonna make it.” They are the critics that can’t handle things, including watching your girlhood fade into the menopausal mess it has become. You know you’d benefit from new friends, but they know too much. You have history. And heck, they’re getting ugly too, so you feel sorry that they wouldn’t find anyone else who’d love them like you do.
Tammy Wynette was right. I’ve been agreeing with her for years that sometimes it IS hard to be a woman. Recently, I had been so busy I barely looked in the mirror but still managed to throw myself together for any meeting or event. While at one particular meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting a lady who gave me a helpful hint for me to quit using that big black pencil to draw in my eyebrows. That it was too much. And over the top. And I look ridiculous. I didn’t have the heart to tell her those were the REAL ONES. I simply hit beauty 9-1-1 on my phone and scheduled a wax.
The next week, I was sitting down at a ladies luncheon and another friendly acquaintance was standing there talking to me about all things life when she abruptly interjected…you know you can get help for those roots. I asked her if she had seen my EYEBROWS. Then I proceeded to just bleach my whole head of hair blonde.
Everything shifts during the menopause years. I took a picture of my stomach and texted it to my OBGYN asking whether this is NORMAL?!! She said absolutely! Not to worry!!! It’s called menopause belly whereas it used to be flat but now the L is silent. I didn’t want to know what her response would be if I told her that now I’m also clumsy.
Recently, I got so excited doing The Hustle that I danced my own toenail off when my right heel kicked my left toenail. Let me not misspeak. It wasn’t completely off. It was still attached by a few millimeters. So kind of off, but still kind of on. I pushed it back on like one of the old Lee press on nails of my youth and I painted that baby pink. I was looking fine with my new blonde hair, big black eyebrows, and big pink toenail.
This lasted only until I attended a wedding reception where I was dancing with an overzealous dance partner when his right foot and my left collided. Later that evening, I met up with some real dancers at a regional event with a big ugly white toe. In my purse was my hot pink toenail that I had saved from the wedding, God rest its soul. I brought it to my dance partner hoping he could do some Superglue Surgery on it, but when I pulled it out of my purse and handed it to him he just shook his head in a way that let me know my toenail was no more.
At the end of the night, we all sat around and showed each other our foot injuries and missing toenails then talked about how dance has helped us to battle our midlife mishaps.
It’s funny how we don’t really think too much about our own decline until someone happens to point it out for us. I walked away from that luncheon that day and all I could hear in my head was – Who told you that you were naked? For at the source of that comment from Genesis is condemnation, itself condemned, and that is not God’s design for his daughters.
As women, the world requires a little too much of us right now. Without the self-confidence to accept who we are in Christ, we could fall apart underneath all the added pressures of perfection in every way, including beauty, career, raising kids who receive scholarships, having the prettiest pet. It’s all too much.
A colleague of mine recently completed her MBA in 12 months despite having a high-powered career that requires frequent travel. When she received her diploma, she left some amazing advice for all of those coming behind her:
“It took me a while to write this. I failed many exams, I dropped a class, I skipped studying on many courses, I made 2 C’s (the max you can make) some nights I forgot I had an exam, some days it was easier to just take it and say screw it, and some days I just didn’t wanna do anything. I wrote good papers & bad papers. I scored more lows than I did highs, but… I graduated.
I say all this to say- I didn’t aim to be a perfect student, my job didn’t care what grades I made- I didn’t force myself to be a straight A student but I survived & you will to! My mental health was more important & I always made it a priority so I slept, ignored, but I didn’t give up.
So shoutout to the students that did JUST enough.”
That wasn’t all she wrote. Perhaps the most poignant phrase of her entire message was the following quote: “Give yourself some damn grace.”
Sorry for the expletive, but it represents the Hell that woman are putting themselves through to survive in roles for which we were never designed, but ready to step in and take on when the need arises, even as our thyroids abandon us and estrogen plays its cruel joke.
So, yesterday I went to my group gym class. I felt like the instructor might have been profiling me when she kept looking at me during dips and yelling for more. I think she was giving me the side-eye and wondering if it was the fried chicken I ate or purely menopause. All I could think was, “Is it hot in here?”
In the month that Barbie returned to pop culture at almost 85 years old, a rural school board miraculously decided to change their stance on sending students home if they showed up to school with anything other than their natural hair color after a local judge declared that classroom teachers would also be required to wear their own natural hair color. That de-escalated quickly.
Women have wanted to be beautiful far longer than Barbie could have ever influenced a generation. Aging, while a certainty, is not the real issue women are facing, though. The real issue occurs when fleeting beauty exposes a woman to her true self and she finds that at her inner core, she has no reverential fear of God.
I would agree with my colleague Lacy Lace of Dallas that we women need to give ourselves more grace, but we also need to refute the condemning tongues and remember the One True Source of our divine beauty who will never abandon us. Keep dancing like others wish they weren’t watching. And, above all, keep in step with the pursuit of noble things. That is the beauty that can never be taken.
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