“I’d just like to age gracefully,” so many women I know have said. What exactly do we mean by that? Does it mean being completely ‘natural’, leaving our hair uncolored when it loses its pigment? The Menopausal Goddesses discussed ‘shades of gray’ hair in one of our meetings. We realized that while most women we knew (including ourselves) waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of allowing our hair to go gray as a sign of graceful aging, these same women all colored their hair. When queried why, they responded that silvery, moonlight hair is beautiful, yet so many of them/us ended up with a muddy or yellowish gray. And that’s a color that we just don’t want to see in the mirror looking back at us!
Does aging gracefully mean celebrating our wrinkles, without intervention? Well, hardly. We run the gamut from merely tolerating them to trying to smooth them out with creams, emollients, injections, or lifts.
Upon reflection, maybe aging gracefully simply means being comfortable in our own skin, whether wrinkled or smooth. Perhaps aging is graceful when you like yourself enough that you’d enjoy having yourself as a friend.
Unafraid, unashamed, unapologetic - most of the time anyway. For the other times, we have our girlfriends to help us through.
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