Aging Gracefully - Shades of Gray

“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.

Hitting the Pause Button (Menopause Button, That Is)

Just about the time that ‘miss’ became ‘ma’am’ and compliments took a backhanded turn, (gee, you look good.......for your age), Menopause burst through the door like an unwanted guest. As it turned out, big M had come for an extended stay.

She is not a low maintenance, easy-to-be-with visitor. On the contrary, she has been intrusive as hell. She fully disrupted my life and that of my spouse. The only good news? Her sisters were moving in with my girlfriends.

So a group of us would-be goddess girlfriends have bonded together, trying to find a way to deal with the new guest taking up residence in every facet of our lives. Meeting for the last 3+ years, we’ve laughed, cried, cursed, and celebrated. We needed sanctuary from the profusion and confusion of information flooding bookshelves, media, and the web. Wisdom is what we sought. Real women sharing experience, sister to trusted sister, has helped us make some sense of the changes, and allowed for an uneasy truce with Big M. And now we are reaching out to expand our community of midlife goddesses through this blog, because the most important thing we’ve learned is that WE CANNOT DO THIS ALONE! (Soon to come: a book of our adventures confronting not only menopause, but midlife and beyond. Stay tuned.) Be sure to visit our main blog site at menopausegoddessblog.org.