Age

Herself speaks.

This weekend, while sitting in the salon patiently waiting for the hair dye to banish my gray roots, I perused a high-fashion magazine. It had a photograph of a newly married couple on the front -- a young tattooed pop star (him) and a model and "television personality" (her) (according to Wikipedia). I never made it to the main article about them, though:  I was fascinated by the advertisements.

Page after page after page of expensive couture offerings: clothing in remarkable shapes and fabrics, shoes of impossible height and sparkle, bags and purses that likely cost more than an average mortgage payment, jewels galore. There were some truly beautiful items. Ethereal gowns, meant to be worn by otherworldly creatures, with diadems for the perfectly oval heads balanced on their swanlike necks, and stilettos which would scarcely touch the ground as they moved, dreamlike, through immaculate surroundings.

The one thing that stood out the most:  how very young the models were. There is no doubt that the vast majority of them are not old enough to buy alcohol, or even to vote, and possibly not even to drive. These girls, with their clearly-photoshopped elongated legs, wobbling on the highest of heels, like baby giraffes. Childlike freckles emphasized, teeth that looked as though their adult canines had not yet completely grown in. And yet there they were, painted and airbrushed and posed provocatively, lips open ever so slightly, eyes half-mast, come hither.

Perhaps I am Old -- for it was almost shocking.
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Today as I go about my business, I think about the Beauty and Fashion Industries, and how they train women to be dissatisfied with their appearances. The vast majority of us are not barely-pubescent, lanky and toned adolescents. We likely never were, and certainly never will be again. In my peer group, we are middle-aged, with nascent wrinkles, cellulite, extra perimenopausal pounds that settle staunchly around our waists, and assorted scars of pregnancy and childbirth and midlife medical issues. Gray hair. Sunspots that are not remotely the cute little freckles of the child models. And fatigue, sometimes etched into our skin, our very bones. How can we compete with the visions of the magazines? We cannot.

And so we march forth, doing what we must do as always, performing occasional self-improvement rituals such as dying our hair or rubbing expensive ointments into our skin -- and at the same time, still trying valiantly to love ourselves the way we are. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail; for that yearning to be young and thin and beautiful and alluring is built into our society, and (despite our best efforts to the contrary) almost into our very worth. We are haunted by the seeming value of being young and thin and attractive. What can we do?

Nothing. We can do nothing. It is not ours to have.

The best we can do, it seems, is just to be ourselves. Perhaps if enough of us do so, our collective voices will drown out those that would tell us we are not worthy of love, just the way we are.