The Beauty of Aging

When we were kids, my dad would say that one of us was from the mailman, one from the milkman, and one from the bread man. (Yes, I’m old enough to remember having our milk and bread delivered to the door.) While we may have been too young to grasp the biological implications of such a scenario, we somehow recognized this was my father’s way of pointing out the vast differences between his daughters. It was true, redhead, brunette, and blonde, my sisters and I could easily have belonged to three different families. (My brother gets a free pass, distinctive by default, as the only boy.)

Looking beyond physical traits, my oldest sister inherited my mother’s creative genes. She didn’t just make her own clothes, she designed and created the patterns as well. She could draw, sing, sew, crochet, and decorate a room like nobody’s business. And on top of that, she was brilliant—a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores.

Next in line was my middle sister, who inherited my father’s athletic genes. She was the first to be picked, when the neighborhood kids were choosing teams for kickball, freeze tag, and stick hockey. She could run faster, climb higher, and throw a ball farther than most boys we knew. It’s no wonder she was recruited for all the high school sports available to girls in the early 70s.

By the time I was born, the artistic, scholastic, and athletic genes had already been doled out. And even if they hadn’t, I was born with what today they would call Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), or Dyspraxia, previously known as Clumsy Child Syndrome. I wasn’t good at riding a bike, catching a ball, or jumping rope. I often cut corners too closely and ran into walls. Art was out of the question, for fear I would make a mess—piano lessons a bust, when my fingers couldn’t connect to the right notes.

Without an obvious identifiable talent, my parents homed in on my natural blonde curls as my biggest asset. They enrolled me in modeling classes and encouraged me to focus on my posture and practice my smile. I learned to walk down a runway (luckily there were no walls), apply make-up, and style my hair, occasionally fashioning clothes for local department stores.

In short, I grew up believing my talent was my looks. Not that I was particularly beautiful. I wasn’t. And not that I wasn’t smart or creative. I was. It just took me years to figure it out that the measure of my worth had nothing to do with my outer layer and everything to do with who I was inside.

Even decades later, having enjoyed an award-winning career and served in leadership positions for worthy causes, at times, an internal voice finds a reason to criticize my appearance. A wiry hair growing from my chin, a billboard advertising body sculpting, the dangling skin under my arm so plentiful a small child could swing from it. These are the things that can awaken my latent “beauty gene” to cast unwarranted judgement.

I don’t blame my parents for focusing on my appearance. No doubt, they had my best interests at heart. It was a popular thing to do in the 60s, with an emerging child beauty pageant industry and I'm sure at the time, I liked the attention.

Six decades later, would their choice for me have been different? I'd like to think it would, but I'm not convinced attitudes about beauty have changed all that much.

It's still a challenge for women to push back on the unrealistic beauty expectations imposed by society and sometimes by those in our inner circle as well. While trends have moved from transformational surgical techniques to minimally invasive natural procedures, the rate of body altering continues to rise—with double the number of procedures today, over that of 20 years ago. So, what weapon is strong enough to reverse decades of objectification and fight a multi-billion-dollar beauty industry?

Words. What we tell ourselves. What we teach our daughters. Words are our greatest defense.

As years collect on my body, I now see my wrinkles like rings of a tree, each with its own significance. The crevices across my forehead signify I’m a thinker. The lines around my mouth reveal my love of laughter. Stretch marks across my belly boast of the two beautiful babies I birthed. And my bunions are proof I’ve put many a mile on these feet—hiking trails, walking dogs, running after grandchildren.

Bruised shoulders and stubbed toes are witness to the fact I still walk into walls. But I’ve learned that being a little clumsy doesn’t stop me from painting a picture, writing a story, or running my own business—talents I’ve discovered over the years, none of which have anything to do with outward beauty.

And as for my sisters and I, let’s just say we’re looking a lot more alike these days.