Talk Thursday: Cracks

Talk Thursday: Cracks

Crack the Shutters (I love that song,) cracks in the foundation, cracks in the mud of my new room - cracks showing up everywhere. Step on a crack break your mother’s back – I always took that one very seriously when I was young. Now that I am older there are cracks in the façade covering my age.

Really I’m not so worry about growing old, I just want to do it gracefully. Not desperately with a medicine cabinet full of Revelon Spackle and L’ Oreal Bondo, but with a grace that embraces the majority of my cracks and wrinkles. Remember on Little House On The Prairie when someone comments to Mrs. Olson about her crow’s feet? She replies, “Oh no dear those are laugh lines.” And the other person rains on her parade and says something to the effect that “Honey, nothing’s that funny.”

Sad.

Mrs. Olson was a fine looking woman, a bit sour and that she wore on her face, but fine looking just the same. Mrs. Olson was trying to keep a façade, most humans do, women probably more so than men. But then most women don’t attempt the obvious comb over on a thinning hairline. Throw stones? Not me, I’ve got my own thinning hairline and a face full of laugh lines. Plus I have the whole body image problem and a fear of dressing too young.

I begin cracking apart when I try to wrap my mind around what I should look like at 53. Oops! A woman isn’t supposed to reveal her age.

Bull pucky!

I worked damn hard for each one of these 53 years and I’m owning up to every one of them, thank you very much. I do regret the added cracks some of the antics of those 53 years placed on my mother’s face. She didn’t deserve my rough teen-hood. And then those twenty somethings – ack! Could we forget them, pluuueeease?

What should an “ample”, mature, fifty-something woman look like? Gladys Cravits? Marge the Manicurist, or maybe Endora (now I could go there minus the hair style) across our great nation, maturing baby booming women want to know this? I want to know this. The cosmetic ad campaigns on TV try to tell me that I can use their product and look like the lovely young American-Korean woman that walked into their clinic. If I use their product… I can return to my youthful appearance. First, the young woman in the chair is 33 not 53 (I know because she was my daughter’s best friend in grade school) and I do not want to return to my youthful appearance, I’m better looking now – thank you very much.

Don’t’ fall for the “Older women should wear short hair” mantra, shorter hair does look better on me, but as long as your hair is styled, who cares the length? It’s the up keep, maintenance, and “I give a damn about myself” attitude that makes the difference, not the hair length.

Make-up? I wear lots, oh lots, and lots of makeup, I adore eye make up, a little bronzer, and a heavy four or five coats of Mascara, and I’m good to go. Marie Osmond once said, she would never go without her kohl (I love her eyes,) personally I never would go without mascara. No Tammy Faye applications for me, but definitely at the very least a light touch of the Calista application – or yesterday’s application, depending on my energy level and time constraints.

I’m trying to embrace my size – all while losing weight. Dressing appropriately is more the problem. What – I ask, about mature, ample woman says LOUD RED AND PURPLE PAISLEY? What? Who in hell (because Hell is that only place the pattern can be manufactured in resplendent, stretchy polyester) decided large women should plaster giant, neon Oriental poppies across their ample butts? Who? And flowered tops? The flowers usually are big enough to cover one of the girls and look like full casaba melons ready to be harvested off their vine. Crap, if I have to wear that, just give me cut out day-glo pasties instead for heaven’s sake. No woman needs torpedo boobs. The fashion industry is supposed to help us, but seemingly it is only trying to sink us.

Oft times when I start writing a Talk Thursday piece I’ve no clue where I am going. This week is just the same. I was going to write about not seeing the cracks in the foundation of my second marriage and instead I write about the cracks in the façade of my appearance. Who knows?

Sith
Cele