Writing through the hot flash, because sleep is impossible.

I woke up at four-fifteen with another hot flash.  I threw off the covers, leaving only the sheet, but even that was too much, so off it went.  I find it hard to believe that this was the very room that I was shivering in last night.  Leaping in between the cold sheets, squeaking slightly, and needing to wiggle around to try to warm them quicker, the down comforter pulled up around my ears and discreetly tucked under the tops of my shoulders, so that when Don got in bed, the covers wouldn’t fly up and waft fresh cold air under to assault my goose-bumped body. 

It’s amazing to me the extremes in temperature that my body is experimenting with.  All these changes.  It’s like all of a sudden my body realized that it had been sleeping on the job.  Forty-eight year old women weren’t supposed to look like this (that’s my body speaking), and so it’s been working overtime to catch up. 

First off, the skin quality is all wrong, we have to do something about that. Boom, a multitude of tiny creases and lines.  Not just on my face, but the back of my hands, my forearms, and probably everywhere else, but I generally don’t wear my glasses when those other parts are exposed, so I can be blissfully unaware. 

Hmm...and that sprinkling of grey?  That will never do.  Women who have been blessed enough to reach the advanced age of forty-eight have way more grey hair than that.  How shall we deal with that?  I know, give her a crisis. Voila, the friend situation in November.  Poof!  My face is framed in grey.  So much so, that I get surprised, startled when I walk past a mirror.  It’s like it’s me, but it isn’t.  It’s a combination person looking back at me.  I have to look closely to pick me out from the bone structure, the falling jowls, the age spots that have been gracing my face, I have to push all these memories of my mother and grandmother aside that are peering back at me from the mirror, to find the Meg that I know, inside.

And yes, I am aware of the beauty and the miracle of a nice well chosen bottle of hair dye, but my reasons for not dying my hair are two-fold.  First off, because my base hair color is a dark brown, if I started dying it, I’d have to keep dying it, because otherwise my roots would get that two-toned look of an old sweater.  And that would mean I’d have to visit a beauty parlor every three weeks or so to keep it looking decent.  Which is not something I would get around to doing.  It’s hard enough for me to drag myself to get my hair cut every 4-6 months, I can’t even imagine carving out the time to go every three weeks. 

The second reason I’ve chosen not to dye my hair is because, even though my vanity is screaming out, “Dye it!  For god-sakes, dye it! You’ll look ever so much younger.” Is that I worry that if I start down the path of trying to erase the years from my life, my body, (which is a loosing battle, because if we are one of the lucky ones, we’ll get old, and then older, and then die.) Then I won’t be aware of time passing.  It feels like it would be sort of like squeezing my eyes shut so that the Boogie-man won’t be there anymore.  Well I tried that as a kid and as an adult, and guess what, they didn’t go away.  They were still there and did whatever they d_____ well pleased.  So, they didn’t go away, just because I shut my eyes and temporarily erased them.

How I see it is that aging is a blessing.  Many people don’t get the privilege to watch themselves get older, see their children grown and on their own.  Several people I’ve loved have passed when they were around my age, but their children were younger than mine.  My friend, Pat.  She never got to see her daughter grown.

So, here’s the deal.  We each are given a finite amount of days on this planet.  We don’t know how many.  We don’t know when our time will come.  And so, me keeping, not erasing the badges of honor that I have won, earned through worries and loving and tired out caring, and experiencing all the joys and passions and disappointments that are present in everyones life.  For me, even though, sure I like to look “pretty” as much as the next person, I am trying to re-educate myself as to what “pretty” is. 

I am a woman who is aging, and I don’t want to forget that days are passing.  I want to experience all of what life has to offer and wear the proof proudly on my body and face.  This is what a forty-eight year old woman looks like.  And if I am blessed enough to reach my eighties, you’ll see what that looks like as well.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Sunday, March 16, 2008 in Chewing the Fat

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