On Gumballs, Divorce, Hair Dye and Resilience - the Complexity of Being a Wrinkled Girl

I am the one nobody notices, strolling along water's edge at the Jersey Shore in July.  I am a  body of energy at the mall on Black Friday, walked passed and bumped into, but never seen. I am the woman the Verizon guy can absolutely see straight through. I am invisible. I am that fifty- something lady.  

But here is a secret the beach-goers, the shoppers and the cable man will never know: There among them is a woman who is every age that she ever was. For I am the six year old who loves the bright color and clank of gumballs.  I'm the teen who dances, alone in her room. I'm the twenty- two year old who works at being mysterious and the thirty year old longing for a man's hands to hold her "like a bunch of flowers".*  I am the forty-eight year old who dyes away fear with a box of  Loreal hair color. I am the fifty- four year old still standing after the cataclysmic collapse of a 29 year marriage. I am invincible (my spirit at least).  I am a wrinkled girl.

 I am not speaking multiple personality here - nothing that scary. But who I was, once- upon- a- time, is still right here with me, filtering life through all those precious perspectives. Some women are not so lucky, and lose touch with "their girl", the separation making them brittle and stiff -lipped, and well,  just old. How wonderful if each one of us could, at will, summon up that girl again, and twirl with her on a summer's night, squealing over sparklers and lightening bugs alike.

I am so grateful that "the girl " who started my journey, has stayed by my side all these many years. And oh how the years have added up! I have tried again and again to savor it all, to make the great stages of life last. But no matter how closely I paid attention, no matter how hard I tried to hold onto time, it has melted away like cotton candy in a clenched fist.  I have only recently come to accept that there is not one thing I can do about it.  So, I'm loosening my grasp, and in sweet surrender,  I open up my hands - the very hands that played jax with my sister, and embroidered my "dungarees", the same hands that accepted the promise of forever in a wedding band, the same hands that tenderly tickled my babies, the hands that have now gone spotty, taking on an odd, reptilian quality.
 

But it is with these hands, these blessed reptilian hands, that I intend to blog my fifty-something heart out. We women of  "a certain age" are so much more complex than any  outward appearance reveals. I want to shine some light on this in a personal way, illuminating the everyday, reflecting on the bittersweet wonder of it all.
 

For someone who has never been talkative by nature, I am beginning to realize that there is much to say. So, for all the wrinkled girls and the wrinkled girls yet to be, that happen upon this space,  I'm sharing some insight, and eagerly awaiting yours - because we are never too old to learn or be inspired by one another.  And for any man who loves a wrinkled girl, or someday might, I hope that by offering a glimpse of my heart,  you will be inclined to hold hers, all the more gently.  





 


* Carly Simon -The Right Thing To Do  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jypWPiDyqP8&feature=related