When I was in my teens my mother was several years younger than I am now (I’m 54). As a high school student, I was at the beginning of my career as a woman who cares about her appearance while my mother was getting towards the end of hers. We lived in California so it didn’t get very cold even in January, but she had her big winter boots for days when it plunged below 60 degrees F (15.5 C).
My mother would often slip these on quickly and head out the door with her slacks bunched up at the top of the boots. Or maybe one leg would be bunched up and the other would drop down eventually, giving her an uneven look.
At the age of 17 years old I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take a minute to straighten out her trousers. They were middle-aged-woman slacks and the boots were purely functional, so there was no way she was going to look good, but she could have at least looked symmetrical.
Welp! Lately I’ve been wearing my winter boots a lot here in Chicago where we had two weeks of snow-dump this month and now that everything’s melting, I’m still wearing them. And guess how I look? The ends of my trousers get piled up on top of my boots and sometimes one eventually drops down, giving me an uneven look.
I get it now. I’ve clearly ended my career as a woman who cares strongly about her appearance at all times. It just doesn’t matter to me. When I’m out, I’ll see my reflection in a glass storefront and I know I look like a middle-aged woman who doesn’t care about looking perfect, but I still don’t take the time to straighten my slacks because I’m a middle-aged woman who doesn’t care about looking perfect.
What’s remarkable is that at the age of 17 I could not conceive of being careless about my appearance and for decades how I looked mattered to me very much. But at some point in the last ten years I stopped caring about the details, for instance, the detail of my slacks being bunched at the top of my boots.
I have never read The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco, but I had someone read a passage to me and this is part of it. One toy is speaking to another about how being deeply loved eventually makes a toy become “Real.”
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
It’s a stunning metaphor for being loved for who I am, without the distraction of what I physically look like. Maybe as we become old (and being middle-aged is part of oldness — yes, it is), we understand before we consciously realize it that things like physical appearance aren’t nearly as important as we used to think. And we realize that anyone who gets as old as we are who still worries about things like bunched up trousers isn’t worth as much of our time.
So I don’t expect everyone to understand how I can walk around looking like some sloppy, distracted vieja. But at this age I have only so much brain left for everything I still want to do before I’m dead, so fixing my slacks isn’t just low priority. Most of the time it doesn’t make the list at all.
26 Feb 2021
In the last couple of years I have become much more lax about putting on my eye make-up.
I often go to the grocery store without my eye make-up on. I sometimes spend whole weekends without it. I never would have done this in my 20’s and 30’s. But I do still color my hair.
Hear, hear!