Wrinkled Beauty
Written by Hinda Rochel Anolick
Eventually, if you live long enough, your body ages.
Your face wrinkles. You get skin tags and age spots. Your body wiggles and jiggles where it never wiggled and jiggled before.
You get called “grandma” by a stranger.
No one cards you anymore.
“But looks don’t matter!” you tell yourself, along with all those lovely phrases: “You are only as old as you feel” or “Beauty is only skin deep” or “Age is but a number.”
As if, when you look into a mirror, or rise stiffly from the couch, you can believe such things.
There are many things we do owe the world, many obligations we need to fulfill. But looking beautiful isn’t one of them.
Not when the world is full of compliments to the person who “doesn’t look their age” and where thirty-year-old actors play the parts of fifty year olds. Where women insist that this or that treatment plan, face cream, diet, is what keeps them looking young and beautiful. “Look at me.” Or when program after program, story after story, shows the old woman as the woman who is evil, corrupted, jealous. There is Snow White, and then there is the Wicked Stepmother.
At some point we can’t pretend anymore that it is the lighting that is making us look old, or that with this or that makeup we will look 10 years younger!!!! (All those exclamation points).
And it hurts.
Especially when youthfulness was something that accompanied you most of your life.
People who are born with physical deformities, who suffered accidents when young, who have been stricken with a disease or disorder that has stripped them of their looks, know how cruel the world is to those who aren’t beautiful. They have, if they’ve become successful and happy in life, learned to rely on other measures of self-love. They’ve become strong in ways that most of us have never considered. Aging requires us to do the same.
Of course, there are surgeons, but like all surgery, this comes with risks; makeup artists and stylists, who can help us put our best foot forward; photographers who know how to make the lighting work (as well as Photoshopping what lighting won’t work on).
At the end of the day though, the makeup comes off, the clothes come off, and we are left with ourselves.
So go look in the mirror at yourself after a shower. Go look at the whole of you. What do you see? Who do you see? And how can you love who you are looking at?
The first step is to realize we have never owed the world our physical beauty. We don’t owe the world a young-looking face. There are many things we do owe the world, many obligations we need to fulfill.
But looking beautiful isn’t one of them.
Now look at yourself again. See the wrinkles, the grey – or white, or silver – streaks in your hair, the marks on your stomach. Does your stomach pouch out? Do your arms jiggle? Do you have a bit of a turkey neck? Look at yourself again.
You do not owe the world physical beauty. You don’t owe that to yourself either.
Now close your eyes.
Imagine you are in a museum, and there is a picture of an old woman. She looks just like you, sitting, naked, on a stone by a cool stream. There are trees all about her, their leaves of all shades of green. Grass carpets the ground around her, and here and there are flowers: blues, reds, yellows. You can tell there is a breeze blowing as her hair is being lifted, just slightly. The sun streams down over her shoulder, warming her skin. One hand dips into the water.
What do you know about this woman? Could you tell from this picture how many children she has nurtured, taught, loved? Whether she is married, widowed, divorced, or never married at all?
Can you tell, by looking at this picture, how many tears she has dried with those age-spotted hands? Or how many tears she has wiped from her own face? Tears of laughter, tears of joy, as well as tears of sorrow.
Can you tell whether she loves popcorn or salmon? Does she read only books on philosophy or science? Or is her preference thrillers or trashy romance?
Is her voice soft? Can she carry a tune? Does she knit or crochet? Does she pray? And if and when she does, what does she pray for?
Open your eyes, and see you. Not the physical, but all those other parts of you that matter, that bring beauty and joy to the world. Beauty of the heart, the mind, the soul.
Beauty that God sees in us, and marks us with lines of worry and joy.
Beauty that is the real you.
You may not be Snow White any longer, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve become the Wicked Stepmother.
Maybe you are the Fairy Godmother, the Wise Woman, dispensing gentle advice to her younger charge.
And once you have learned to love the true you, help other women, other girls, see their true selves as well.
When complimenting a woman, or even a young girl, consider your words. Is it her looks you are focused on?
Or her humor, her intelligence, her kindness.
It isn’t wrinkled but beautiful. It isn’t beautiful but wrinkled. It is wrinkled and beautiful.
Wrinkled of body, beautiful of heart, mind, and soul.
Which is the beauty that doesn’t become dust.
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