"A Soft Brown Woman in a Flowery Dress..."You and I Are Too Old Not to Deeply Appreciate Who and What We Are Right Now

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

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How watching a beloved friend age taught me about myself

My treasured friend Sonja sauntered through the exit door at the airport last night, her newly-greying hair framing her perpetually-youthful face (she’s in her early sixties). A grey flowery dress flowed around her soft body as she sauntered lazily towards me, a happy grin on her face.

She was a vision. Always was, likely always will be.

Sonja is Black. Her café au lait skin has refused to age. We’ve been close friends now for nearly forty years. A disastrous visit to a beauty salon cured her of hair color. She giggled as she said that her greying hair had finally humbled her. She still looks twenty years younger.

What’s to be humbled? She is gorgeous.

These days, her once nearly stick-thin body with its 24” waist looks comfortable, the result of a marriage and a love affair centered around food and affection. She also looks happy. Like many of us, she misses her tiny waist.

But she’s happy. And she is beautiful. As she is. Not “she would be beautiful if she dropped thirty pounds.” She’s beautiful now.

How lovely it might be if we could be so appreciative of our friends, and then turn that same appreciation onto ourselves. They look good at that weight, but I need to drop another ten/twenty/thirty.

Really now.

Watching Sonja age/not age has been an education in how rarely I allow myself to celebrate my changing body. I value powerful muscles and lean sinew; part of that is my family. A much larger part of that is how badly I have wanted love.

My family equated weight gain with severe moral failure; that’s a reflection of society, and how deeply embedded such false ideas about body size are.

I’ve also paid a terrible price for desperately wanting to be thin. Too many of us still do. These days I am working harder at being strong and fit, having allowed myself the grace that being 118 lbs is neither healthy nor does it serve me as I age towards eighty. Nature likes us to be a little more padded; fat is an organ as essential as our lungs. Not enough of it can be difficult if we have physical challenges.

Sonja’s husband adores her beyond measure, as she is. I suspect that curling against that soft body at night is immeasurably better than being jammed against sharp hip bones. Do you want the soft mattress or to sleep against hard metal springs?

The magnificent Ursula Le Guin, as she aged into her own kind of perfection, wrote this about the body and our search for perfection. Dancers, because of who they are and what they do with their bodies, are their own kind of perfection, she mused. But what is perfection?

Perfection is “lean” and “taut” and “hard” — like a boy athlete of twenty, a girl gymnast of twelve. What kind of body is that for a man of fifty or a woman of any age? “Perfect”? What’s perfect? A black cat on a white cushion, a white cat on a black one . . . A soft brown woman in a flowery dress . . . There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.

Ursula Le Guin

That last line is like a dagger in the heart of a lifetime of self-loathing. After decades of beating myself up for not being thin and perfect and therefore not worth loving, aka punishment, let me repeat these words of freedom:

As I’ve aged, some if not much of the terrible judgment I’ve leveled at myself has also softened in the same way as Sonja’s lovely body. The time I used to spent honing my biceps and building leg strength was valuable for how well that strength has served me.

The larger question now, as I move more deeply into my seventies day by day, is how to continue to work on my strength without having it be a form of punishment for my faults and imperfections.

My best friend Melissa and I were speaking about this today, and it comes down to this: when will we treat our precious bodies with the same love and care that we would treat our dearest friends, our children, our beloved animals? Are we not the most deserving, so that we may cascade that great gratitude onto others?

I want to find a flowing, flowery dress. I would love to walk like a leopard- the way Sonja does- down the sidewalk with soft silk flowing over the curves of my body like a song.

How are you already perfect? Let’s count the ways.

Let’s play.

Photo by Nyegi on Unsplash

Heartfelt thanks for joining me on this incredible journey. The more I watch my friends age, the more I appreciate my own process. If this story resonated please consider

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