41 years ... young?

It's my birthday today and I feel as old as dirt.

It's hard, I think, for an American woman tuned in to popular culture, to age gracefully. We're so bombarded with images of 15 year old "women" -- women? -- wearing $4,000 Marc Jacobs coats and $600 Manolo Blahniks -- like nature, in her infinite irony, would ever ALLOW you to look like a 15-year-old, once you can actually afford outfits like that!

You know, I'm as vain and concerned with appearances and impressions as the next person (who can't resist looking at all those fashion magazines at the check-out counter at Safeway, dangit!) So what's a gal like me to do, when the media hold out images of "womanhood" that are unattainable (without Botox and plastic surgery) and can barely qualify as "legal", age-wise, anyway?

I have to admit, though, that despite my struggles to be truly, deeply okay with the wrinkles around my eyes, in my usual try-to-find-a-positive-reframe kind of way, I am really enjoying letting my natural hair color grow in -- gray hair and all. It's the new, mature me... and also, the first time I've been totally au naturel in the tress department since, oh, I dunno... maybe 1983, when I first misted my blonde, high-school-girl locks with drug-store hydrogen peroxide and tanned in the Santa Cruz sun, hoping to be the perfect, cheerleading, teenage California blonde. I managed the cheerleading, teenage California blonde part of that dream; never quite did make it to perfect, though.

It's been almost surreal to realize, after all these many years, that I'm actually pretty darn blonde even without the help of salon professionals, albeit a pretty darn ASHY blonde. And there's enough gray sprouting up, especially at the front hairline, to actually be sorta interesting looking. Maybe I'll get to perfect someday yet! Aging perfectly, maybe? Perfectly okay to be me.

Now, I'm debating whether to cut off the chin-length bob I've been growing out for a year. I've a yen to get something really wild and artsy done with my hair - like cutting one inch "Amelie" bangs into a choppy shag. I'm about ready to need glasses again for the first time since the miracle of LASIK made me lens-free six or seven years ago, so why not just spin out entirely and get funky with the hair and glasses, both, eh?

Interesting, isn't it? I'm 41 today, and feel as old as dirt... but the mundane silliness that occupies my mind in this particular, freeze-frame moment -- hairdos, and style, and whether or not glasses can be cool -- are the very same things that occupied my mind when I WAS that cheerleadering, teenaged California blonde.

Time passes, but things stay the same. Or so it seems. There's some kind of depthful realization buried in that sentiment, most likely, but I'm too hungry for cake and ice cream and other birthday-related self-indulgences to really digest it right now. I'll ponder it later, I think. Maybe when I'm 42.

Happy Birthday to Me!